3 Reasons Vertical Response Is Better Than Constant Contact

I’m often asked by clients which email service I like the best. The answer of course is “It depends,” – it depends on the number of people you’re going to send emails, how often you’re going to send out emails, and the type of emails you’re going to send.

Generally speaking, for small business owners with less than 50,000 email contacts, I prefer Vertical Response over Constant Contact. Here’s why:

1. Few businesses need to send emails constantly. One of the biggest benefits of Constant Contact is that you’re able to send as many emails as you would like when you sign-up for an account. Unfortunately, I don’t see this as a benefit. The reason? I have yet to work with a business owner who needs to send a substantial volume of emails on a monthly basis. Granted, there are some businesses who want to send their customers a weekly, daily, or even hourly email – I just haven’t worked with one yet. When I do, I’ll recommend Constant Contact. For everyone else, I would recommend monthly or quarterly mailing frequency. Anything more often and you risk alienating the customers on your mailing list.

2. Constant Contact is exorbitantly expensive for most businesses. Again, since I would recommend emailing on a monthly or quarterly basis, it’s hard to justify the price difference between Constant Contact and my favorite service Vertical Response. Let’s pretend we have a list with 200 email addresses that we like to email once a month:

• Constant Contact charges us $15 per month (as of today) to email our 200 contacts.
• Rather than a monthly fee, Vertical Response charges us per email we send. We simply pre-pay for some email credits and we’re ready to go. We can buy one email credit for no more than $0.015 – that’s a penny and a half per email. If we buy 200 email credits each month, we only spend $3!
• Vertical Response offers us a price break if we buy email credits in bulk. If we decide to pre-pay 6 months worth of emails (that’s 1,200 credits), we get a price break of $0.002 cents. That might not sound exciting, but pre-paying for 6 months of email credits costs $15.60. That’s right – buying 6 months worth of service from Vertical Response is only $0.60 more expensive than one month of service from Constant Contact!
• Constant Contact penalizes us for growing our list. If we conduct a special promotion and gather another 300 email addresses, Constant Contact raises our price to $30 per month as soon as we get our 500th email address.

3. Vertical Response has better standard email reports. While both Constant Contact and Vertical Response will tell you how many people opened your email, how many clicked, etc., Vertical Response gives you more detailed data in a better format. Here’s a screenshot sample of Constant Contact’s standard email report:

Here’s a screenshot of the standard Vertical Response email report:

Not only is the Vertical Response screen “prettier”, but it offers a couple of things that can’t be found on Constant Contact’s standard send report screen:

• You can look at email opens by time frame. How many people opened your email within 1 hour? 4 hours? 1 day? 1 week? This info can help you determine the best time to email your clients if you want immediate response, and it also gives you insight into what your clients are doing at different times of the day.
• Historic comparisons are easier. It’s not shown in the screenshot above, but Vertical Response makes it brutally simple to compare statistics from one email to another. Constant Contact offers the same data, but it’s not nearly as easy to find (it’s on a different screen), nor is it easy to understand at a glance.

Of course, Vertical Response isn’t perfect. Constant Contact might be easier to use if you’ve never ever ever sent an email newsletter in your life. You can pick up the phone and someone at Constant Contact will walk you through the email sending process at no charge. Constant Contact also reports the number of people that mark your email as ’spam,’ which is important if you’re trying to determine the quality of the relationship you have with your list members.

Still, for our money and for our clients, we recommend Vertical Response. Here’s a special offer if you decide to try it out –