Constant Contact review

An email marketing tool that lets a trade owner build a customer list and send branded promotions, seasonal reminders, and follow-up campaigns from ready-made templates without any design work.

What it costsas of August 2026

Lite: $12/moAt 500 contacts, billed monthly
Standard: $35/moAt 500 contacts; roughly $110/mo at 5,000
Premium: $80/moAt 500 contacts; roughly $200/mo at 5,000

Prices climb as your list grows and can reach around $425/mo at 25,000 contacts, and extra email sends beyond your plan's allowance plus text-message add-ons on the lower plans (from about $10/mo) cost more on top. Paying 12 months up front saves up to 15% and nonprofits save up to 30%.

Read our full Constant Contact review

What Constant Contact does

Pricing & terms

Starts atThe real monthly cost to get in the door, before add-ons.

$12/mo for Lite at 500 contacts; Standard $35 and Premium $80 at that size

How pricing worksFlat tiers, per user, or per job. This decides how fast the bill grows as you add people.

Priced by how many contacts you store, with extra sends billed on top

Free trial or planCan you try it with your own jobs before paying?

30-day trial with the full tool but only 100 test sends; no free plan after

ContractMonth-to-month vs a year-plus commitment you can't easily leave.

Month to month and cancel anytime; prepay 12 months to save up to 15%

Fit & support

Ease of useHow hard it is to get a non-technical crew actually using it.

Built for non-technical owners; the editor pulls in your logo and colors

SupportWhat owners say about reaching a human when something breaks.

Phone and live chat on every plan, not just the top tier

What it does

Email campaignsSend a seasonal offer to past customers to fill a slow week.

Send a promo or seasonal reminder, then see opens and clicks per campaign

Automated follow-upsSet it once so past customers hear from you without you remembering.

Lite runs one automated path only; Standard gets three, Premium unlimited

Ready-made templatesYou are not a designer, so the email should look right out of the box.

Hundreds of ready email designs on every plan, no design work needed

Text messagingTexts get read, and customers answer them.

Texting adds about $10/mo on Lite and Standard; Premium includes 500 texts

How pricing scalesMost of these charge by list size, so the bill grows as you collect customers.

Standard is $35/mo at 500 contacts and about $110/mo once you hit 5,000

Alternatives to Constant Contact

Other tools that do the same job for a trade business. Prices are what each vendor publishes, dated when we checked.

Birdeye

A reputation and local-marketing platform that automatically asks finished customers for Google reviews, pulls reviews from 200-plus sites into one dashboard so you can reply in one place, and keeps your business listings, texts, and social posts consistent so more local homeowners find you.Quote only. Reported entry is about $299/mo per location billed annually

ChatGPT

The AI chat assistant with the best hands-free story for a truck: you can talk to it on a CarPlay screen, and it will write a quote or read a photo of a nameplate. It reads the words in a manual but not the diagrams, which is the catch for equipment paperwork.Free to start. The usual paid plan for one person is $20 a month

Claude

The AI chat assistant that handles paperwork best: it reads a manual or a contract up to 100 pages with the diagrams included, and turns rough notes into a quote or a follow-up. Talking to it hands-free still carries a beta label, and the vendor will not say how much the free plan gives you.Free to start. $20 a month for one person, or $17 if you pay for a year

Google Gemini

The AI chat assistant already sitting in the Google account most shops run on: it drafts inside Gmail on paid plans, reads photos and spec sheets, and takes hands-free questions with the phone locked. Its free plan is the least restricted of the three.Free to start. $19.99 a month for one person, or $4.99 for a lighter plan

Housecall Pro

Field-service management for home-service trades, strong on dispatching, service agreements, and customer marketing.$59/mo (Basic, billed annually)

HubSpot

A CRM with a free tier that lets a trade owner keep every lead, call, and email in one place, then add paid marketing and sales tools like email campaigns and forms as the business grows.Free CRM at $0 for 2 users; paid Starter is about $20/seat/mo

Mailchimp

Email marketing you can run yourself to stay in front of past customers, send seasonal reminders and promotions, and turn your customer list into repeat and referral work.Free up to 250 contacts; paid starts about $13/mo at up to 500 contacts

Method:CRM

A QuickBooks-native CRM that trades use for customer management alongside a scheduling tool.CRM Quick Start $35/user/mo ($27 annual); Pro $59 ($45); Enterprise $97 ($73)

How we research this

Pricing comes from Constant Contact's own pricing pages and is dated at the time we checked it. Features are taken from the vendor's documentation, not from a sales call. We are independent and rank on fit, never on what a tool pays us. See how we review.