Constant Contact Obviously Doesn’t Care What Its Customers Say

Remember this blog post from about seven months ago, the one about Constant Contact constantly contacting me? Well now I’m trying to cancel my Constant Contact account, and I can’t unless I do it by phone… and I’ve been on hold for about a half an hour now.

What makes this even funnier is that a blogger complained about this four years ago, and Constant Contact doesn’t seem to be listening. You would think a marketer that deals with communication would be on the lookout for bad things being said about it, and strive to make customer-centric changes.

Or maybe they are listening – when I wrote the initial blog post, someone from Constant Contact left me a direct message on Twitter. They might as well have put a flier on my car’s windshield, because at least then I would have seen the note before throwing it out.

Why am I canceling? I decided to experiment with an e-mail newsletter for a high school football blog I write. The question was, would a weekly e-newsletter help lift page views, and it didn’t. And for that matter, not very many people registered during the season, even though the newsletter contained some exclusive content.

Long story short, it wasn’t worth the time and effort, or $15 a month.

Once I was finally connected to a call center representative, the process was short and sweet and they didn’t try to con me into staying (then again, I haven’t checked my e-mail… and I have been unsubscribing from Constant Contact e-newsletters that randomly show up in my inbox for the past seven months).

But now that I look at this review, I wonder how long they are going to take to cancel my account, and keep taking my money. I guess I’m going to have to keep an eye on my credit card statement.

Was Constant Contact easy to use? Yes. Would I recommend it to anyone who was looking to do a small newsletter? Probably not. On the business end, the company doesn’t seem to be very customer-centric. And the fact that they don’t follow their own do-not-e-mail rules and send correspondence to people who have opted out of receiving e-mails kind of bothered me:

Please be reminded that your opt-outs (unsubscribe requests) via Constant Contact never expire. Federal law requires that you honor all opt-out requests indefinitely, regardless of future mailing platforms, unless you receive a new explicit opt-in request for that address.