Constant Contact review 2026 · email for small business

Constant Contact is the tool you reach for when phone support and a gentle learning curve matter more than automation depth. At 500 contacts the math is clean — Lite $12/mo, Standard $35/mo, Premium $80/mo (verified 2026-04, unchanged as of 2026-06-05) — and the live phone line plus event tools are genuinely better than what Mailchimp or Omnisend hand a non-technical operator. The problem is what happens as the list grows. Pricing is contact-count based and the steps are steep: Lite jumps from $12 to ~$30 the moment you cross 1,000 contacts (a 150% increase for doubling the list), and Standard climbs to ~$110 at 5,000. There is no permanent free plan, only a 60-day trial, and the SMS add-on ($10/mo on Lite/Standard) plus $0.002/email overage fees stack on top. For a Shopify store whose list compounds with every order, that curve outruns the value fast. Pick Constant Contact if you run a small store, nonprofit or community brand under ~5,000 contacts, you send infrequently, and you'd rather call a human than read a docs page. Skip it if you need branching automation or volume-based pricing — Brevo bills on send volume (kinder to large, low-frequency lists), Omnisend's free tier is a better on-ramp for Shopify, and Klaviyo wins outright once Shopify-native automation and SMS are the point.