There are hundreds of companies small businesses can turn to for tools that facilitate their e-mail marketing campaigns, some of which operate solely on the Web.
One of the largest such providers, Constant Contact, is actually much bigger than most people think.
Launched back in 1998, the company is now publicly traded on NASDAQ and boasts a market cap of nearly half a billion dollars, and the company caters to hundreds of thousands of small businesses and organizations who use its software to spam connect with their customers and members. So if such an e-mail newsletter juggernaut launches a new service that is bound to be a competitor to a host of Internet startups, we take notice.
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Some time today, Constant Contact is launching an event marketing tool, which will enable customers to promote and manage registrations and RSVPs for their meetings, seminars, parties and other events. Users will be able to enter details for their events, communicate them with their contacts via e-mail and an optional custom homepage, and receive payments for events that require attendees to pay in advance.
The tool also lets users track campaigns in real-time and get extensive, automated reports on the e-mail marketing performance, payments, venue capacity and much more.
I gained access to a preview version of the software, and found it had quite a robust set of features. See some screenshots below to get an idea of what it’s going to look like.
Startups, take note
Considering the company’s already vast customer base, I think it’s a logical step for Constant Contact to take and one that will likely provide them with another steady revenue stream. For Internet startups who operate in this field, the announcement of the new feature isn’t exactly going to be the best of news.
Not that Constant Contact’s newest endeavor will effectively kill any of them outright, but it certainly limits the amount of small businesses they’ll be able to convince to use their tools for event marketing. After all, there’s now a large, public company with a big track record in handling large-scale campaigns offering a combination of e-mail marketing, online survey and event marketing tools all-in-one.
Pricing for Constant Contact’s Event Marketing service will be based exclusively on the number of active events – not on the number of registrants – nor are there any additional charges based on revenue collected for events. A set-up fee will not be charged either. Pricing starts at $15 per month for up to five concurrent events.
Some of the startups that will no doubt be analyzing this pricing strategy today: Meetup, Eventbrite, Evite, Cocodot, Amiando – and there’s plenty more where that came from.
Thats horrible news for some of the startups in this space…although the startups likely will offer a free service to entice usage, and then “figure out pricing later” like so many Internet startups do…I think constant contact definitely has the upper hand though, with over a 10 year track record, and being a publicly traded company they definitely are here to stay, might be worth it to pay for a service that will be here 10 years from now, rather than one that might fizzle out over the next year or two.
I tihnk this is interresting approach for them.
From my point of view, all those startups in event organization space are now a testing enviroment for Contact Contact. They jsut waited and copied what works.
Anyone would have a reccomendation what
Meetup, Eventbrite, Evite, Cocodot, Amiando
should do now from strategy perspective? Can they succeed in a long run?
This comes at an interesting time for sure. I’m glad to see pricing models change in how tickets are bought. We have been working on an alternative to EventBrite and others with Ettend.com. Now in private beta, we plan on charging fixed monthly pricing that is associated to active vs. in-active events. (see CrunchBase here http://www.crun.../company/ettend).
I think execution on support, flexibility in terms of payments supported (we integrate with PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net today and glowing) and overall experience for the event manager and attendees will filter out apps in this space.
Good luck Constant Contact!
Ettend – Event Management
ConstantContact has too many features already. I think the simple solutions like madmimi.com will eventually beat the rest because they’re the easiest to use.
I think this is a great idea to integrate e-communications and event registrations. However, Constant Contact is nearly twice the cost of many of it’s competitors AND being that they already charge extra for the survey function (which others like iContact do not) I’m sure that they will be charging extra monthly fees to use this service.
Maybe these startups will start email marketing. Did Constant Contact create more competition. From experience, I have found their site user interface to be less appealing than others. They are marketing their product more than others, but I feel it is just a matter of time before you see more companies.
After reading over the pricing, seems after 2000 attendees a month they charge $.50 per attendee. 2000 attendee is still a good amount of usage for a fixed price.
Ettend -http://www.ettend.com
As someone who hosts events, this is great news. Although eventbrite is sleek, etc., I think it is overpriced. Meetup is also WAY overpriced IMO for no more than it does and it is too limiting as far as email goes (no export, can only send email from within meetup, etc).
If meetup were to make integration with websites easier and add better functionality to list/email functions they could be much better.
I am extremely opposed to spam. I like having the opportunity to have folks sign up for only the info that they want (ie RSS by email, newsletter, events only, etc)
Ultimately I love the idea of being able to manage that all in one place!
I have been using Constant Contact for nearly 4 years and this is great news.
We are launching events next year and will definitely consider using this new tool because it will seamlessly integrate with our existing email marketing activities.
Competition is a good thing. At Signup Anytime, our target market is unlikely to be affected by this development. We offer a unique feature set to community based organizations, especially youth and sports organizations.
However, it does encourage us to bring clarity and competitive edge to our offering.
As someone who is in the middle of hunting for an ‘event management’ co. I just signed up 30 min. ago. Doesn’t have tiered pricing (a must imo) for attendees and lacks the widgets eventbrite has. You would think they’d ‘copy’ features from a leader than expand on it.
I guess anotehr market leader in this space is cvent. Also, a smart start-up http://www.zeringo.com with better features is coming up.
Looking at their pricing, it seems they are cheap. May be they want to start with cheap and acquire market.
according to yahoo finance they had revenues of $107 million but a net income of -2.7 million. Their gross margins are over 70%. They must not be that successful of a company if they are losing money with gross margins as high as 70%.
I’d say the reason that CC has a net income of -2.7 million is because they have a very aggressive marketing strategy which would be costing a fortune among other things that would contribute to a loss.
Interesting space with near-zero barriers to entry. I don’t understand however how someone can integrate with a processing gateway, which charges a % of every transaction and offer a low, flat monthly rate?
Interestingly they have been very sly with their pricing details. The event fee of $25 is a recurring depending on the amount of “open events” you have in any given month. This means that even if you carry an event forward from say June to July, it credits as an event in both months. Also they charge additionally for email marketing and surveys (and a third field that I can’t remember right now). Also if you create an event and scrap it it still counts as an event.
To answer your question, they take payments via paypal that charges a fee on transactions (unless the user chooses ‘pay at the door’ or ‘mail in check’.
I’ve been playing with the free trial for a while now and it isn’t very good at all. The reporting tools are rough and can only be viewed in Excel. The templates are boring (not bad though) and it takes ages to actually set up an event.
The homepage feature is nice though, but its nothing new.
Overall this product seems pretty run of the mill for a company with that kind of money in the bank. Maybe they should spend less on marketing and concentrate on their product.
It is apparent that their event software is just an add on to their mass marketing email tool and isn’t good enough to be a dedicated online event management service.
Oh, and it thought google chrome was IE 3 ….
Wouldn’t elegant integration with salesforce.com be nice? Not there but available now for OER here:
http://www.nava...orce-com-sites/
Are there any startups that compete with ConstantContact’s core business?
Maybe a freemium model?
Also, it would be really useful to have a TechCrunch feature where I get an email if someone replies to my comment. Then again, I need to keep checking this page to see if there’s a reply, so maybe it works out in your favor
http://www.traderbots.com
Please try http://www.zeringo.com to see the smart communication. U get only one notification, and it would tell you how many messages are waiting for you at the time of opening the email. Also, the whole communication facility is embedded in your activity.
I am a Constant Contact customer who is unsatisfied with their current offerings. Many of my subscribers report issues with the e-mails sent. The UI is cumbersome (e.g., it does not allow editing emails in multiple tabs). It does not work in Chrome. It automatically logs you out after (i believe) 1 hour of usage). When you enter text/URLs/formatting that it rejects, it provides a generic error message with no identification of what line or section caused the error.
Given these issues, I am not excited about new Constant Contact features. Indeed, I would be more pleased to hear that they are rectifying existing deficiencies.
John,
We are sorry to hear you are unsatisfied with our services. We take customer comments and complaints very seriously. I would love to walk through the issues you are having with you to see if we can help you. Please feel free to email me directly at lstreeter@constantcontact.com or call me at 781-472-6227. I have also asked our customer support handle on Twitter to send you a tweet to discuss as well. They are available at @CTCTHelp if you need assistance any other time as well.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention, I look forward to speaking with you.
Larry Streeter, VP customer support, Constant Contact
Here’ s another: MeetingWave.com is not focused on events, but rather helps you meet new people for business or social purposes, while giving you a lot of control, privacy and flexibility in choosing who you will ultimately meet in person. You can propose networking meetings, yet control who attends and whether the meeting occurs.
What’s MeetingWave’s value to you? Think of MeetingWave as creating immediate opportunities for you to be contacted by a potential employer or client to have lunch – without you ever having to disclose your contact information or identity.
You can ignore or decline, without ever revealing who you are.
MeetingWave is all about bringing immediate opportunities to you to meet new people, while giving you control, privacy and flexibility in deciding who you ultimately meet.
More features and a site-wide redesign coming soon.