If you’ve been looking for fresh ways of monetizing your content, no matter the type you tend to produce and you’re interested in using an email marketing affiliate program for that, you’ve ended up in the right place.
Today’s article is going to be a review of the Constant Contact affiliate program. We’ll go into every little detail you need to be aware of, from how much you can expect to earn to the cookie duration, any rules you may have to know, and more.
If you’ve never heard of Constant Contact before (although that might be impossible if you’ve been in the digital marketing industry for a while), you should take a bit of time to find out what this brand does before even trying to recommend it to your readers.
Put simply, Constant Contact is a tool that anyone can use to better manage their email list. The brand has all sorts of nifty features as a part of their services and although email marketing is what they largely focus on, they can also help you grow your social media and just Internet presence in general with a few other tools such as SMS marketing or landing pages.
As a Constant Contact affiliate, you will effectively be promoting two types of plans — needless to say, they are priced differently and come with unique features.
First of all, there is a free trial available and it lasts for a whole month — which makes things a lot easier on your end since your potential referrals aren’t going to feel as wary about trying a product if they don’t need to pay a single cent at the beginning.
The Core plan is billed at $9.99 per month but it’s largely customizable since users can pay more if they want to manage a higher number of contacts. With this plan, you get features such as hundreds of email templates, engagement reporting, the ability to post to three different social media networks at the same time, and integrations with a variety of useful tools such as Shopify or Canva, for example.
The second plan now available for Constant Contact is called the Plus and is billed at $45 per month — but this one also depends on the number of people in your referrals’ email list.
Some of the features available in the Plus range from dynamic content personalization to automated communications, customer segmentation, and more — we’d say that this one works best for small online shops or just e-commerce businesses in general, since there are a lot of useful functions in this sense.
One of the first things that we have to mention about this program is that it is not self-managed. If you’ve been an affiliate marketer for a while, you probably know that this can be a significant advantage, as working with a separate platform that you maybe can use for your other niche sites is a clear benefit.
From what we’ve gathered, Constant Contact works with both Impact Radius and CJ Affiliate, two of the largest affiliate networks available these days.
So, when you join the Constant Contact affiliate program, you have to actually go on one of these two platforms and search for it there. There is a signup form that can be found on the brand’s own site, of course, but your application needs to be analyzed by a manager.
As you can expect, the company is a little careful when it comes to the people it associates itself with and there are some rules that you need to abide by in order to avoid getting booted out of the program.
For example, you’re not allowed to have adult content on your site and you’re not allowed to have any content that is discriminatory in any way or engage in all sorts of weird behaviors such as spam or trying to collect and store potentially private data from your users.
A requirement that we found to be quite unique is that Constant Contact does not want to be promoted on any website selling or recommending fire arms, bombs, or any other types of weapons — especially content that teaches people how to build these things.
In a nutshell, these are all pretty common sense when you look at them and it’s something that most other companies you may ever be interested in working with will expect from you, as an affiliate.
If you compare what this brand has to offer to its affiliate marketers and influencers compared to what others in the exact same niche can, you’ll quickly realize that it’s a pretty sweet deal.
And the reason we’re saying this is that you can earn $5 for every free trial (Sendinblue has something similar but offers just $2 per free trial by comparison) and $105 for all paid accounts, whether that be monthly or yearly plans.
Another great thing that we have to note about this program is that the tracking cookie lasts for 120 days. That can be extremely convenient given the fact that there is a free trial lasting for a whole month, so if your cookie were to have 45 days long, your referrals would have had just 15 days at their disposal to make up their minds.
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The threshold and the method of payment will both depend on the network that you choose to work with for promoting Constant Contact services, so we can’t give you a clear answer here.
On both CJ Affiliate and Impact Radius, though, you aren’t going to find the ability to be paid through PayPal — which can be a pro and a con at the same time. While PayPal is indeed convenient, it does have some pretty hefty fees and it’s gotten a bad reputation over the past few years for simply deleting accounts for no reason.
In a nutshell, you’ll most likely be paid through direct bank transfer or ACH, with the note that you can use online services such as Payoneer (which create virtual bank accounts in various countries) on both of these two networks.
There will be a waiting period that you can expect you are able to withdraw your earnings, but this is something that every company relies on — with Constant Contact, it can take anything between 10 days to 30 days, but things tend to move much faster.
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It is pretty obvious that the most important benefit you’ll get to enjoy is the commission structure. The fact that even on free trials, you’ll get $5 and then once someone decides to get the paid plan, you’ll earn $105 off the bat automatically puts the Constant Contact affiliate program aside from many others — it’s one of the best out there.
Additionally, since you can work with either Impact Radius or CJ Affiliate to manage everything, you’ll save a lot of time. If you were to be the affiliate of dozens of brands, for example, and each of them were to have their program self-managed, you would waste a lot of time having to check on your conversions periodically.
When it comes to the cons, we really couldn’t find that many. The cookie duration is 120 days, which is yet another advantage, and while it could have lasted for a year, it’s still decent enough.
We would have liked to see a bit more versatility in the sense that a recurring rate, no matter its value, would have been appreciated by affiliates — but not every company works in the same way.
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We recently did a review of this affiliate program and we say that you should at least give it some thought – or consider it as an option to Constant Contact and other email marketing programs out there.
As a Mailerlite affiliate, you can expect a rate of 30% out of the value of every subscription purchased by your referrals. The good thing about this rate is that it is a recurring one, which means that every time someone renews their plan or just pays for their monthly subscription, you’ll earn 30% of whatever they pay for that.
The downside is that the program is self-managed, so you will have to utilize the company website to check your performance, stats, conversions, payment settings and pretty much everything else.
We are preparing an article on the Moosend affiliate program, too, but to put things simply, you can expect the same 30% commission rate with this alternative, too.
And in this case, at least, even though the program is also managed by the brand itself instead of them relying on a separate affiliate network, it seems to be working fairly well — there’s a whole team of affiliate managers that can guide you through the process in case you need additional assistance.
Considering that the majority of the email marketing affiliate programs we’ve gone through over the past years are offering a percentage of their plans and some of these options can be quite affordable, sometimes it might make less sense for a seasoned affiliate to choose to go down this route.
Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case with Sendinblue, and the reason we’re saying that is the $2 commission you earn even on free trials and the whopping $120 one you get for every referral that gets a paid plan, regardless of its length or cost.
As for the tracking cookie, it lasts for three whole months, so it’s three times better than what is now the industry standard, meaning 30 days.
This one is by far one of our top favorites when it comes to email marketing affiliate programs. Getresponse offers you the freedom to pick between two earning models.
You can either be paid a flat $100 commission for every paid lead you send out their way or you can opt for the more lucrative model over time, with the help of which you can make 33% out of every referral’s subscription even years from now.
Another really nice thing about this one is that the cookie duration is 120 days — clearly longer than most of the other companies in this niche have to offer.
When you’re trying to decide whether to use ActiveCampaign for your affiliate marketing endeavors or not, you might have a bit of a hard time telling exactly how their commission structure works.
The maximum rate you can expect to earn is 30%, but the truth is that you actually start at 20% — and in order to benefit from this rate, you need to send out sales of $100 to the brand over a period of 90 days (which by the way, is the length of the tracking cookie).
Once you’ve referred $500 in sales and if you have acquired more than $2,000 in sales over time, your commission will become the 30% rate we mentioned at the beginning. So clearly, despite this brand being quite popular and well-known, its rate is initially lower than that of other choices.
The 30% rate offered by ConvertKit to its affiliates is pretty decent, but the biggest downside that we managed to discover regarding this program is that the cookie lasts for 60 days.
Now, considering that other companies are offering a tracking cookie with a length of 120 days (we’re thinking about GetResponse, for example), this seems to be a bit short.
At least this one works through LinkMink, a separate affiliate platform, which could prove to be an advantage for affiliate marketers who have several different niche sites and want to have everything regarding their earnings in a single place.
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