Email Campaign Experience

There are really two different "indent" issues involved in this thread. One is indenting the first line of a paragraph, which it sounds like now can be done with use of the space bar. For me personally, that is the less important one. The other issue that's been discussed, and which is just unforgivable that it's been ignored all this time, is being able to do the equivalent of a "blockquote" to indent, for instance a quote within your text. THis is especially important, I think, for those of us who publish newsletters. ... View more

It is a best practice when linking to any site other than your own, to make it open in  a new window so as not to lose the reader. Since this is an email cms, that seems like it would have automatically have been the design.   I avoid inserting any links that aren't absolutely necessary because I don't want to lose email readers. ... View more

It would be extremely helpful to move the red text indicating the email is a test to the top of the email. We've had countless situations where a test email was forwarded thinking it was real. You have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see it's a test, and most people just don't do that! This would be a very intuitive move for Constant Contact. ... View more

Thank you for finally adding tables back into the editor.  However, why can't I add an image/graphic into a cell?  We primarily use the Table function for our monthly calendar email and we like to include certain graphics to denote an event and I can not seem to get the graphic to insert.  Why? And can you please change this? Thanks ... View more

We would love an option that allows for lengthy paragraphs to have a collapsible ability that had a "read more" button. I see that you have a button for "read more" but this links to a website. We would rather it collapse the text to "read more" button. Thank you, Carolin Wood at Cornerstone Fellowship ... View more

The new editor should allow the user to wrap text around a photo anywhere in a copy block.  That's a fairly common and very useful layout feature.  Don't know why you don't offer it. ... View more

Hello, I would like to suggest that you enhance your product so that it will provide an ID# with each font color box.  It is almost impossible to disquinquish between very similar colors when one is attempting to match font's in another portion of the document.  For example, blacks and dark blues are very hard to distinquish.   I realize that one can go to "more colors" see an font code but it is not clear if that font code is for the spectrum of the font one is actually using.     Hope this makes sense, this needs to be improved. ... View more

I'm sorry, I have been using CC for about 6 years and I find the new editor really lacking. It may be fine for inexperienced designers or some do-it-yourself business owners but for the rest of us professional graphic and web designers it really sucks. I'm forced to use it because the company I work does not want to migrate to another vendor. I got so frustrated using the editor that I finally ended up designing it in HTML/CSS in the custom code editor. That works well but if any of my non HTML colleagues need to edit text they have to call on me to do the slightest text edits. The previous version allowed you to get under the hood of each module and fine tune the HTML/CSS to fit your needs. What happened to that?! The new editor seems to have been designed to be idiot proof and for the lowest common denominator and the resulting emails look like it. Mark Goings Graphics Specialist ... View more

I need access to my old stuff - how do to simple things like bullets and sub bullets are no longer available. Not everyone's contacts use only their mobile devices to look at emails. ridiculous. Constant Contact has wasted my time. ... View more

Arghh not dig'n it. How can I view a new account in the old editor? The new editor is like the new social social sharing tool... a wicked drag. ... View more

I have seen many threads complaining about the terrible builder experience, often without specific details on the issues the user happens to be facing. Each time this happens, the CC team replies asking what, specifically, isn't working for the user. In almost any other SAAS product, I would consider this response fair, but in the case of CC, the builder is so abysmal that I doubt most users even know where to start, and I wonder whether CC even uses their own software at all, because I have yet to see the experience improve by an inch. Here's what CC needs to understand; at least for me, making email comms is a small part of my responsibilities. I have so many other things to do, that even when I encounter a bug, I just press on and work around it, because the task at hand just needs to get done as quickly as possible. Here's the takeaway from that: when a user goes through the trouble to report a bug, contact cx service, or complain, it's because the issues have come to a head. So, here we are. Here is a (far from comprehensive) list of the issues I face every week, three times a week, when trying to build a simple campaign.   Note: I have GIFs recorded for many of these, but I'm not sure whether posting images of a WIP newsletter would get me fired, so I'm not posting them. CC team - Happy to share privately.   1. Performance The CC interface is borderline unusable on normal, office-grade hardware. Before I got a serious upgrade on my company issued laptop for video work, I used a perfectly serviceable, new Lenovo ThinkPad, with decent enough specs for office work. When using the CC builder, however, my machine would absolutely chug, fans going like jet engines. UI elements would disappear as I dragged them, the page would scroll at what felt like 1 FPS, and a single newsletter could take me literal HOURS. This was not a beefy PC, but it ran the entire Adobe CC suite just fine. It should not take a video editing workstation to make a newsletter. Stop it.   2. The color bug Sometimes, for no discernible reason at all, changing the color of one item will change the color of another one somewhere else on the page. As an example, changing the text color of a title somewhere might change the background color of a text block elsewhere. There is no rhyme or reason to this; it just happens sometimes. Sometimes, random color changes even seem to happen when a campaign looks fine, is saved and re-opened, or worse, sent.   3. The line-height bug When an image is added to a text block, and the line-height of the text block is changed, the image will (often, but not always) disappear.   4. Intrusive formatting pop-up placement Ever try and edit a text block near the top of the viewport? I sure hope you don't need to SEE IT.   5. The image placement bug Sometimes, when you place an image placeholder into the campaign and double click on it, the media picker modal doesn't open, so you can't add an image. This can *sometimes* be circumvented by dragging an image from your pc onto the placeholder, and then double clicking to change the image. Sometimes. My campaigns are newsletters about the membership of the org I work for. Each and every text block contains at least one image, usually of the member. These are all saved in the media library, but 99% of the time, double clicking on the placeholder doesn't allow me to select an image. To save time, I literally have a folder full of pictures of kittens, SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS ISSUE, that I can drag and drop onto the image placeholders. This inevitably leads to the CC media library, and its limited space, being filled with duplicate images of kittens. There are hundreds at this point. Why not just use the final image, you ask? Well, as I mentioned, I work for a membership org. We have over 500 members, and finding pictures can be difficult using windows explorer. This is why we have them all organized in the CC media library. Shame it doesn't work.   6. The alt text bug Ever add alt text to a media library item in CC? Wouldn't it be nice to know whether that alt text was still attached to the library item for the next time you need to use it? Too bad; the alt text field will be empty every time you view the image.   7. The image editor bug Sometimes, when clicking edit, the image editor doesn't appear at all. When it does, sometimes when you click "export," it just does nothing. The editor disappears, and none of your changes were made. Love that.   8. The campaign preview bug Need to look at a past campaign to copy event data or something? Have fun. The images don't load at all. (This is a new one; exciting!)   9. No ability to work in bulk. As I mentioned, I build newsletters, not short marketing pieces for drip campaigns. As a result, the campaigns I build have dozens of the same groups of components: Title, main copy, member headshot, and a link. Want to group these for easy duplication? Ok cool, but you now lose the ability to put more than one image side by side if you need to do that.  Want to change the color of multiple items at once? Move a group of articles at the same time? Select and delete more than a single, solitary element at one time? Ha, nice one.   10. The drag and drop sucks What's the single most important feature of a modern WYSIWYG editor? You guessed it, the ability to drag and drop items. You know, the ability that makes even not so tech literate users feel like they have a chance at putting something together that kind of, almost, maybe feels like a professional did it. Yea, the drag and drop function in CC is beyond abysmal. There are two ways to do it: Hover over an element and click and hold the multi-directional arrow icon The way everyone is going to do it: click somewhere on the element, drag and drop. Number two is the one that sucks. I don't have the time to spell out the shortcomings of this feature; truly, they are profound. If anyone over at CC is scratching their heads at this one, they have never used the feature in a campaign taller than their viewport. Try it, all of you. I want every single employee at CC to try and organize a newsletter twice the height of their viewport by dragging and dropping this way. Here's an idea: every time an element lands somewhere you don't want it to, take a shot!   Anyway, that's all I can think of right now. I'm sure there are more annoyances that I routinely use cumbersome workarounds for. If I were in a corner-office with a view at CC, this is what I'd do: I'd scrap whatever hellish, Ramos -Gin-Fizz-esque, teetering stack of frameworks comprises the builder, and I'd start again, fresh, with plain old vanilla javascript (or at least a compiling library like svelte), that is nice and fast, and where fixing bugs doesn't require devs to wade into a cesspit of endless dependencies. You could even use web components, they don't need a framework at all! Then, I'd test the hell out of it. I'd test it on windows, mac, linux, android, ios, firefox, safari, chrome, edge... I'd even test it on opera. My experience with CC has really reached a head. Not only have I been actively researching other options, I literally started building an email generator with Jekyll (that unfortunately went down with the ship on a dead hard drive) so that I can just write my newsletters in markdown and copy and paste the generated HTML. It's that bad. Anyway, my org will probably be long done with this platform by the time anything gets better at CC, but I just had to get this out there in the hopes that someones experience with the product, some day, doesn't impede their ability to do literally anything else in an entire workday besides make a newsletter.   Peace. ... View more

Two ideas : 1. Allow event announcements to be added to my calendar to be posted on web site. 2. My calendar should help us capture contact info. If someone views my calendar have a pop-up that asks if their information can be added to the contact list. No one wants to go to another form to complete anymore. As you know, sites are using google or facebook log-on button so you do not have to type info. Typing info over and over again is passe ... View more

Trying to add a bulleted or numbered list I run into multiple problems. First, as users, WE should be able to control the spacing, not you, so there is/isn't a space between a heading and the list points or individual list points. Second, I cannot indent a list without it giving me a blank first item that is not indented. ... View more

Add ALT Tag to 'Read More' Blocks image source.   While using an email validation tool, we are being penalized because of missing ALT tags when using the 'Read More' build block. Can you add the ALT tag in the source code?   Much appreciated! ... View more

When you are comparing campaigns or reviewing results its very annoying having to go to campaigns, select the campaign you are reviewing and go to the same process when you want to open other campaign... it would be great if you could open the campaign in another window or tab ... View more

If I delete an event or email, I would like to reuse the name that was deleted. ... View more