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by Alkan Balkaya · Last updated: 2026-08-12To switch from Constant Contact to Mailsoftly, export your contacts as a CSV, download your templates and campaign assets, authenticate your sending domain, import your contacts and rebuild segments, then recreate your automations in Mailsoftly’s visual builder. Most teams finish the entire migration in under an hour with zero subscriber disruption.
You have already decided to switch from Constant Contact. Maybe your bill jumped after crossing the 500-contact threshold. Maybe you spent twenty minutes trying to build a simple two-step automation and gave up. Whatever pushed you to this point, the question now is practical: how do you move everything without losing subscribers, breaking automations, or missing a scheduled send?
New here? Start with our primer on Email Marketing for the fundamentals, then come back to this guide.
Quick context: Mailsoftly offers transparent pricing, free hands-on migration, and human support. 500 contacts and 2,000 emails per month, no credit card.
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This guide walks you through every step of the Constant Contact migration process. You will export your contacts, preserve your segments, rebuild your automations in Mailsoftly, and go live without your subscribers noticing a thing. The entire process takes most teams under an hour.
I built Mailsoftly specifically for teams outgrowing platforms like Constant Contact. The migration path is something we have refined through real customer migrations, and I will share the exact workflow that gets you moved over cleanly. If you would rather not do it alone, Mailsoftly also offers free human-assisted migration, where our team imports your list, rebuilds your templates and automations, and sets up deliverability with you.
Key Takeaways
People leave Constant Contact for four concrete reasons: pricing that climbs sharply as your list grows, automation limited to linear autoresponders, a rigid template editor, and segmentation that caps out at simple filters. Each one gets more painful as your program matures.
Constant Contact was a reasonable choice five years ago. For a small list and basic newsletters, it did the job. But the platform has not kept pace with what email marketers actually need in 2026, and the cracks show in four specific areas.
Pricing that punishes growth. Constant Contact’s Lite plan starts at $12/month for up to 500 contacts. Sounds fine. But cross into the 2,501 to 5,000 range and you are looking at $110/month on Standard. Reach 10,000 contacts on the Premium plan and you are paying $275/month. For many growing businesses, these jumps arrive without warning when a signup form performs well for a single quarter.
Shallow automation. Constant Contact offers “autoresponders,” which are time-delayed emails triggered by a signup or date. That is it. There is no conditional branching, no if/then logic, no lead scoring integration. If you want to send different follow-up sequences based on which link a subscriber clicked, you cannot build that workflow inside Constant Contact without manual workarounds.
A template editor that fights you. Drag-and-drop builders are only useful when they let you move things where you want them. Constant Contact’s editor snaps elements into rigid grids, makes custom spacing difficult, and renders differently across email clients in ways that require extensive testing. Editing a single column layout should not take fifteen minutes of trial and error.
Basic segmentation that caps out fast. Creating segments in Constant Contact is limited to simple filters: list membership, open/click activity, and basic contact fields. You cannot build compound segments that combine behavioral triggers with custom field data and engagement recency, which is the kind of targeting that drives the highest-performing campaigns. Independent buyers on the G2 email marketing software category flag these same gaps in review after review.
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Mailsoftly includes automation branching, multivariate A/B testing, AI content tools, and compound segmentation on every plan, while Constant Contact gates most of those behind higher tiers or omits them entirely. Before you migrate, here is a direct comparison across the features that matter most for day-to-day email marketing.
| Feature | Constant Contact | Mailsoftly |
|---|---|---|
| Visual automation builder | Limited (linear only) | Full drag-and-drop with branching |
| A/B testing | Subject line only | Subject, content, send time |
| AI content assistance | Basic subject line suggestions | AI writer, subject lines, send-time optimization |
| Advanced segmentation | Simple filters | Compound rules with behavioral triggers |
| Contact tagging | Tags + lists (separate systems) | Unified tags and smart groups |
| Template library | 200+ templates | 100+ templates (fully customizable) |
| Live chat support | Business hours (paid plans) | All plans, extended hours |
| CSV import with field mapping | Yes | Yes (auto-detected) |
The pattern is consistent: Constant Contact covers the basics but gates advanced capabilities behind higher-tier plans or omits them entirely. Mailsoftly includes automation branching, AI tools, and advanced segmentation on every plan.
Migration breaks down into five discrete steps: export contacts as CSV, download templates and assets, authenticate your domain, import contacts and rebuild segments, then recreate automations. Each one is independently verifiable, so you will know it worked before moving to the next.
Go to Contacts, select the lists you want, click Export, and choose CSV format. Constant Contact includes email addresses, names, custom fields, tags, and list memberships in the file. This is the most important step, and Constant Contact makes it reasonably straightforward. Here is the exact process.
Step 1: Navigate to Contacts. Log into Constant Contact and click “Contacts” in the left navigation. You will see your full contact list with any tags and list assignments.
Step 2: Select the lists you want to export. You can export all contacts at once or select specific lists. For a clean migration, export everything. You can segment later in Mailsoftly. Click the “Export” button in the top-right area of the contacts table.
Step 3: Choose CSV format. Constant Contact offers CSV and Excel exports. Choose CSV. It is the most universally compatible format and what Mailsoftly’s importer expects. The export will include email addresses, first names, last names, custom fields, tags, and list memberships.
Step 4: Download and verify. Open the CSV file before uploading anywhere. Check that your custom fields came through, that tag columns are populated, and that the contact count matches what Constant Contact reports in the dashboard. A quick sanity check here prevents problems later.
What about bounced and unsubscribed contacts? Constant Contact includes a status column in the export. Mailsoftly’s importer reads this column and automatically excludes bounced and unsubscribed contacts from your active list. They are preserved in your records for compliance but will never receive a send.
Go to Contacts then Import, drag in your CSV, and let the auto-mapper match your columns to the right fields. The Mailsoftly side of the import takes about five minutes, and your Constant Contact lists translate directly into Mailsoftly tags or groups.
Go to Contacts > Import in your Mailsoftly dashboard. Drag your CSV file into the upload area. Mailsoftly’s auto-mapper will scan your column headers and match them to the correct fields: email, first name, last name, and any custom fields. Review the mapping, adjust anything that looks wrong, and click “Import.”
For lists with 10,000 or fewer contacts, the import typically completes in under two minutes. Larger lists process in the background, and you will receive a notification when the import finishes.
Recreating your segments. Constant Contact’s “lists” translate directly to Mailsoftly’s tags or groups. If you had separate lists for “Newsletter Subscribers” and “Product Updates,” you can either import them as separate groups or use tags to differentiate them within a single contact pool. The second approach is more flexible. It lets you create cross-segment campaigns without duplicating contacts.
Mailsoftly’s segment builder lets you combine conditions that Constant Contact cannot. Build segments based on engagement recency, tag combinations, custom field values, and click behavior, all in one rule set. A segment like “tagged Product-Updates AND opened an email in the last 30 days AND has custom field Industry = SaaS” takes about thirty seconds to create.
Map each Constant Contact autoresponder to a Mailsoftly automation using the same trigger and delays, then add the conditional branches Constant Contact never offered. The upgrade is significant: you are moving from linear time-delay sequences to a full visual workflow builder with if/then logic.
Welcome sequences. Your Constant Contact welcome series, typically a signup trigger followed by 2 to 5 time-delayed emails, maps directly to a Mailsoftly automation. Create a new automation, set the trigger to “Contact joins group” or “Contact is tagged,” and add your email steps with the same delays. The difference is that you can now add conditional branches: if the subscriber opens Email 1, send a different Email 2 than if they did not.
Date-based automations. Birthday emails, renewal reminders, and anniversary campaigns in Constant Contact use date-field triggers. Mailsoftly supports the same triggers but adds relative date logic. Send an email 7 days before a custom date field, 3 days after, or on the exact date, all from the same visual builder.
Re-engagement campaigns. Constant Contact does not offer automated re-engagement workflows. You would need to manually segment inactive contacts and send a one-off campaign. In Mailsoftly, set up a standing automation triggered by inactivity. If a contact has not opened an email in 60 days, automatically enter them into a re-engagement sequence with escalating subject lines.
At 10,000 contacts, moving from Constant Contact Premium ($275/month) to Mailsoftly Business ($79/month) saves you $2,352 per year. All prices are as of 2026-04-15. Constant Contact’s tiered model charges more for features and contacts simultaneously, creating compound cost increases as you grow. You can confirm the current rates on the official pricing page.
| Contacts | CC Lite | CC Standard | CC Premium | Mailsoftly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500 | $12 | $35 | $80 | Free |
| 1,000 | $50 | $75 | $110 | Free |
| 5,000 | $80 | $110 | $200 | $39/mo* |
| 10,000 | $120 | $160 | $275 | $79/mo* |
| 25,000 | $280 | $310 | $425 | $159/mo* |
The savings compound at every tier. And unlike Constant Contact, Mailsoftly does not gate features by plan level. Automation, A/B testing, AI tools, and advanced segmentation are included on every paid plan. You pay for contacts, not capabilities. For a full breakdown of every tier, see our pricing page.
Your email cadence, subscriber relationships, content strategy, sender reputation, and compliance posture all carry over unchanged. Switching platforms can feel like starting over. It is not. Here is what does not change when you migrate from Constant Contact to Mailsoftly.
Your email cadence. If you send a weekly newsletter every Tuesday at 9 AM, that schedule continues uninterrupted. Your subscribers see the same “From” name, the same reply-to address, the same content rhythm. The platform behind the curtain changes; the experience does not.
Your subscriber relationships. Every contact, every tag, every custom field comes with you. Subscribers do not receive a notification about the switch. They do not need to re-opt-in. Their history travels in the CSV, and Mailsoftly treats imported contacts as established subscribers with full sending privileges.
Your content strategy. The emails you planned for next month still work. Your content calendar, your promotional schedule, your seasonal campaigns all apply in Mailsoftly exactly as they did in Constant Contact. The only thing that changes is how much easier it is to execute.
Your sender reputation. Deliverability is tied to your domain, not your ESP. As long as you set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correctly (Step 3 in the checklist above), your sender reputation carries forward. Mailsoftly’s onboarding guide walks you through the DNS records in under ten minutes.
Your compliance posture. Unsubscribe links, CAN-SPAM compliance, GDPR handling. Mailsoftly handles all of this out of the box, the same as Constant Contact. Your legal obligations are met the moment you send your first email.
For a deeper, feature-by-feature breakdown, see our full Constant Contact vs Mailsoftly comparison, which covers deliverability, automation depth, and support side by side.
Looking for a simpler Constant Contact alternative? See why teams switch to Mailsoftly as a Constant Contact alternative. Free hands-on migration in 1 to 2 hours, no contracts, real human support.
Most teams complete the entire migration in under 60 minutes. The contact export and import steps take about 15 minutes combined. Domain authentication depends on your DNS provider but typically propagates within 30 minutes. Automation setup varies based on how many active workflows you are running, but a standard welcome sequence takes about 10 minutes to recreate in Mailsoftly’s visual builder.
Your contact-level data transfers fully, but campaign performance history does not. Constant Contact does not include historical open rates, click rates, or campaign analytics in its contact exports. Those stay in your Constant Contact account for as long as you have access to it. We recommend downloading campaign reports as CSV or PDF before you close your account, so you have a record for year-over-year comparisons.
No. Your subscribers will not receive any notification about the platform change. The emails they receive will come from the same sender name, the same email address, and (once you configure DNS) the same authenticated domain. From their perspective, nothing changes. The only difference they might notice is that your emails look better and arrive more consistently.
Yes. Migrating to Mailsoftly does not automatically cancel your Constant Contact subscription. After you confirm that your contacts are imported, your automations are running, and your first send from Mailsoftly is successful, log into Constant Contact and cancel your plan through their billing settings. We recommend keeping your account active for at least one billing cycle after migration so you can reference any campaign history you need.
Mailsoftly handles lists of any size. The CSV import processes large files in the background, and you will receive a confirmation email when the import is complete. For lists over 50,000 contacts, reach out to our support team for a guided migration. We will help you segment during import and ensure your first sends warm up your new sending infrastructure properly.
If you are comparing multiple email marketing platforms, these guides walk through the same migration process for other providers:
You can also explore how much email marketing costs across different platforms, or visit our platform comparison page for a detailed breakdown of every major provider.
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