Most people leaving Constant Contact are not unhappy with the product. They have hit a specific wall: custom automations require the Premium plan, while Lite and Standard only offer a small number of automation templates. If your flow does not match a supplied template, the price roughly doubles.
Is migrating the right call?
Good reasons to leave: you need custom automation logic without jumping to Premium; you are paying for stored contacts you rarely mail; you need transactional email, which Constant Contact does not offer.
Weaker reasons: you value live phone support on every plan — that is genuinely rare and worth something, and most cheaper alternatives do not offer it at entry level.
The detail is in Constant Contact pricing explained.
What moves, and what does not
Moves cleanly: contacts and custom fields, tags and segment data, unsubscribes and bounces, and campaign history as an export.
Has to be rebuilt: automations and templates. No platform imports another’s workflow logic, and editor markup does not port. For most accounts that is a few hours of work and a useful cull of flows nobody has opened in a year.
The order that protects your deliverability
- Export contacts with consent data — signup source, timestamp and opt-in method, not just addresses. Several jurisdictions require you to hold these.
- Export unsubscribes, bounces and complaints separately. This is the step people skip, and it causes the real damage.
- Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the new sender and verify before sending anything. See SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained.
- Import contacts, then suppressions immediately — before any campaign goes out.
- Rebuild your core automations. Welcome series first. Copy is in our template library.
- Warm up if you send meaningful volume. Start with your most engaged segment and ramp. See how to warm up an email domain.
- Run both accounts in parallel for two to four weeks.
- Cancel only after a full billing cycle of clean sending.
The mistake that does real damage
Emailing people who had already unsubscribed on Constant Contact.
Suppression lists sit separately from the main contact export on almost every platform, so a straight contact import loses them. Everyone who opted out then receives a campaign they explicitly refused — and those people hit the spam button rather than unsubscribing again. A complaint spike on a brand-new sending domain with no reputation history is close to the worst possible start.
It also breaches consent rules in most jurisdictions. See email marketing rules by country and email list cleaning.
How long it takes
A small list with two or three automations: an afternoon of setup, then two to four weeks of parallel running. A larger account with complex flows: a week of setup, then four to six weeks of warm-up and parallel running.
Setup is rarely the bottleneck. Rushing the warm-up is how migrations fail.
Migrating to Bluey Email specifically
If you send more than 100,000 emails a month, our team does the migration for you — contacts, suppressions, templates and automations rebuilt on your behalf. You approve the flows before anything sends.
Below 100,000 a month we guide you through it, with a real person answering questions rather than a documentation link. That threshold is worth stating plainly rather than implying everyone gets a done-for-you service.
On billing, Bluey charges on emails sent, not contacts stored, and includes automations with conditional branching from the free tier rather than reserving custom flows for the top plan. Transactional sending is on every plan too.
Frequently asked questions
Will I lose my subscribers?
No. Contacts export cleanly as CSV with custom fields intact. What you must also export is the suppression list, which sits separately.
Can I move my automations?
Not automatically. No platform imports another’s workflow logic, so flows are rebuilt.
Will my deliverability drop?
Temporarily, if you move significant volume without warming up. Ramp gradually from your engaged contacts and the dip is brief.
Should I cancel Constant Contact immediately?
No. Run both for two to four weeks. One extra month’s subscription removes nearly all the risk.
Weighing it up? Bluey Email vs Constant Contact covers the differences and Constant Contact alternatives covers the wider field.
Start free — 500 emails a month, no card required, so you can build and test before moving anything.