Email marketing continues to be the most effective method to connect with your customers. With stiff competition, an ideal way to stay ahead of your competitors is to use an effective email marketing tool. If you’re considering the two best email platforms, Mailchimp and Constant Contact, read on as we compare their features to help you decide which one is best for your business.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp has evolved from a bootstrapped side project started in 2001 to 11 million active customers
and an audience of 4 billion users. Mailchimp is the most popular email marketing platform, with a mammoth 62.23% market share. It has expanded to a complete marketing online solution. Mailchimp’s advanced features include social media scheduling, automation, landing pages, and reporting.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact was founded in 1995 and is known for helping small businesses create effective marketing strategies. Although it has fewer users, it’s still one of the most prevalent email platforms available. Although Constant Contact is Mailchimp’s biggest competitor, they own just 8.69% of the market share. They help more than 600,000 customers create online stores, websites, branded email marketing campaigns, and more.
Both platforms are the go-to brands for email marketing and have earned respect for various reasons.
Features
So what makes one tool better than the other? Let’s compare features.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Automation
Both Mailchimp and Constant Contact offer email automation. Email automation will assist you in creating emails to send to a list of recipients in one batch. This clever feature uses configured triggers to send a separate email to people who meet specific criteria. For example, a welcome email gets sent to everyone that signs up.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp’s automation feature allows you to send customized purchase follow-ups and product recommendations. There are triggers available to send an automated message if your customer clicks on a particular link or leaves their cart, for example.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact also offers auto-responses and customized emails. However, its automation abilities are limited.
Verdict
Mailchimp wins here due to having more sophisticated automation features. It’s pretty neat that you get to configure triggers and customize emails according to your customers’ behavior.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Deliverability
Deliverability is a vital metric to measure the success of your email before it’s read. Deliverability success depends on reputation, authentication, and content. An email is considered delivered when it doesn’t go undelivered or end up in the Spam folder.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp uses the abuse-detecting technology Omnivore to prevent abusive content from being sent out. Its unethical practices prediction contributes to the 96-99% deliverability rate.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact observes best practices using a spam-monitoring tool to predict if your email campaigns will experience deliverability problems. Their deliverability rate is 98%.
Verdict
Constant Contact is the winner here, as its consistent rate is higher than Mailchimp’s and in recent years, its yearly rate is typically above Mailchimp’s.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Registration Forms
Your registration form could make or break your subscriber list. There is an ideal way to gauge people’s interest in the offerings on your website. However, they can make your marketing effort spam a host’s mailbox without proper address validation, which will not look good for your business. Therefore, getting your registration form right is essential.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp offers many options to get your registration forms as attractive as possible and to integrate them with your website. From adding custom fields to drag-and-drop choices, it also provides an excellent opt-in message that you can personalize based on your preference. The only limitation is that you’ll need to follow the HEX color code.
Constant Contact
With Constant Contact, you can change the fonts and background color, but your registration forms will only have the basic checkboxes for name, company name, etc. Constant Contact does redeem itself slightly by allowing you to create a QR code to link to your form.
Verdict
Even though Constant Contact offers a cool standard QR code feature, Mailchimp is the winner here with its opt-in feature and more customization options.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: A/B Testing
To find out which email resonates best with your audience, you can use Mailchimp and Constant Contact to experiment with different variations. You can test the email content, subject, call to action, images, and send time to discover the best version to email to subscribers.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp’s A/B testing allows you to test three variations of your campaign in their free plan. Their Pro Plan will enable you to send up to eight campaign variations. Before sending your tests, you can specify how many people will receive them to help determine which variation worked best.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact doesn’t offer comparable options for A/B testing, and you’ll only have the opportunity to run tests on your subject line. If you want to use multiple variations, you’ll need to set them up manually.
Verdict
Mailchimp wins again here, as its automated A/B testing will save you valuable time.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Reporting
To know how effective your email campaign is, you’ll need to know what worked and what flopped. This will help your business grow and give you an advantage over competitors’ campaigns. Mailchimp and Constant Contact include reporting and analytics dashboards with different strengths to consider.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp’s metrics reporting includes click-through rate, bounce rate, open rate, etc. It helps you measure your email’s success with interactive graphs, and its click overlay feature provides deeper insight into the elements that attract your subscribers. Its other cool features include geo-tracking, social media reports, and newsletter success per provider. And if that isn’t impressive enough, their unique e-commerce conversion tracker lets you know which products you’re selling more of and when, among other valuable details.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact does not have a click overlay feature, but it will give you reports on the number of clicks, opens, forwards, and more. Its activity tab logs updates, removals, and exports.
Verdict
Mailchimp takes this one also as it has far more advanced analytics features. Their reporting system could be considered the best out of all the email tools currently available.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Design and Templates
Both platforms will offer you a decent number of templates to get you started.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp offers user-friendly design features and a range of polished templates. Their block-based outlines accommodate on-brand designs, as you can drag your content and have flexibility with image placement and layout options. It offers unlimited storage space for images.
Mailchimp has its templates sorted by category. However, it offers fewer templates, with 100 compared to Constant Contact’s 200. To create a newsletter from scratch, both solutions allow HTML, and both will let you save templates for re-use.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact offers many premade designs and templates, which have been praised for their ease of use. Their designs can be a real-time-saver if you’re happy using a cookie-cutter approach instead of creating one yourself. It provides a gallery of stock images, whereas Mailchimp does not. If you went with Constant Contact, you’d only have 2GB storage space, which seems measly compared to Mailchimp’s unlimited allowance.
Verdict
MailChimp wins again. When it comes to design, it has more flexibility.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Ease of Use
Both platforms provide simple navigation and well-defined sections. They’re ideal for beginners and those without much spare time to learn how to use them.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp UI is considered more modern and more responsive than Constant Contact. Aesthetically, it uses color sparingly to draw attention to its clean and easy-to-understand dashboard. Its drag-and-drop tools support simple email creation and customization. However, you might find some of the advanced features more challenging to grasp at first.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact’s UI has been designed for ease of use. It has fewer features, which makes it even more straightforward. It utilizes drag-and-drop, and finding appropriate integrations is made accessible. The design templates are displayed by functionality, which enhances its overall simplicity.
Verdict
We almost had a tie here, as both platforms have focused their UI designs on usability and are relatively easy for those new to email marketing tools. Constant Contact’s smaller number of features contribute to making it more straightforward to use. But Mailchimp has designed its advanced features for intuitive use. Ease of use goes to Mailchimp.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Integrations
The email marketing tool you use is just one of the applications in your software selection. To help take your marketing efforts to another level, email marketing should be integrated with other tools such as your CRM, CMS, e-commerce tools, and other marketing apps.
Integrating an e-commerce platform offers you access to valuable customer information. Using this data, you can divide your target audience to send relevant emails, subscription reminders, birthday messages, etc.
Customer relationship management systems will accommodate the setup of lead cultivating emails, upsell emails, etc.
Content management systems will help you boost your subscriptions using great content for brand awareness.
Both platforms have native integrations with hundreds of other software apps.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp offers over 700 integrations, including the following.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact has around 450 integrations, a few of which are shown below.
Verdict
This time the win almost went to Mailchimp, as it has more integrations. However, you’ll only have the option to search through them alphabetically, so you’ll need to know which app you’re looking for.
Constant Contact accommodates not knowing the app name by allowing you to search by category. Since Constant Contact has made this process easier for beginners, it is the winner here.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Pricing
Mailchimp
Mailchimp offers the following plans.
Free Plan
Their free plan allows up to 2,000 subscribers and an allowance of 10,000 emails each month. You’ll also get free reporting, templates, signup forms, website builder, access to their creative assistant, and more.
Essentials
Starting at $11 per month and based on 500 contacts, you’ll get everything in the Free plan plus engagement reports, A/B Testing, customer branding, and more.
Standard
Mailchimp’s recommended plan starts at $17 per month. In addition to all the features in their Essentials plan their Pro Plan offers you customer journey insight, send-time optimization, behavioral targeting, and more.
Premium
Their Premium plan is for advanced email marketers who require more customization options. For $299 per month, you’ll receive everything in the Standard package, plus advanced segmentation, comparative reporting, phone and priority support, and more.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact plans are as follows.
Constant Contact Core Plan
Starting at $9.99 each month, you’ll receive 300+ email templates, real-time reporting, and access to their award-winning live phone and chat support.
Constant Contact Plus Plan
Starting at $45 every month, this will give you all the Core plan features plus automated emails for reminders including abandoned cart, sales and conversion reporting, auto-generated segments, and more.
Constant Contact offers a 30-day free trial on both plans.
Verdict
Mailchimp is a clear winner here due to more flexible payment options. The free plan is great for businesses just starting or on a tight budget. Constant Contact plans are suitable for larger establishments or small ones with multifaceted needs.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Support
Excellent customer support offers additional value and helps to develop trust and loyalty. If customer support is essential to you, consider what both solutions have to offer.
Mailchimp
If you need assistance as a free user, you’ll need to visit their contact page for information. You can select the topic and then be taken to the article that addresses it. For round-the-clock email and chat support, consider their Essentials plan. Alternatively, if having access to support will be heavily required in your business, their Premium package offers phone and priority support.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact provides email, phone, and live chat support. There is also helpful information available via their knowledge base or help center community. In addition, they offer in-person and online training events.
Verdict
Although both platforms offer live chat and email support, Constant Contact is a clear winner, as they’ve gone the extra mile. Their phone support and training events show that they’ve tried their best to make help more accessible.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Winner
Mailchimp wins overall thanks to its advanced customization features and ease of use. They offer free and cheaper plans compared to Constant Contact, and its unlimited image storage and reporting give Constant Contact a run for their money. Despite not doing so well in the customer support area, they offer live chat and email support, which typically suffice to resolve issues.
On the other hand, if you value comprehensive customer service above most other features, then Constant Contact wins here, hands down.
Both platforms do have a fair share of advantages and disadvantages. Your winner will depend on how well it meets your business requirements.
Based on what you know of the two solutions, which are you siding with more? Tell us in the comments section below.
