Constant Contact Vs Mailchimp

Email marketing is something that everybody hoping to make it big in the online sphere, be it businesses or professionals, should master or at least learn. Of course, the best and easiest way to do this would be through the help of automation services and tools.

Did you know there are 5.6 billion active email accounts and that 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute their content?

Today, we present to you two of the strongest contenders when it comes to email marketing tools: Constant Contact vs Mailchimp!

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is an excellent marketing automation and email marketing software used by businesses who want to take their marketing efforts to the next level by pitching directly through customers through their emails.

The software already has ready-made email templates and drag-and-drop elements in order to ensure that even beginner marketers can successfully launch their own email campaigns. Constant Contact also has a mobile application to allow users to view their statistics, create new emails, and monitor the performances of their campaigns on the go, right at the tip of their fingertips.

Overview

Constant Contact as a service was first launched way back in 1995, making it one of the oldest email marketing tools around. It was then purchased in 2016 by Endurance International Group (EIG), the same company that also acquired web hosting companies like Hostgator and Bluehost.

Features

Constant Contact has several features that both beginner marketers and advanced marketers will enjoy. It is most definitely one of mailchimp’s fiercest competitors.

Email Automation

The first feature is, of course, email automation, which lies at the heart of email marketing. With this feature, users can send emails automatically with specific triggers, without having to check every single time. For example, users can set Constant Contact to send a welcome email immediately after someone subscribes to the website. With Constant Contact, you can also easily set up autoresponders, birthday or anniversary emails, and email series based on a trigger of your own choice.

Event Marketing

Not all email marketing tools allow easy event marketing, making it a great feature for Constant Contact. Users can create event invitations, manage registrations, and even set up tickets, as long as they’re subscribed to the Email Plus plan. There’s also a bonus event registration application called EventSpot, which allows marketers to use their email campaigns to drive more attention and attendance to their upcoming events, like conferences, seminars, or trade shows.

Reports, Statistics, Analytics

Constant Contact also offers ways for users to accurately determine and assess the performance of their campaigns. Users can see various reports, statistics, and analytics regarding each email campaign, such as the number of clicks, opens, spam reports, forwards, and unsubscribes, among others. Constant Contact also shows an activity tab that logs all the users’ individual activity. You can check this tab if you want to see how well your campaigns are doing and what you can still do to improve.

List Management

Constant Contact lets users organise everything from their dashboard by providing different tools. Subscribers can be curated into contact lists for easier sending off campaigns depending on various categories, which can be helpful for marketers who want to send certain emails only to a certain category. Users can also easily add contacts from Gmail or Outlook, making the job more efficient. Other than that, it also makes it possible to add tags to contacts and to add custom fields.

Form Builder

Marketers will be glad to know that there’s an easy-to-use form builder included with the subscription to Constant Contact. You’re free to build all the forms you want to help you out in your business. It’s also integrated with various e-commerce solutions that will allow marketers to see their sales and even process emails for abandoned carts straight from their dashboard.

Support

In terms of support, Constant Contact is definitely not lacking. There are Information icons included beside each Option in order to provide assistance to new users. There’s also a Knowledge Base (KB) section with several articles like tutorials and guides, as well as a professional services team that can give marketers advice regarding their marketing strategy and campaign design and templates.

Other than that, Constant Contact also holds various educational events including online and in-person trainings and seminars. If you’ve got any questions, you reach support by calling them on their toll-free number from 8AM-10PM Mondays through Thursdays, 8AM-9PM on Fridays, and 10AM-8PM on the weekends. You can also opt for live chat or messages on social media.

There’s also a community of users called Help Center where you can receive advice from other subscribers of the service.

Constant Contact Pricing

You have two pricing plans to choose from if you’re interested in availing Constant Contact’s services.

The first one is Email, and it starts at $20 a month. It offers great features such as list management, audience organization, and campaign template design. For more small businesses, it should be enough to handle most marketing needs.

The second one is Email Plus, and this one starts at $45 a month. It’s suited more towards bigger businesses and companies and thus offers more features than the basic plan, including automated email series, A/B testing, registration and marketing for events, online surveys, and online donations, among many others.

Here’s a comparison of the pricing between the two plans:

If you decide to pay for at least 6 months upfront, Constant Contact also offers a discount of up to 15% on the full amount.

Luckily for those who are interested but still hesitant to shell out money, Constant Contact offers a FREE TRIAL for 60 days. In this period of time, you can send out an unlimited number of campaigns, as long as you don’t exceed 100 contacts at a time. If you like the service, you can easily upgrade to the paid version anytime to unlock its full features. You also get a 60-day money-back-guarantee in case you’re not satisfied with the service.

Why Choose Constant Contact

Here are some reasons why you should choose Constant Contact:

• Long trial period
• Offers 60-day money-back-guarantee
• Provides plenty of help and support
• Easy-to-use drag-and-drop features for beginner marketers
• Supports list management for subscribers and contacts
• Has both form and page builders
• Allows email preview for different email clients
• Includes various integrations such as Google Analytics
• Has a mobile app available

Why You Shouldn’t Choose Constant Contact

On the other hand, here are some reasons why you shouldn’t choose Constant Contact:

• Slightly more expensive compared to competitors
• Sometimes I have experienced glitchy dashboard
• Limited capabilities for auto-responder
• Limited form templates and customization

Mailchimp

So let’s now see how Mailchimp fairs in the Constant Contact vs Mailchimp battle. Similar to Constant Contact, Mailchimp is another email service provider that could also help take your business to the next level. It has long been a top player in the industry, claiming to send more than 600 million emails a month. Mailchimp has long been one of the most recommended providers on the world wide web, and frankly, it’s easy to see why.

Overview

First established in 2001, Mailchimp quickly rose its way up the ranks as one of the largest and most used email service providers on the web. Currently, Mailchimp has over 17 million customers regularly enjoying its features, as opposed to Constant Contact’s less than a million users.

Features

Speaking of features, Mailchimp also offers plenty of services to its customers. Like many other email service providers, it boasts professional services that are necessary for the average marketer, even going far and beyond what is required.

Email Marketing

Evidently, Mailchimp is great at doing email marketing, especially when it comes to sending out newsletters to subscribers. With Mailchimp, it’s very easy to automate all your newsletter needs. You can choose to send emails based on certain triggers, such as your subscribers’ birthdays, or if they do a certain action on your website. There’s also email personalization, which automatically fills in the subscribers’ details to make the newsletter more personal. In terms of design, you can select premade templates or even create your very own look using the included drag-and-drop builder.

List Management

Mailchimp also offers list management as a feature. Users can combine up to five conditional relationships, regardless if it’s negative or positive. You can easily group subscribers based on factors such as the email clients they’re using, or if they’ve already opened a certain campaign or not. The only downside is that each list is considered an isolated case, so it’s impossible to manage different lists at the same time. This means that if you’re going to deal with multiple lists, you have to do each one one-by-one. There’s no other way to do it currently.

Performance Tracking

Of course, Mailchimp also allows users to view, track, and analyze the performance of their campaigns. You can easily check the metrics of all your Sent campaigns by clicking on the Reports tab. Aside from the number of messages sent, you can also see how many emails were opened and how many included links were clicked. Interestingly, you can even tell which subscriber opens the most messages, which gives you an idea in case you want to give incentives or perks for the most engaged subscriber. However, it doesn’t track metrics in real-time, sometimes taking more than 10 minutes to register a single click. The page also doesn’t refresh automatically, so if you want to see the latest performances of your campaigns, you’ll have to do a manual refresh on the page.

Support

If you need help with anything, Mailchimp offers several ways to contact their support team. You can do Email Support, which is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There’s also Live Chat Support if you need a quicker response, though it’s only available on weekdays from 8AM-6PM (EST) and only to paid users. Mailchimp also answers queries regularly through their Twitter account and a Facebook page, so if you’re not really in a hurry to have your question answered, you could simply tag them and wait for a reply. Unfortunately, at the moment, they don’t have Phone Support yet

That said, if your problem isn’t too personal, you can always turn to Mailchimp’s knowledge base, a section where you can find guides answering commonly asked questions and discussing known issues. Given how comprehensive each guide is, you’ll certainly get your issue straightened out in no time at all.

Mailchimp Pricing

One of the best things about Mailchimp is that you don’t need to pay anything in order to start using it. Mailchimp allows users to send 10,000 emails per month to 2000 subscribers for free, which is great for beginner marketers or small businesses. It doesn’t matter how long it takes you to get to this number, since Mailchimp’s free plan doesn’t expire. This generous offering is why many smaller bloggers recommend Mailchimp above other providers in the same niche.

If you need more than that though, here are Mailchimp’s pricing plans:

With a paid plan, you can send an unlimited number of messages and campaigns, as long as you stay within those number of subscribers. If you go over, you’ll have to pay more. That’s pretty much the only differences between the pricing plans.

Let’s say you have 2,200 contacts. You’re paying $30 a month and you can send 20,000 or even 30,000 emails if you want to. Meanwhile, even if you’re only planning to send 3,000 emails the entire month, if you have 3,000 subscribers as well, then you have to shell out $76. Basically, the pricing depends on the number of subscribers and nothing else.

In order to access more features like Advanced Segmentation, Compliance and Delivery Insights, Multivariate Testing Campaigns, Comparative Reports, and Priority Support, you’ll have to shell out an additional $199 a month for the Mailchimp Pro add-on, regardless of the number of subscribers you have. So if you have 2200 subscribers and you want to avail Mailchimp Pro, you’ll have to pay $229 a month. If you have 9,000 subscribers though, it goes up to $275

Mailchimp also offers a payment option that no other email service provider has. It’s called Pay as you Go, which allows users to pay per email instead of per subscriber count. It takes 1 credit to send 1 email, and 1000 credits cost $30 ($0.03/email), while 200,000 credits cost $1000 ($0.005/email). The more credits you buy at one time, the less each email costs to send. Since credits don’t expire, this kind of payment is ideal for those who don’t regularly send out newsletters but have plenty of subscribers.

Why Choose Mailchimp

If you’re already considering using Mailchimp, here are some reasons why you should push through with the plan:

• Free for your first 2,500 subscribers
• Offers flexible payment plans
• Integrates various third-party tools and services like WordPress
• Has a drag-and-drop builder to make it easier to create campaigns
• Includes a built-in CRM for paid version
• Has an easy-to-use interface, even for beginners
• Offers plenty of options for support
• Provides templates for emails so you can save time designing

Why You Shouldn’t Choose Mailchimp

Mailchimp isn’t perfect, however, and you might want to consider some of these downsides too:

• Form builder less advanced than other services
• Doesn’t have a community of users
• Can’t be used for live events
• Automation can be rather hard
• May sometimes charge double for the same subscriber in two different lists
• Very list-centric, making it hard to have complete control and flexibility
• Doesn’t support tags
• Has no real-time tracking for reports or auto-refresh
• Strictly disallows affiliate marketing – A tough call for those who make money blogging or email marketing

Verdict: Constant Contact Vs Mailchimp

Now that we’ve discussed the pros and cons of each service and as well as their features and pricing, it’s time for the final verdict: which one should you get, Constant Contact vs Mailchimp?

In a nutshell, Constant Contact is a professional service that allows even complete beginners to start their journey in email marketing. It’s a lot easier to use than Mailchimp, but it does tend to have glitches more than the competition. It also costs a lot more the higher you get in subscriber count. Meanwhile, Mailchimp is a long-time player in the industry and is already tried and tested by millions of customers.

For beginner marketers who are hoping to make it fairly quickly, we recommend availing Constant Contact, since it offers a very generous 60-day-trial period with its complete features. If you already have a large subscriber base but are quite inactive in terms of new campaigns, you may want to check out Mailchimp instead, since it’s the only one that offers a Pay as you Go option.  In the end, both services are equally excellent–it just really depends on which specific feature you value higher.

If you enjoyed our constant contact vs mailchimp review, you may enjoy our other reviews HERE.

Want to learn more?
Not started your blog yet? check out How To Start A Blog (Step by Step)
Enjoyed our review and want to check out all of the resources we use? Then head over to our Resources Page for whole host of awesome tools that we use every day and every month.