If you want to connect and engage with your audience, email marketing is a way to go. When we say email marketing, two of the biggest competitors that strike in the mind are MailChimp and Constant Contact.
Both MailChimp and Constant Contact are players of the same field, and choosing which one is the best can be a challenging decision. To make your way clear, we have compared MailChimp vs. Constant Contact with some crucial parameters such as ease of use, features, automation, pricing, and more.
By the end of this article, you will be able to find out who won the crown in this battle. Curious to know? Continue reading till the end and find out yourself!
Without taking more of your time, it’s time to let the war begin between MailChimp and Constant Contact.
MailChimp vs Constant Contact – Comparison
Before we dive into the details of MailChimp and Constant Contact, let us start by an overview of both the email marketing solutions.
1. MailChimp Overview
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing solutions that enables you to grow your business efficiently and reach its prospects with its robust technology and features. MailChimp helps you in creating, analyzing, and sending email campaigns. Additionally, it helps significantly to manage your subscribers and view your click-through rate. With its intuitive and easy to use interface, you can get started immediately. It offers plans for both small businesses and medium-sized businesses. Furthermore, it also handles massive volumes of email marketing, making it a perfect choice for large organizations and business owners.
2. Constant Contact Overview
On the other hand, constant contact is another powerful email marketing solution that comes with plenty of unique features to boost your marketing so that you can continue to grow your business. Being one of the oldest email marketing solutions, it has excellent goodwill with millions of customers globally and continues to grow. With Constant Contact, you can send a series of targeted emails to your users with its automation feature. Just like this, various features come handy for beginners as well as professional users. It is ideal for every kind of industry right from small to large organizations.
MailChimp vs Constant Contact – Key Features
Now that you have a basic idea about MailChimp and Constant Contact let us dive into the features of both the tools.
1. MailChimp Key Features
MailChimp is rich in features, and functionality o boost your marketing game. It comes with good options to import contacts. You can import contacts from Google Contacts, Zendesk, Salesforce, and Highrise, or add subscribers one by one copy-paste files, or import a CSV file. To build you a complete and professional email, it comes with a massive library or premade templates that you can customize as per your needs.
Besides, you can upload an unlimited number of pictures with MailChimp easily. Moreover, it comes with excellent deliverability features where it makes sure that the users deliver appropriate content. The emails you create using MailChimp as fully responsive means it can be viewed on any device. It also corrects errors when you are crafting your email to deliver the best content with no mistake.
It allows you to track opens and clicks from your email to see your progress, and you can later compare your reports to the industry standards. You also get basic A/B split testing with three various variables. If you go for the highest-paid plan, you can again try multivariate testing. Additionally, it comes with an intuitive interface and dashboard that makes email marketing easier.
2. Constant Contact Key Features
Constant Contact also comes with plenty of useful features. It comes with tracking tools that allow you to see who is sharing your email and who is opening it. To make email marketing further, it lets you connect with your audience through polls, surveys, live events, coupons, donations, and more. With a deliverability rate of 98%, it provides exceptional deliverability as it uses a spam checker tool.
However, the only drawback is that it does not come with A/B testing. Instead, you will have to manually do all the testing, which could be a deal-breaker for many users. Like MailChimp, it also checks errors in your email before you send it to the users. It allows you to add images effortlessly. Constant Contact comes with more designs and email templates that you can customize. The designs are professional and unique, so you can ensure that you craft a perfect email to your subscribers.
You can add images, videos, links, buttons, and more to your email and give it a bit personal touch. The drag and drop interface helps in crafting emails quickly with a beautiful look. Similar to MailChimp, you get plenty of options to import your contacts.
Winner: Both MailChimp and Constant Contact comes with tons of features. Therefore, it is tough and unfair to call one a winner. The round gets a tie between MailChimp vs. Constant Contact.
MailChimp vs Constant Contact – Ease of use
Yes, both MailChimp and Constant Contact offers pretty impressive features, but let’s look at the ease of use and user interface. No matter how pro you are, the interface of every tool is different. What you used earlier might not be the same in MailChimp or Constant Contact. Irrespective of the experience, you need to pick the one that comes with a sleek interface and is easy to use.
MailChimp –
If you are a beginner, you would be impressed by the ease of use of MailChimp. The interface of MailChimp is designed by keeping beginners and simplicity in the mind. The editor of MailChimp is easier to use. The navigation menu comes handy as soon as you create a campaign. Additionally, it comes with a drag and drop tool which you can use to create an email, add images, and more. Even if you have never used any email marketing tool, using MailChimp is exceptionally easy. It comes with a modern and cleaner interface.
Constant Contact –
Constant Contact, on the other side, also provides a beginner-friendly interface. However, it lacks a sleeker interface like MailChimp. The design on Constant Contact feels a little outdated compared to MailChimp; for example, the contact section and lacks some of the advanced features. However, you would find it pretty simple to use as it comes with few features, but some users complain about the difficulty in using the tool. To look at the brighter side, it comes with a drag and drop interface that makes your work pretty quick and more accessible.
Winner: Undoubtedly, the winner of this round is MailChimp. Although it depends on the user, we still find MailChimp’s interface is more comfortable and more modern than Constant Contact.
MailChimp vs Constant Contact – Segmentation
Now that you have seen various parameters, it is good to know how they will segment your audience to facilitate better and comfortable management of the lists. Therefore, let us check out the segmentation features that they both provide.
MailChimp –
MailChimp is a little complicated when it comes to managing your list. The segmentation offered is limited by MailChimp hence, making it a bit tough to pick. Earlier MailChimp did not provide tags. Due to colossal criticism, it now encourages users to use tags. You can segment users based on their birthday, first name, last name, promo subscription, or put them in groups.
You can use groups to filter people based on their profile, interests, and more. With their new feature, you can now look at your 30 days growth right on the dashboard. MailChimp lacks advanced segmentation features. If you are using the highest-paid plan, you get behavioral segmentation as well.
Constant Contact –
Constant Contact does an excellent job at segmentation, and without a doubt, it does better than MailChimp. With Constant Contact, you can add tags and have various lists to filter your audience. What’s more interesting about Constant Contact is that it comes with easy navigation, which means you can filter contacts through manual search, email tags, email lists, subscription status, etc.
In addition to that, it lets you add custom notes for your users to save useful information about them. Compared to MailChimp, it does a better job of managing your contact lists.
Winner: The winner is clear. Constant Contact provides better segmentation compared to MailChimp.
MailChimp vs Constant Contact – Email Automation
While comparing MailChimp vs. Constant Contact, we are looking for the best email marketing tools that ease the workload. So, let us look at the email automation features of MailChimp and Constant Contact so that you can decide which tool is the right for you.
1. MailChimp Email Automation
MailChimp offers some of the advanced email automation features. You can integrate with your website and quickly send emails to your subscribers using their activities. With the integration with your website, you can see what your users are doing when they visit your website. MailChimp provides one of the reliable and robust email automation features. It allows you to integrate customer data and to purchase history in the workflow. Additionally, you get plenty of automation options and get to set up flows based on your goals.
To reduce the abandoned cart number, you can quickly send your user’s email to encourage them to get the product in their shopping cart. Moreover, you can also send discount codes to enable them to buy more products from your site. However, if you are using the free version, you will not be able to access the email automation features of MailChimp. See, another great reason to upgrade to the paid version!
2. Constant Contact Email Automation
Constant Contact also comes with plenty of email automation features, but not as many as MailChimp. Constant Contact comes with all the necessary email automation features that you need on the initial stage, such as welcome emails, anniversary emails, birthday emails, and more. Besides the basic features, it lets you create your drip series based on user behaviors such as whether the users clicked on the link or not, did the user open your email or moved it into the trash bin.
After that, it lets you pick the number of days you want between automated emails to get a more personalized touch. Although it does not come with advanced automation features like MailChimp, you would be satisfied with the automation features if you are looking for all the basic and primary features to start with. For advanced features, it’s better to have your eyes on MailChimp.
Winner: MailChimp steals the medal for this round as well. As it comes with advanced automation features, you will likely ease your workflow and get a better experience with MailChimp. Similarly, if you do not need advanced automation features, you can go for Constant Contact.
MailChimp vs Constant Contact – Third-party Integrations
Email marketing boosts when it integrates with other popular tools. Sure, email marketing helps increase your goodwill, but having other tools integrated and work along with your email marketing tool is like nitro to your car to increase the speed. Tools such as eCommerce, CRM, and CMS are useful for email marketing.
MailChimp Integrations:
MailChimp comes with a never-ending list of integrations. MailChimp provides over 800 third-party integrations, including all kinds of CRM. The integrations include Facebook, WooCommerce, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, SalesForce, QuickBooks, Cazoomi, and more. Since it is highly impossible to list all the 800 integrations, MailChimp gives you official integration with WordPress, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento. The only drawback of MailChimp is that it does not provide direct integration with Shopify.
Constant Contact Integrations:
Constant Contact may not provide as many integrations as MailChimp, but it connects to some popular CRM tools and social media channels. Some of the integrations include 3dcart, HootSuite, Facebook, Zapier, Salesforce, QuickBooks, WordPress, Eventbrite, and more. What’s good about Constant Contact is that it provides seamless integration with Shopify, which MailChimp lacks.
Winner: The winner of this round is MailChimp. With over 800 integrations, you will have a better idea about what you need to do.
MailChimp vs Constant Contact – Customer Support
Having good customer support is crucial. No matter how much of an expert you are, you will need assistance at some point due to the continually evolving features and aspects. Even if the email marketing tool offers excellent features, having slow and lousy customer support can make you turn your back from it. Therefore, before you decide, let us look at MailChimp’s customer support vs. Constant Contact.
MailChimp Customer Support –
MailChimp provides 24/7 customer support through email and chats during their business hours. However, customer support is not available for the users who are using the free version. Additionally, if you need more assistance, MailChimp provides a knowledge base with multiple articles to solve your issues. You can always reach out to the knowledge base and surf through the articles that have the same problems as yours. There are also tons of tutorials videos, but personal contact support is lacking by MailChimp. MailChimp also does not provide phone support to all the users. The phone support is only for the users of their top-tier plan.
Constant Contact Support –
Constant Contact provides 24/7 customer support to the users via phone, email, and chat. It also provides a help center community and knowledgebase where you can find plenty of useful articles to resolve your issues. Customer support is available anytime to answer your queries no matter how big or how minor they are. Unlike MailChimp, it comes with phone support, so if you are not a live chat person and like more personal help, you can always reach out to them through the phone.
Winner: Both of them offer 24/7 customer support, but we pick constant Contact over MailChimp here because it provides limited phone support. Additionally, if you are using MailChimp’s free service, they do not provide customer support at all, so you will have to figure out everything on your own.
MailChimp vs. Constant Contact – Pricing Battle
Pricing influences most of our decisions. Both of them provide various plans that you can pick according to your budget. However, let us look at the pricing plans and the flexibility of MailChimp vs. Constant Contact.
MailChimp Pricing:
MailChimp offers a free version as well. The free plan is suitable upto 2,000 contacts and comes with all the necessary features of any email marketing tool. If you do not want to spend money on an email marketing tool, you can start using the free version.
However, the features are limited; hence we recommend going with the paid version that comes with some of the additional features you might find helpful.
The other three plans are:
- Essentials: The essentials plan starts at $10.38 per month. The plan is perfect for beginners and capable of upto 50,000 contacts. The plan includes all the free version features with some of the extra features such as multi-step journeys, 24/7 customer support, custom branding, email templates, and A/B testing.
- Standard: The Standard plan starts from $15.50 per month. It is suitable for up to 100,000 contacts. It comes with all the features of the Essential plan along with additional features such as custom templates, custom journey builder, dynamic content, sent time optimization, behavioral targeting, and more. The plan is suitable for users looking for advanced automation and small to medium business owners.
- Premium: The premium plan is the most expensive MailChimp plan, starting from $310.09 per month. The plan is idle for large business organizations and pro users as it comes with advanced features and more customization features than any other plan. The plan includes all the features of Standard. It provides advanced segmentation, phone support, comparative reporting, multivariate testing, and unlimited seats and role based access.
Constant Contact Pricing:
Constant Contact, unlike MailChimp, does not provide a free plan. However, you can get a free trial for a month for its plan, but if you need to go with a free version, you will be disappointed with Constant Contact. There are two plans that Constant Contact provides. They are as follows:
- Email: The plan is the first and the cheapest way to get Constant Contact starting at $20 per month. It is ideal for small business owners who want to create professional emails and take a step onwards success. The plan comes with customizable templates, tracking and reporting, eCommerce marketing, A/B testing, and more.
- Email Plus: The Email Plus plan starts from $45 per month and is suitable for users looking for advanced features and better results and engagement with the audience. The plan includes all the features of the Email plan along with features such as RSVP, surveys, customizable popup forms, dynamic content, coupons, polls, and more.
Winner: Both of them offer affordable pricing. However, MailChimp provides a transparent pricing structure than Constant Contact. The free plan comes handy for users on a tight budget and does not want to spend additional dollars on email marketing solutions. On the other hand, Constant Contact only provides a free trial for a month. Moreover, the pricing of MailChimp is more uncomplicated and easy to understand.
Reasons to Choose MailChimp:
- You want plenty of integration options.
- You want advanced automation features.
- Spending a couple of extra dollars for the best features is not an issue for you.
- You want better A/B testing.
Reasons to Choose Constant Contact:
- You do not need advanced automation tools.
- You want to integrate seamlessly with Shopify.
- Customer support is your top priority.
- You want more outstanding deliverability and customization options.
The battle between MailChimp vs. Constant Contact was tough. Both the email marketing tools come with some exceptional features and outshine each other by doing what they do the best. Both the popular tools come at affordable pricing and bring the best of email marketing no matter your website’s size.
Unfortunately, you cannot pick both of them. As the battle now comes to an end, it is no doubt that MailChimp is the winner here. MailChimp is a perfect email marketing tools that come with some advanced email automation features and makes email marketing effortless while continuously leading you towards the path of success.
With that being said, Constant Contact is not any less. It provides some of the useful integrations and comes with the unique features that distinguish it from MailChimp. Depending on your budget and needs, picking either one would not harm.
If you are still confused about MailChimp vs. Constant Contact or have any questions, please drop it in the comment section below. Also, we are curious to know which one are you picking for your site? Let us know in the comments.