Constant Contact vs Mailchimp in 2021: Which To Choose?

Social media, Google, and pay per click advertising have long been advertising tools due to their widespread. However, they seem not to be so effective because you do not have a loyal customer community. Email marketing is now regarded as the most productive way to contact and connect companies and customers. There are many popular email marketing service providers out there. Among them are Mailchimp and Constant Contact, which you must have been heard a lot before. Each platform has its benefits and drawbacks. So which one is better for you?

This article will focus on these two email marketing service providers and explain what they offer. Our comparison will be a recommendation for you to come to the final decision.

Constant Contact and Mailchimp are both email marketing provider which help companies connect with products and engage customers via email. Although Constant Contact’s share is much lower than that of its biggest competitor Mailchimp, we shouldn’t take it for granted that Mailchimp is the best choice for everyone. Before finding out which to choose between two email marketing giants, let’s look at their definitions.

What is Constant Contact?

Constant Contact has been used since 1995 and gained nearly 500 thousand users around the world. Even though having fewer users than Mailchimp, it is still an ideal option for many reasons.

Constant Contact provides various ways to upload contacts in which its automation feature allows you to send a series of emails to your target customers. Moreover, it also offers event registration used to drive attendance to your conferences and events. One more plus point of Constant Contact is its quick set up and free trial without a credit card.

Therefore, Constant Contact remains one of the best email marketing solutions out there.

What is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is such a giant in many other marketing applications. It lets businesses build, send, and analyze email campaigns and provides free membership for newbies. Mailchimp has a high-quality program and allows people to set up their accounts very quickly.

Having a rich series of impressive features, it is not the main reason making users choose Mailchimp. In terms of designing, its dashboard interface and templates are attractive and fashionable. With mobile apps that help in flat designs and email sending, Mailchimp’s analytics are a worthy attraction.

Constant Contact vs Mailchimp comparison

Ease of use

In general, both two platforms have a simple design for beginners to use. With their drag-and-drop user interface, they are also ideal for those who don’t want to spend time learning ways to use extra backend.

Constant Contact is designed with simplicity. It also allows you to look for the relevant integration quickly. The key factor making it simple is that Constant Contact has fewer features. Therefore, if you have little idea of email marketing or you do not have enough money to pay for a personal designer, Constant Contact is a great choice. Despite having clear design templates, Constant Contact seems slower and less modern, with some sections hidden from the menu.

On the other hand, Mailchimp is also a big competitor. Despite using color to get attention, it provides easy navigation and a clear section. The dashboard is clean, easy to understand, and seems to be modern. Mailchimp has advanced features, which are difficult to use at first. However, it does not take long for the normal user to create emails, customize, and add images. One of the beneficial sections of Mailchimp, which many users like is the campaign navigation tool. With that tool, you can easily move forward and backward to ensure every step of the campaign is correct and in the right position.

To sum up, it can be seen that both providers are simple and clear to use. But Mailchimp seems to do better with its advanced features.

Main features

To make it clear, we used three main email marketing features to determine the best choice for each.

In terms of automation, both giants offer autoresponders when emails will be sent automatically to users on special events or when they sign up to your mailing list. Mailchimp has a more advanced automation feature which lets you send appropriate emails to your customers according to their behaviors and activities. For example, people interested in fashion will receive suitable emails that will not be sent to those interested in the sport. Constant Contact also lets you set up personalized emails, but it has limited automation capabilities.

When it comes to A/B testing, Mailchimp offers three variations in free payment option, which allows you to send emails to a small section to conclude which one worked better. On the other hand, Constant Contact does not provide a similar ability. You have to send one version of your recipients, or else; you spend time creating multiple same emails.

Finally, registration forms are used to check on customer’s interest in your offers on your website. While Mailchimp offers more options for customization from custom fields, drag, and drop features, Constant Contact’s fields only provide standard tick boxes for first name, company name, and so on.

Therefore, Mailchimp takes this round in all factors due to its advanced features.

Integrations

Email marketing success depends much on integrations. However, not every integration tools do it well in making marketing more effective.

At first, it seems to be number game, but you’re very unlikely to be missing any with either service. We will explain why it is not simply how many integrations those two providers have but what you get out of these integrations.

Email marketing platforms provide you with customer information. In this way, you can cut the target audience and then send them suitable campaigns, review requests, subscription reminders, or birthday messages. While Customer relationship management (called CRM) helps you build nurturing emails, objective prospects from customer’s journeys, and then send upsell emails. CMS (Content management systems) allows you to create brand awareness, which will boost your subscriptions.

Moreover, the accounting and billing tools can be used to collect data from special customers for email campaigns. By using billing information, you can send subscription reminders with sign up dates to customers or geo-targeted campaigns with location information. Likewise, with information about buying behavior provided by accounting information, you can send special offers and rewards to loyal customers. Also, you can send discounts and promotions to your budget customers. On the other hand, social media allows you to send specific emails to more customers via different channels.

In terms of number, Mailchimp has more than 700 integrations while Constant Contact has about 450 integrations.

Mailchimp’s integrations include WooCommerce, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Base CRM, WordPress, QuickBooks, Cazoomi, etc.

Some of Constant Contact include Shopify, 3dCart, Zapier, DonorPerfect, Eventbrite, Facebook, SalesForce, QuickBooks, HootSuite, WordPress, etc.

However, many integrations Mailchimp has; its search functionality is limited in alphabetical order. You have to know the name of what you are searching for. When it comes to Constant Contact, which has fewer integrations, it uses categories for its search function according to business needs, industry, etc.

Therefore, the winner in this ground seems to come to Constant Contact.

Reporting

Reporting is an important factor that provides us what worked and what flopped, a chance for development, and future campaigns.

Constant Contact provides many opens, clicks, forwards, etc. Also, it lets you know who opened and clicked with Google analytics integration. Its activity tab logs updates, exports, and removals.

With its advanced features, Mailchimp offers all of the above. Moreover, it also provides geo-tracking, social media reports, and click maps. One of the most impressive features is its unique e-commerce conversion tracking, which lets you know when and how products are sold. Overall, this will help you measure your emails’ success and provides an email click map for users to see the best positions for placing links.

It is easy to see Mailchimp win not only this ground but also is the best reporting system among all email marketing tools.

Customer support

Customers are who use and directly affect the success of an email marketing platform. Therefore, good customer support provides customers with a positive experience and then promotes support for your image.

Mailchimp offers a contact page for customers when they get confused and need answers. You can choose the topic of the problems and get related knowledge to address the relevant answer. Mailchimp also offers full-time email support and chat help when you contact the support team. However, Mailchimp service in customer support is said to be a bit slow.

On the contrary, Constant Contact offers email support and live chat like Mailchimp, but it also has phone support, which makes it easy to address issues immediately. Moreover, Constant Contact staff always check the community forums and Twitter every week for urgency. Besides, Constant Contact has online and in-person training events.

To sum up, the winner here is probably Constant Contact.

Pricing

Price is an important factor to put into account.

Mailchimp provides some plans below:

Free plan: It allows you to have 2000 subscribers and send 12000 emails every month. Additionally, reports, signup forms, templates, automation, guides, and a 30-day email only support are all free. Grow plan: You have to pay $10 for each month with unlimited subscribers and emails. With this plan, you will have some more features like engagement reports, advanced segmentation, and email delivery tools. Pro plan: The price is $199 each month also with unlimited subscribers and emails. Some plus tools are API access, comparative reports, advanced testing, and support for high- volume sending.

Constant Contact provides the plans below:

Constant Contact Email plan: The first month will be free. From the second one, you need to pay $20 every month. With this plan, you have unlimited emails, 1GB file storage, reporting, and contact management. Constant Contact Email plus plan: It also offers one month free. Then, the price starts at $45 every month. Some more advanced features include 2GB file storage, event marketing, email automation, coupons, online donations, polls, and surveys.

In general, Mailchimp offers more flexible options. Its free plan is suitable for companies or start-up enterprises that have a tight budget. While Constant Contact is only decent for larger businesses, Mailchimp serves all kinds of needs. So, Mailchimp wins on this round.

Design and Flexibility

Both providers allow you to save your templates and re-use them for the next time. They also offer multiple templates for you to choose (80 for Mailchimp vs 100 for Constant Contact)

Though Mailchimp has fewer templates, it provides more customization, and templates of it are classified in categories that make it easier to use. Constant Contact’s layout options and image placement are a bit rigid whereas those of Mailchimp is more flexible and modern.

Constant Contact gets a stock images gallery to choose but it only offers 2GB storage. Having no gallery but Mailchimp has unlimited storage space for pictures. Both platforms allow you to use HTML when creating a newsletter from the beginning. However, Mailchimp lets you import the code from a URL or a .zip file while Constant Contact does not.

When you use Mailchimp, you will get blank templates anytime you bridge the gap between custom code and a template. Here you can add text, images as you wish.

When it comes to design and flexibility, Mailchimp does much better.

Spam testing

In this round, both platforms are not as advanced as other email marketing providers. Spam testing is a step to make sure your emails are sent already and arrive in your subscriber’s inbox.

Mailchimp provides a third-party advance which is Inbox Preview. This tool will help you see your emails on different devices and email clients. However, this is only for two paid plans for Mailchimp. Each month, users will get 25 Inbox Preview tokens and each view costs 1 token. If you choose the free plan, you can sign up for a Litmus account because all users of Mailchimp get one first week of Litmus for free.

Constant Contact also offers a spam testing tool but it is advisable we shouldn’t depend on it completely but use an external app like GlockApps or MailTester.com.

Again, Mailchimp is the winner in terms of spam testing.

Deliverability

When sending emails to your customers, make sure they are appropriate before users read them. The success of your email depends on whether they land in the spam folder or not.

Mailchimp uses Omnivore to ensure the quality of content. It is an abuse-detecting technology which foresees unethical practices in email campaigns before distributing. When it comes to Constant Contact, it also has a spam check tool. This helps check your emails and see whether your email campaigns experience any deliverability issues.

According to a quick test using a spam testing tool GlockApps, Constant Contact is said to have better deliverability and fewer emails landing in the spam folder.

Who should use Constant Contact?

Constant Contact focuses much on customer support and deliverability. Therefore, if you care about those features, it is a great choice for you. Constant Contact is also advisable if you are beginners and want more customization options for email design which are simple and clear.

Besides, you should pick Constant Contact as your email marketing provider if your organization or company are non-profit ones. Its drawback is very limited automation. Be careful when considering this aspect.

Who should use Mailchimp?

On the other hand, Mailchimp is such an ideal choice if the price is a matter to you. With the free option, it is suitable for companies with little money but still want to get decent features. Although there are still many cheap or free email marketing services. Although there are still a lot of cheap or free email marketing services, it is recommended to use Mailchimp instead because of its advanced automation features. Moreover, you may pay less when your subscriber number grows beyond 2000.

One impressive feature of Mailchimp that makes you run to a decision is its modern, flexible design. Also, Mailchimp comes with advanced automation features to send purchase follow-ups as well as product recommendations that are personalized.

Conclusion

As you can see, Mailchimp wins almost all the rounds in this quick review, especially in advanced features, reporting, pricing, design and flexibility. Whereas, Constant Contact seems to do much better in customer support, deliverability, integrations.

That Mailchimp is a clear winner doesn’t mean that you should definitely choose it as your email marketing provider. Both two solution have their pros and cons. In the long-term, choosing an email marketing platform depends on your specific business needs. Remember there are still other options such as AVADA Email Marketing, an simple-to-use platform helping non-tech people to send emails in minutes with everything is ready-to-use?