Email marketing is a vital instrument for ecommerce, it’s your way to communicate with customers and achieve their loyalty. It helps you attract new and retain old ones more effectively than social networks and advertising do. Constant Contact vs Mailchimp is an eternal question for marketers, they are two of the most popular services for email marketing, so let’s consider the benefits and drawbacks of each of them to choose the best solution for your goals.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: basis features
Mailchimp offers its clients free membership, a great number of features, a user-friendly interface of dashboard, and email templates. It provides a good analytics solution and several mobile applications to develop and send emails. All you need to start work with Mailchimp is to set up an account. No wonder that a lot of people prefer Mailchimp’s other services.
Constant Contact is another popular solution for your email marketing. It offers a free trial version and a wide range of functions. For example, you can send targeted sets of emails and make them personalized. Its interface concedes Mailchimp but there are a lot of marketers that like to work with it.
Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp are designed for setting the communication between companies and their customers, selling the products, and re-attracting customers.
Let’s compare the main features of these services to simplify your choice of the best solution for email marketing. Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: who wins in this battle?
#1. Automation
It is a basic feature for email marketing that allows marketers to create and send emails to multiple users at the same time. A special set of triggers helps specialists to define the type of emails. How does it work? You don’t need to write a personalized email for every new visitor of your site: with this feature, you create a template and the system sends this letter when it is needed.
Mailchimp allows you to automatically send emails with personal recommendations about products and purchase follow-ups. You can activate these functions when customers buy the product, click a certain link, or leave the cart.
Using Constant Contact you can customize autoresponders and personalized emails, but its automatization features are limited.
Score: 1-0 in favor of Mailchimp! Its automation is more flexible and includes more features.
#2. Deliverability
Brand’s reputation, content, and authentication influence on your email deliverability. Your email strategy can’t effectively work if all your emails are perceived as junk mails.
Mailchimp uses a special program to detect abuses before sending emails, it calls Omnivore. Omnivore guarantees that customers will get appropriate content that allows the marketing department to increase the productivity of their emails to 96-99%.
Constant Contact also uses mechanisms for spam detection, with its help you can predict and address any problems with deliverability. The efficiency of Constant Contact is up to 98%.
Score: 2-1 in favor of Mailchimp, but in this round, both services showed us similarly high results.
#3. Registration forms
Registration forms help you to check the customers’ interest in your products and offers.
But you should use it properly, there is the risk to spam a host’s mailbox without appropriate address validation. As a consequence, you can get a needed subscriber list or break it down and undermine all your business. Hence, you need to be sure that your registration forms are made properly.
With Mailchimp, you can customize your registration forms according to your needs, use a variety of custom fields, drag and drop functions. The only condition is to adhere to the HEX color code.
Constant Contact also supports font and background color customization. It allows specialists to create QR code for your registration form. The drawback of Constant Contact is that its fields use only usual tick boxes for the company’s name, customer’s name, etc.
Score: 3-1 in favor of Mailchimp. Mailchimp wins this round: it is more flexible and offers more features for customization.
#4. A/B Testing
A/B testing is necessary for email marketing: you should test what your customers like and create your winning combination: themes, texts, images, send time, kinds of the call to action, etc.
Mailchimp offers three kinds of its free plan, so you have the ability to send your emails to small groups and test your emails work.
Constant Contact is less user-friendly for testing automatization: if you want to experiment with several versions of your email, you should customize it manually.
Score: 4-1 in favor of Mailchimp. This service allows you to save your time and achieve good results from testing with less effort.
#5. Emails design
Mailchimp allows marketers to choose different easy-to-use parameters of template and image customization. Also, it provides unlimited storage for images.
Constant Contact, in its turn, offers more ready templates and stock images gallery (it’s a key moment, Mailchimp hasn’t such a feature). But Constant Contact has serious limitations, the size of its storage is just 2 GB.
Score: 5-2 in favor of Mailchimp. We gave points for both services because they have their own benefits, but the flexibility of Mailchimp can be the decisive factor for somebody.
#6. Reporting
Reporting is one of the crucial features that gives specialists the ability to consider the success of a marketing campaign, which of your solutions was effective and which was not good enough.
With the help of Mailchimp, you can make reporting about the open rate, bounce rate, click-through rate, measure your email efficiency with interactive graphs, and more.
Also, Mailchimp allows you to use a Click map if you want to know where your customers click in your email, what elements are more attractive for them.
Constant Contact hasn’t a Click map, but you can use reports about the number of opens, clicks, forwards, and others. Its activity tab shows information about updates, export, and removals.
Score: 6-2 in favor of Mailchimp. Click map is a cool feature, and its functions are more advanced than Constant Contact can offer.
#7. Integration
Integration is the ability to improve your basic tool with other helpful features. This increases your marketing strategy results and saves time for specialists. So, what instruments can you use for your successful communication with customers?
- Ecommerce platforms can help you with the segmentation of your target market that is needed for customization email marketing campaigns. Also, such platforms are useful for sending customer reviews, notifications about subscriptions, birthday, or anniversary.
- Customer relationship management systems (CRM) allow you to customize lead nurturing emails, target potential customers according to their buyer’s journey, and send upsell emails.
- Content management systems (CMS) helps you to increase the brand’s recognition and the number of your subscribers using actual content.
- Billing tools also can be useful and give you unique information about your customers: with the help of payment data you can find information about the first purchase and then send a subscription reminder. Also, these instruments can be helpful for geotargeting campaigns.
- Accounting services can give you knowledge about customers’ behavior: using this information you can send special offers and bonuses to loyal customers.
- Social networks are needed to extend your campaign ranch and you can send targeted emails via their channels.
Mailchimp can integrate with more than 700 services. It works with the most popular ones, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Shopify, WooCommerce, Salesforce, WordPress, Base CRM, and more.
Constant Contact offers not so large list of integration services (450 positions) but also supports the most popular tools: Shopify, Salesforce, WordPress, Facebook, 3dCart, etc.
Score: 6-3 in favor of Mailchimp. Constant Contact wins this round. Despite it offering a smaller list of integration services, you can customize your search according to your business requirements, attributes, and industry. Mailchimp doesn’t support such customization and shows all tools in alphabetical order. It can be complicated for beginners in ecommerce: you already should know what tools you need to find.
#8. Simplicity and convenience
The dashboard of Mailchimp seems clear and easy to use. It offers drag-and-drop tools to simplify emails creating and working with images. It allows properly using colors that will attract customers’ attention.
Constant Contact is also a simple and user-friendly service, available even to the beginner. You can figure out with its tools on your own, make good-working emails, and configure your integration with other services.
Score: 7-4 in favor of Mailchimp. Mailchimp stays at the leading position but in this round, we have the draw. Both services are simple and convenient for work.
#9. Custom service support
Custom service support is needed for customer retention, their good customers’ experience, and creating positive brand perception. It’s vital to know that you are not alone with your problems and can ask the question to the specialist.
Mailchimp offers users a special page where they can find the themes of their problem, go to its description and solution. Also, you can connect via email or chat with the support team.
Constant Contact offers special chat and support via emails or calls. Also, you can use its database and visit it’s online and offline training events.
Score: 7-5 in favor of Mailchimp. In this round, the winner is Constant Contact: the ability to call the support team plays a vital role for the beginner.
#10. Pricing
Let’s see what plans Mailchimp can offer to its customers:
- Free plan: you can work with 2000 subscribers and send 12000 emails per month. Also, you can use reporting, automatization, registration forms, templates, guides, and support only via emails per first 30 days.
- Grow plan: starts at $10 per month and includes an unlimited number of subscribers and emails. This plan offers extended segmentation, engagement reports, and advanced email delivery tools.
- Pro plan: starts at $199 per month and also includes an unlimited number of subscribers and emails. Also, you will get access to API, comparative reports, extended testing, and high-volume sending.
Constant Contact offers 1 month free of any plan.
- Constant Contact email plan: starts at $20 per month. It includes an unlimited number of subscribers and emails, reporting, contact managing, and 1GB of data storage.
- Constant Contact email plus plan: starts at $45 per month. In addition to features from the previous plan, it includes 2 GB of data storage, automatization, event marketing, donations, polls, and surveys.
Score: 8-5 in favor of Mailchimp. As we see, Mailchimp pricing is more flexible and available for free. Constant Contact is more oriented on enterprises and mid-sized businesses.
#11. Common view
Let’s sum up features of both services for email marketing and list their pros and cons.
Benefits of Mailchimp:
- Abilities of deep reporting: you can compare a great number of metrics, even geo-tracking, and integration with powerful tool Google Analytics.
- Generous offer in case of the free plan (2000 of subscribers and 12000 emails per month).
- Advanced automatization features and personalized recommendations about products.
Drawbacks of Mailchimp:
- Limited customer support.
- The cumbersome interface in case of high volume users.
Benefits of Constant Contact:
- Diverse variations of customer support.
- The great number of templates.
- In-built the survey and coupon features.
- The serious policy of affiliate links and blacklisted domains.
Drawbacks of Constant Contact:
- Limited automatization, A/B testing, and reporting that influence the efficiency of email marketing strategy.
Score: 9-5 in favor of Mailchimp. Flexibility, usability, and the absence of restrictions of this service speak for themselves. But if the customer support is crucial for you, you should think about Constant Contact.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: alternatives
If you didn’t choose your front-runner at the Constant Contact vs Mailchimp battle, we gathered several other interesting services for email marketing. Check the list below to figure out what tool you need.
SendinBlue
SendinBlue can be your working solution with a great number of features such as transactional messages, SMS, automatic messages, contact management, IP-plans, etc.
SendinBlue starts with a free plan that includes the ability to send 300 emails per day to an unlimited number of customers. SendinBlue Lite plan costs $25 per month and the highest plan costs $66 per month. Also, it offers a corporate plan for enterprises with their concrete requirements.
SendinBlue benefits:
- It offers a powerful SMS marketing tool.
- It provides credible email automatization and transaction features.
SendinBlue drawbacks:
- The outdated user interface leads to difficulties with setting up the account.
- Limited integration abilities.
HubSpot
You can make a perfect combination with HubSpot free email tool and powerful HubSpot CRM system. As a result, you can create personalized emails for every customer.
Its drag-and-drop instruments of the editor allow you to make needed professional email campaigns. Also, you can choose one of the various enable templates that suits your goal requirements.
You can add to your email certain personalization tokens: they will customize your text for every client, using the information from CRM. These actions improve the campaign’s efficiency and clickability.
In-build A/B testing and reporting help you to measure and increase your brand influence.
HubSpot benefits:
- You can send 2000 emails per month for free.
- Free CRM and numerous variations of list segmentation.
- Powerful personalization features.
- Drag-and-drop editor.
HubSpot drawbacks:
- A/B testing and automatization are paid functions.
AWeber
AWeber is an effective service for email marketing. It provides a great rate of deliverability, various necessary features, and easy-to-use tools. You don’t need a special preparation or knowledge to work with AWeber.
AWeber offers a flexible pricing policy: the simplest plan costs $19 per month and the advanced plan costs $149 per month and includes a 30-ty days free trial period.
AWeber benefits:
- It provides wide reporting abilities.
- Smart Visual builder feature allows you simply to edit your template.
AWeber drawbacks:
- There is no Google Analytics integration.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is good in list segmentation: using it, you will see engaged subscribers and those who only think that your emails are interesting. With this information, you can create truly working and effective campaigns.
Klaviyo offers impressive drag-and-drop elements that include images, social links, split columns, etc. One of the most interesting Klaviyo features that differentiate this service from other email services is the ability to create targeted emails according to your customers’ behavior in real-time.
Klaviyo pricing is based on the number of subscribers: paid plans start at $25 per month for 500 contacts.
Klaviyo benefits:
- It offers a simple visual editor.
- It allows using impressive automatization abilities.
- This service shows a large list of segmentation variations.
Klaviyo drawbacks:
- It’s hard to customize.
- You should be ready for complicated data migration
GetResponse
GetResponse is a professional email service provider with a lot of important features: list segmentation, A/B testing, automatization, integration with Google Analytics, social media marketing, template editor, image hosting, and more.
GetResponse also offers video-based email marketing, QR code generator, and exclusive apps for iOS and Android.
The first GetResponse pricing plan named as Email cost $15 per month. The second Prol plan costs $49 per month, the third Max plan costs $165 per month and the widest Custom plan costs $1199 per month. Plans differ with the set of available features and the number of actual processes.
GetResponse benefits:
- It allows impressive abilities for list automation.
- It includes the landing page editor.
GetResponse drawbacks:
- Its templates need updating.
We considered the battle of Constant contact vs Mailchimp and their popular alternatives: each of them has its own pros and cons, and require your testing. Hence, figure out what features you need for effective email marketing and what’s your budget for the marketing strategy. Which of the marketing services did you try and what is your choice?