Overview of Constant Contact and Mailchimp.
Constant Contact was established in 1995 and is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts.
With annual sales of over $330 million, over 1,200 employees, and more than 600,000 customers worldwide, it is one of the largest email marketing service providers in the world.
Among its most important characteristics are:
- Attractive email templates
- Email editing tools
- A/B testing tools
- Excellent delivery capacity
- Advanced email tracking features
- Image library and file hosting
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Mailchimp is another popular marketing automation platform and email marketing service provider. Founded in 2001, it is headquartered in Atlanta, GA.
With nearly 1000 employees and a turnover of over $500 million, it is regularly included in the “Forbes Cloud 100" list.
Some of Mailchimp's most important features include:
- A “drag-and-drop” editor to design your own emails
- Very thorough analyses
- Email personalization
- Attractive landing pages
- Track statistics in real time
At first glance, Mailchimp and Constant Contact look very similar.
Let's dive under the hood to see which one is the best in 2020.
Pricing and features.
Constant Contact offers 2 pricing plans, called “Email” and “Email Plus.”
The “Core” plan costs $9.99 per month, and the “Plus” plan costs $45 per month.
The 2 prices are based on the number of contacts you have.
However, while the Email plan is suitable for small businesses looking to create professional emails, the Email Plus plan is more appropriate for smaller businesses looking to automate email marketing.
The good news is that you get a 2-month free trial, allowing you to get familiar with the tool and test whether or not it fits your needs.
Here are some of the common features offered by all paid plans:
- Customizable templates
- Contact management tools
- Scheduling emails
- Live support
- List creation tools
- Mobile application
- Facebook and Instagram ads
- Marketing calendar
- Apps and integrations
- Importing the contact list
- Image library
- Pre-designed landing pages
- Advanced tracking and reporting functions
- Easy drag and drop functions
Constant Contact is rich in features and offers over 240 personalized and mobile-friendly templates.
You also have a lightweight library feature that has made adding images to your emails extremely easy.
Mailchimp also offers plans based on the size of your audience list.
However, all plans have a monthly cap on the number of emails you can send.
Starting in May 2019, newbies and those who upgrade from the free version to monthly plans will start to be billed per contact instead of just subscribed contacts.
It offers four pricing plans, one of which is completely free and offers all the basic email features for businesses that are just starting out.
Mailchimp's pricing plans are as follows:
- The “free” plan offers a monthly limit of 10,000 emails.
- The “Essentials” plan starts at $11 per month and offers 500 contacts and 500,000 emails.
- The “Standard” plan starts at $17 per month and has advanced automation.
- Finally, the “Premium” plan gives you access to all areas starting at $299 per month.
Mailchimp email services allow you to:
- Selling products
- Make announcements
- Telling stories
- Follow-up
- Explain your products in depth
With Mailchimp, you also get a wide range of templates, with over 100 highly customizable templates to choose from.
In that case, you can use email personalization wisely.
All you need to do is enter your name and have your email sent according to the correct time zones.
Winner: Constant contact.
Constant Contact offers a large number of options, including more than double the number of templates offered by Mailchimp.
They also offer great plans that are highly customizable according to the needs and wishes of the user.
Additionally, they offer features similar to Mailchimp at a much lower price and with more subscribers.
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Email marketing automation functions.
Email marketing automation makes your life easier by sending automated emails to an entire list of recipients and determining what type of email should be sent to a specific audience.
Constant Contact has built-in email marketing features and automation capabilities that are especially useful for small businesses and non-profit organizations to set up an unlimited number of automatic emails.
With the automation tools offered by Constant Contact, you can drive customer engagement and provide them with an improved user experience, which can boost sales and improve customer retention.
The Constant Contact automation tool allows you to:
- Automatic sending of welcome emails to new contacts
- Nurture potential customers (create effective drip campaigns to target contacts)
- Engaging your audience (by segmenting them and sending the right messages to the right people)
- Expand your field of action (add contacts)
They also allow you to create autoresponders for new subscribers, allowing you to get more value for every email you send.
Mailchimp also has some great email automation features.
It integrates with your website and can help you send targeted emails based on lead activity on your website. It offers the possibility of choosing a single email or a series of emails in a single click.
With Mailchimp, you can do a lot of things like:
- Send emails to visitors after they visit a specific page on your website.
- Integration of objectives (grouping prospects that go from your campaign to a specific page)
- Use purchase data to send product recommendations to customers
The downside is that the automation plan isn't included in Mailchimp's free plan and you need to sign up for a subscription to get it.
Winner: Mailchimp.
It is very difficult to separate these 2 pillars of the sector. However, Mailchimp narrowly wins because it can provide you with behavior-targeting emails, which is very important in email marketing.
List management and segmentation.
List management and segmentation are essential when it comes to email marketing.
Constant Contact offers some of the best list management and segmentation functions.
Basically, there's a lot you can do with Constant Contact, including:
- Add contacts to your list
- group them together for targeted campaigns (here, you can use labels, which can help you create groups based on interests, customer status, locations, etc.)
- Send targeted emails
Marking contacts is very easy and can be done by clicking a button on the toolbar. It's easy to use, and very effective to deploy.
You can also easily remove contact information for someone who doesn't respond or isn't interested.
Additionally, Constant Contact offers a free video tutorial for a visual demonstration of its use for list management and advanced segmentation.
Additionally, you can create your email address list via the signup or signature form and import contacts from Excel, Outlook, Salesforce, your e-commerce platform or even a place where you store your electronic contacts.
They also have a very powerful service for managing (cleaning) email address lists that automatically eliminates duplicates and unregistered contacts for you.
Mailchimp, on the other hand, does not offer such usability.
Here, groups and segments have different meanings and can be confusing for users. “Groups” are used for organization and “segments” are used for filtering.
To create a segment, simply click “Create a segment,” add the filters you want to use, and preview.
You can also create groups by going to “Manage Contacts” and clicking on “Create Groups.”
It also offers numerous customization options.
With Mailchimp, you can import a list in four ways:
- Download the CSV file
- Copy/paste from Excel
- Importing from applications like Salesforce, Google Docs
- Create a list
Winner: Constant contact.
Constant Contact won this round for its unparalleled conviviality. The best thing about Constant Contact is its “tagging” feature, which Mailchimp is sorely lacking.
Email deliverability.
Email deliverability can be defined as the number of times your email lands in the intended recipient's inbox, instead of the spam folder.
One of the benefits of using email marketing software is that, unlike Gmail or other email services, it alerts you when a message enters the inbox.
Otherwise, there's no way of knowing if your email actually reached the recipient's inbox or if it went into the spam folder.
Constant Contact is an industry leader in email deliverability.
They are 100% compliant with CAN-SPAM and CASL legislation, which allows them to maintain a deliverability rate of around 97%.
It is the best industry standard and has been audited and confirmed by third party providers.
Some of the ways Constant Contact maintains a high deliverability rate include the following:
- Proactive monitoring (prevents network abuse)
- Feedback analysis (registered with all major Internet service providers to obtain regular feedback)
- Authentication
- Ongoing monitoring of blocklists
- Higher compliance
- Regular account review (minimum margin of error)
Mailchimp, on the other hand, provides a 96% deliverability rate most of the time, which isn't a very bad number.
However, the exact delivery rate is not mentioned on the official website.
It also focuses on the speed of sending email messages and allows you to send up to 1 million messages in 45 minutes.
However, the deliverability is obviously lower than that of Constant Contact.
Mailchimp maintains high deliverability by:
- Feedback loops and Internet service provider whitelists (effective spam handling)
- Abuse detection technology
- Authentication (very accurate tracking)
Winner: Constant contact.
Constant Contact has a large number of features that allow it to maintain a high delivery rate.
With 97%, Constant Contact has the best figures in the sector and therefore wins this round.
Ease of use: Import and export.
Constant Contact and Mailchimp are the best in the business when it comes to offering options for importing your existing contacts into their platforms.
For Constant Contact, all of your contacts stored in formats like XLS, KLSX, and CSV (spreadsheet file), vCard file (VCF), and text files can be imported directly.
You can add them one after the other, or all at the same time, together.
In addition, it gives you multiple options for storing, importing, and integrating customer contact information.
When importing, the following steps are helpful:
- One email address per individual contact
- The file type should be compatible
- Label column headers properly
- Remove extra spaces and special characters
In addition, Constant Contact can import files containing 40,000 contacts or fewer in a very short time.
However, the ability to import new contacts into your account may vary depending on the pricing plan you choose.
For Mailchimp, you can directly import CSV or text files. If the files are XLS or XLSX, you need to copy and paste them.
You can also use Mailchimp to automatically update existing contacts.
It also provides an API for advanced users who can use it to add contacts to an audience.
However, when importing files that contain a large number of contacts may make the process slow.
Here's a guide from Mailchimp that gives you a detailed overview of How to import contacts into Mailchimp.
Mailchimp and Constant Contact also provide in-depth troubleshooting details to help users.
Constant Contact offers features such as directly importing as many file formats as possible. Also, Constant Contact can manage files when you upload contacts much better than Mailchimp.
So the winner of this round is Constant Contact.
Email analysis and reports.
By making everything more measurable, email analytics is helping businesses reach their ROI goals like never before.
By tracking email openings, clicks, purchases, unsubscriptions, etc., you can view data by email or by subscriber.
To help businesses track their email marketing efforts, Constant Contact offers an integrated email tracking tool that offers easy to read reports to track marketing success in real time.
The Constant Contact analysis tool also provides:
- Detailed engagement report (see shipments, clicks, and more) Track the performance of your campaign and identify the most effective respondents)
- Compare email campaigns (compare up to 5 campaigns at the same time)
- Click tracking heat map (tracks the links that received the most clicks). Circles get bigger as the number of clicks increases)
- Click segmentation (effectively segment contacts based on the content they click on. Allows you to identify and train specific groups, for the creation of more relevant content and concerted targeting)
- Monitoring the opening rate of mobile phones
- Google Analytics integration
The Constant Contact application makes it easy to study all the critical measures related to your email marketing and to make informed decisions.
Mailchimp also has a great built-in analytics tool that can help you see what's working for your business. It makes it easier for you to track performance and create better email marketing campaigns.
Mailchimp's built-in analytics tool allows you to:
- Mutualize all marketing campaigns (emails, automation, social advertising) on the same platform for the visualization of statistics in real time.
- Make informed decisions through their growth, engagement, and revenue reports (tracking click-through rates, downloads, and purchases).
- Control ROI effectively (track sales throughout the sales funnel, from click to buy).
- Check the money earned (as well as what was purchased)
Mailchimp also offers a mobile application that allows you to:
- Provides access to campaign data in real time
- Show all measurements in a single window
- Provide campaign performance alerts at regular intervals
Winner: Constant contact.
Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp have great analytics and reporting features. But Constant Contact narrowly wins thanks to relatively better features.
Registration and acceptance forms.
Registering or registering is an essential part of your sales funnel and one of the factors that will help you develop your email list.
Therefore, your registration forms should be attractive and easy to fill out.
With that in mind, Constant Contact offers an easy way to create a signup form.
You can add the registration form to any page of your website that you want, and even multiple pages.
Constant Contact offers a variety of registration forms, including:
- Pop-up (display of a pop-up that may encourage the customer to register)
- Inline (insert the registration form wherever you want on your website)
- Facebook lead ad (create Facebook ads)
You can further personalize it by giving it a specific title and edit the content by simply clicking on the “Content” option to customize the information you want to appear on the registration form.
You can add fields like:
- Title
- Description
- Contact fields
- Email lists
- pimple
- background
After personalization, all you have to do is activate and install it.
Mailchimp also offers one of the easiest signup forms in the industry.
Here too, you can attach registration forms to any page or to multiple pages on your website.
You need to generate registration forms using their “Form Builder.”
Mailchimp lets you choose from four built-in form templates, like:
- Classic
- Condensed
- Horizontal
- Unstyled
One of the best features is that the embedded and pop-up forms take care of any SSL certification on your website.
It also offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface.
Winner: Mailchimp.
Constant Contact doesn't allow you to remove its brand logo for every signup form, and this feature is unique to a specific exclusive plan.
If your email plan doesn't allow it, you need to upgrade it. But Mailchimp offers better personalization and more options to choose from.
So Mailchimp wins this round.
A/B testing.
Constant Contact helps you maximize the open rate of your emails through split A/B tests of your subject line.
This function allows you to take the pulse of your prospects and target them more effectively.
However, this A/B testing feature only applies to subject lines and does not allow you to test other attributes such as an email template, etc.
Mailchimp's A/B testing feature, on the other hand, allows you to compare up to three variants simultaneously and then choose the best one.
Their premium plan includes multivariate tests (involving more variables) and allows you to compare up to 8 variations at once.
The Mailchimp tool can also advise you on how long it takes to continue conducting A/B tests in order to get the best, optimized results.
Here too, you can test the following items:
- Topic
- Contents
- Names
- Sending times
- Number of targets receiving your mail
Winner: Mailchimp.
Constant Contact has a lot of features in its favor. But Mailchimp has great attributes like multivariate testing, a wide range of metrics, and greater flexibility. So Mailchimp won this round.
Customer Support.
The Constant Contact Help and Support Center sets itself apart when it comes to customer support.
Constant Contact offers a variety of customer support options, via:
- Chat service
- Telephone support
- Video tutorials
- Ask the community
- Professional services
- Educational events
- Apps and integrations
- Developer resources
When it comes to telephone support, you get billing support as well as international customer support.
Additionally, they offer telephone support even on Saturdays, and community support and Twitter support are available seven days a week.
Few online service providers offer as extensive customer support as Constant Contact.
Mailchimp support is not left out either.
It seems that they are taking this aspect of the business very seriously. And that means 30 days of free email support for new subscribers.
Customer support varies depending on the type of subscription you use. However, overall, you get email support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and telephone support during business hours.
They also have knowledge-based self-service and a fairly effective chat service when you need personal attention.
Additionally, they provide a very comprehensive FAQ section that addresses virtually most of the issues you might encounter using the email marketing tool.
Winner: It's a draw.
Both Mailchimp and Constant Contact offer great customer support and world-class features.
Therefore, it is a draw for this round.
Email preview features.
It's especially important to preview your emails before launching a campaign, as email templates may look different depending on the device you're using.
Constant Contact solves this problem by allowing its users to see how emails are going to look on the customer's device.
It can reproduce the display on:
- gmail
- Outlook
- Apple iPad
- Apple iPhone
- Google Android
- Mobile devices
Thanks to Constant Contact's email preview function, you can also customize the appearance of your emails to make them as easy as possible for customers to use.
With the email preview function, you can see the following items:
- If the bottom of the email template is cut
- The placement of the CTA to ensure that the link button is clearly visible or not
- Check if your images are out of appearance (as can sometimes happen in Outlook)
- Check font style compatibility
You can immediately rectify any errors or incompatibility issues so that your customer gets an optimal experience.
To solve the problem of previewing emails, Mailchimp offers a tool powered by Litmus, called Inbox Preview, which allows you to accurately replicate the look of your email in the customer's inbox.
The best part is that all Mailchimp users get 30 days of free access to Litmus when they sign up.
If it's a paid subscription, you can get 25 Inbox Preview tokens every month.
Creating or updating an overview is equivalent to a token.
Even if you run out of chips, you can still check the preview by.. :
- Comparison between mobile and desktop
- Sending a test email
- Activate push notifications and push them to the mobile
Winner: Mailchimp.
The clear winner is Mailchimp, as it offers a wide range of email preview and compatibility options.
Integrations.
Constant Contact offers users a wide range of integrations, allowing you to get the most out of its email marketing solution.
In a recent survey, 69% of respondents suggested that the integrations provided by Constant Contact played a central role in the success of their business.
Numerous third-party tools integrated with Constant Contact allow you to synchronize contacts between your customer relationship management (CRM) system and Constant Contact, add subscription forms to your blogs, create online content for your newsletters, etc.
Constant Contact is fully integrated with the largest and most used platforms, including:
- Eventbrite (used for event management and promotion)
- Shopify and Magento (sync your Ecommerce online store with your account)
- Salesforce integration with Cazoomi (real-time lead engagement)
- WordPress (via the official Constant Contact plugin)
- MINDBODY (online booking, point of sale and others)
- WooCommerce (using Zapier)
- Viewbix
- MailMunch
Constant Contact is distinguished by its integration with event management software, which places him far ahead of others in this field.
Mailchimp also works with a plethora of the most useful applications to facilitate your email marketing.
Mailchimp offers integrations with some of the best platforms like:
- Eventbrite
- Salesforce
- Shopify
- Square (connect payments to Mailchimp to sell directly from landing pages)
- WooCommerce (sync store data and send more personalized emails)
It has also been integrated into some of the latest platforms that help increase its usability:
- Xero
- Canva (helps you create the best charts for your account)
- Shopware (sync your Shopware products, customers, and orders with Mailchimp)
Winner: Constant Contact.
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The 2 services are almost equal, but Constant Contact's integration and flexibility are comparatively better than Mailchimp's.
Therefore, the winner of this round is Constant Contact.
Pros and Cons.
To summarize, the 2 emailing solutions have their own set of advantages and disadvantages.
It is not very easy to make a decision by choosing one over the other. It is essential to assess what unique characteristics you want to get from the service.
Here I offer you a brief review of the characteristics of these 2 email marketing tools in order to help you in your buying decision.
Constant contact.
Pros
- Offers features such as integration with event management, which is unique among its peers.
- The deliverability rate is the best in the industry (97%).
- Offers a good quality/price ratio (great features at standard prices)
- Usability (intuitive interface)
- Enables a high level of personalization
- Integrated email autoresponder providers
- Global user base and goodwill
- Industry leader in data analysis and social media platform integration
- Can process files containing a large number of coordinates.
- Excellent knowledge base
Cons
- Does not allow you to remove the logo from every registration form.
- Better suited for small businesses
- The website is available in Spanish and English, but the tool is only available in English.
- No provision for spam testing
- The email preview function could be improved
Mailchimp.
Pros
- Excellent data analytics and social media platform integrations
- Provides a robust drag and drop function
- Offers a freemium plan with impressive features
- Integrated customer relationship management (CRM) tool
- World-class customer support
- Offers excellent behavioral email targeting
- Offers one of the best A/B testing tools (multivariate analysis included)
- User-friendly software
- Has an excellent email preview function
Cons
- One of the most expensive service providers on the market
- No integration with event marketing
- Does not allow affiliate marketing
- Average deliverability (96%)
- The site is only available in English
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Who is the winner?
MailChimp and Constant Contact are 2 of the most important tools in the email marketing industry and are used by millions of people around the world.
Mailchimp is the most appropriate when it comes to personalization, ease of use, automation, and ease of previewing emails.
However, if you're looking for a comprehensive experience that comes with great features, value for money, customer support, and great usability, Constant Contact should be your choice.
It offers better general features, such as integration with event management software, better deliverability, and more advanced analytics.
As a special bonus for my readers, when you start using Constant Contact, you get 10% off your first year and more. :
- An expert account manager dedicated to your business
- Award-winning product and technical support
- Customer hub to manage all your customers in one place
- Online portal with an extensive training library
- Certification, professional marketing tools, and more
Start with Constant Contact.
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Further reading: Want to see how Constant Contact compares to other email marketing software?
Check out my comparison between Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign for more information.
