As we’ve previously written about, email marketing is an essential part of any decent marketing campaign. Marketers across the board see email campaigns as the best way to build awareness, acquire leads, convert shoppers and retain customers. Two of the largest email campaign managers out there are Mailchimp, with around 38.5% of the market, and Constant Contact, with a little over 11% of the market. They are both powerful platforms packed with features and functionality, but they do differ in some key areas. We’ll break down exactly how here.
Pricing
Mailchimp starts off with their “Forever Free” plan, which allows you to send up to 12,000 emails a month with a contact list of up to 2,000. If your list grows beyond that or you want to send more than 12,000 emails a month, you’ll have to pay for it. It works on a sliding scale based on how many people are on your contact list. You can play around with it here. As an example, an email list with 2,500 subscribers would cost $30 a month. They also offer a pay as you go plan where you are charged per email. This can be cost-effective for some businesses, but only if they are sending less than one email campaign per month on average.
Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial period to new users. You can only send emails to up to 100 recipients but there is no limit on how many you can send. They divide their plans into “email” and “email plus” categories. “Email plus” includes features like surveys, coupons and more. “Email” starts at $20 per month and costs $85 per month if your contact list is between 5,001 and 10,000. “Email plus” starts at $45 and costs $110 if you have between 5,001 and 10,000 people on your contact list. They also offer discounts of 10% and 15% on both plans if you pay for a half year or year in advance, respectively. Additional discounts are available for non-profits. Learn more about their pricing options here.
Neither platform will force you to take out a loan to cover its costs, but Mailchimp’s payment plans are a bit more flexible than Constant Contact’s. Mailchimp’s “Forever Free” plan is also a great option for small businesses that may never grow their contact list beyond 2000 recipients. There’s no way to use Constant Contact for free beyond its 60-day trial period.
Customer Support
Paid Mailchimp accounts have access to 24-hour chat and email support during business days. On weekends they are limited to email support. Users on their “Forever Free” plan have customer support for 30 days, but after that they will have to use Mailchimp’s Knowledge Base to find solutions to their problems.
Constant Contact offers phone, chat and email support during business hours and email support on the weekends. Users also have access to their community forum and video tutorials to learn more about the platform. They can even attend seminars and webinars to further their expertise and ability. You can also hire people to help you with your campaign via Constant Contact, something that Mailchimp doesn’t offer.
We feel that Constant Contact comes out ahead in terms of customer service. Mailchimp’s Knowledge Base is nice, but Constant Contact simply offers users more ways to help users get better at using the platform.
Features and Functionality
We’re not going to run you through the whole list of features that both platforms offer. It would simply take up too much time and space. Instead, we’ll talk about the key differences in between them. Deep breath…here we go:
- Constant Contact has a wider variety of templates available than Mailchimp does. Mailchimp’s are easier to customize, but you have more power to customize in Constant Contact depending on your knowledge of HTML code.
- Mailchimp will give you unlimited free image storage while Constant Contact only offers storage for up to five images for free, although they do have a stock photo library you can choose from.
- Mailchimp has a paid feature that allows you to see what your email will look like in various email clients, something that Constant Contact doesn’t offer at all.
- Mailchimp can automatically send emails at different times based on time zones, while you will have to manually segment people in different time zones if you want to do this in Constant Contact.
- Mailchimp offers automatic A/B testing while you would have to do this manually in Constant Contact.
- Constant Contact offers event management as a paid add-on for $20-$25 per month. Mailchimp doesn’t do this natively, but it does integrate with EventBrite.
- Constant Contact offers surveys as a paid add-on for $15 per month. Mailchimp has simpler polls and can also be integrated with SurveyGizmo or SurveyMonkey.
For anything else, both platforms do them about as well as the other. Some things Mailchimp does better or more simply, the same is true for Constant Contact for other functions. If one of these bullet points really sticks out as something you want or need, then that’s probably the best platform for you.
Deliverability
Both platforms boast extremely high deliverability rates, 97% for Constant Contact and 96-99% for Mailchimp. Some users have reported that once they switch platforms they have seen a jump in emails being sent to spam folders, but there are reports of it happening with both Constant Contact and Mailchimp. Please note this is by no means common in either. One major difference is that you can add email addresses that have unsubscribed to your Mailchimp contact list, whereas in Constant Contact this will put a freeze on your account. In general, Mailchimp and Constant Contact both have exceptional delivery rates and will get the overwhelming majority of your emails where they need to go.
Integrations
Mailchimp’s full list of integrations can be found here and Constant Contact’s here. Some notable integrations for Mailchimp include WordPress, Twitter, Magento, BigCommerce, Drupal and Google Analytics. Constant Contact is easy to integrate with Facebook, Hootsuite, Outlook, Quickbooks and WordPress. Both platforms offer many, many more integrations, but these are some of the biggest names that you are most likely to include as part of your marketing strategy. Because Constant Contact has a built-in suite of functionality, it doesn’t integrate quite as readily as Mailchimp does. If you plan on doing a lot of integrations, we recommend choosing Mailchimp.
Conclusions on Mailchimp Vs. Constant Contact
Let us be clear: Mailchimp and Constant Contact are both powerful and reputable tools for managing your email marketing campaign. It’s no accident that they are the two most popular platforms for doing so. There are some small differences between the two though. Mailchimp offers you more flexibility in testing your campaigns while Constant Contact lets you do more to customize your emails. Mailchimp’s “Forever Free” plan is great for small businesses that don’t have a large contact list, but limits your ability to access support in a way that Constant Contact’s plans don’t. Constant Contact offers discounts if you pay for chunks in advance, but doesn’t have a non-paid version outside of their 60-day free trial.
Unless something we’ve mentioned in this article really sticks out to you, the best way to choose between Mailchimp and Constant Contact is to send a few test emails in each and see which one feels more intuitive to you. After all, the hard part of email marketing isn’t choosing the marketing platform, it’s coming up with a plan and creating emails that follow through. This decision is a tiny first step compared to the long journey that follows it.