Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp

Advantages of an all-in-one marketing platform

If you use separate platforms to manage your marketing, you may be required to send performance data back and forth between and manually import customer files to make sure they contain the latest information. This leaves room for error, and can allow crucial data—and customers—to slip through the cracks. An all-in-one platform streamlines your workflow, gives you more marketing options, and helps you get the most out of your marketing budget.

Two of the most popular marketing platforms among marketers and business owners are Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Here’s a direct comparison of the two services and what they can offer your business.

Mailchimp’s all-in-one Marketing Platform vs. Constant Contact email marketing

Mailchimp and Constant Contact are both unified marketing platforms. Of the thousands of reviews for these two platforms on the website of G2.com, Inc., Mailchimp outperformed Constant Contact in 32 areas of user satisfaction ratings in the email marketing category, including but not limited to:

• Ease of use
• Email list management (see the “Manage Email Lists” category)
• Performance and Reliability
• Data Import and Export Tools
• Building and Personalizing Emails
• Custom Reports

Need a more thorough comparison? We’ve got you covered.

Mailchimp vs Constant Contact at a glance

Let’s take a closer look at how Mailchimp’s features compare to those offered by Constant Contact in a few key areas.

Automation

Constant Contact offers a variety of email automation features, but to use them, you’ll need to sign up for their highest payment tier, the Email Plus plan, starting at $45 per month.

Mailchimp has several different automation tools to keep you connected with your customers, including:

• Welcome emails triggered by email signups
• Emails sent on birthdays and other special days, to show your customers you know them
• Product retargeting emails for customers who don’t complete a purchase
• Printed postcards sent out in response to abandoned carts
• Special offers and promo codes for high-value customers
• Customer Journey builder to give you control over your automations

While automations allow for always-on marketing that increases your reach and capacity, Mailchimp’s Customer Journey builder also gives you total control over those automations. Our builder allows you to create customized, adaptable journeys for most common customer interactions by selecting starting points, branching points, and specific actions that prompt relevant messaging based on those interactions. They’re easy to build with drag-and-drop functionality in a visual interface that helps you see the journey and follow the dynamic marketing path to its end. You’ll stay connected to your customers even when you’re managing other parts of your business.

With Mailchimp, you can choose the messages you send based on your business’s needs, and you get several pre-built automation options at every level, including our Free plan. Although the Customer Journey builder is a paid feature, you can try it out even on the Free plan to see if it's the right automation solution for you before upgrading to a paid plan.

Reporting

The value of an email campaign lies not just in how much revenue it generates, but also in the insights it provides about what works and what doesn’t.

Constant Contact gives you numbers for opens, clicks, and forwards, but they offer fewer advanced reporting features than Mailchimp.

Mailchimp’s in-depth reporting capabilities let you analyze audience responses and see what parts of a campaign draw the most reader interaction. You can also track your ROI across all channels, including your website, email list, and social media accounts, when you connect your store to your Mailchimp account. This helps you learn what campaigns are working and whether you need to re-allocate any of your marketing funds.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

CRM tools are valuable because they help businesses of all shapes and sizes build, strengthen, and manage their customer relationships. And while Constant Contact offers contact list management features and email list segmentation, Mailchimp gives all users—even free accounts—access to a larger selection of Marketing CRM tools at no additional cost. Our Marketing CRM tools make it easy to segment your audience and personalize your messaging. To get started, you just have to:

1. Import your audience data
2. Create tags to organize and filter audience data in a way that makes sense for your business
3. Set up automated messages based on the tags and segments you identify

There’s even an intuitive audience dashboard where you can see important data like growth sources, customer locations, and email engagement patterns at a glance.

You’ll get digestible reports and real-time analytics each time you run a Mailchimp campaign, and you organize the resulting data and segment your audience however you’d like. When you combine this functionality with our advanced personalization tools, you’ll have the power to send highly-targeted—and highly-relevant—messages to each customer.

If you’ve got a paid Mailchimp account, you’ll also have access to features like customer lifetime value and purchase likelihood, which use your e-commerce data to make predictions about customers' future purchase activity.

Pricing

Constant Contact offers website and domain services separately from email marketing, making it less convenient to coordinate your marketing efforts between channels. After a free trial, users can choose between the $20+/month Email plan and the $45+/month Email Plus plan. Larger businesses—or businesses with more specialized needs—will need to pay extra for additional services.

Mailchimp, on the other hand, offers flexible pricing plans with robust features to meet the needs of any size business. Here’s the rundown:

• Free: $0/month for 7 marketing channels (email, social media posts & ads, landing pages, websites, surveys, signup forms, and postcards), single-click automation, use of Mailchimp’s marketing CRM, and more (capped at 2,000 contacts and 10,000 email sends/mo.)
• Essentials: $9.99+/month for everything included in the Free plan, plus more templates, A/B testing, and 24/7 support
• Standard (recommended): $14.99+/month for everything included in the Essentials plan, plus advanced analytics, retargeting ads, custom templates, and event-based automation
• Premium: $299+/month for everything in the Standard plan, plus more advanced segmentation, testing, and different access plans

Ease of use

Constant Contact promotes its usability through pre-fabricated templates and drag-and-drop email composition tools.

Mailchimp offers pre-designed templates, too, and gives you everything you need to create custom designs for your email campaigns, transactional emails, postcards, landing pages, and website. Our drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to customize your content, colors, and fonts, and you can use our built-in photo editor to resize images, add filters and text, adjust brightness and contrast, and a whole lot more.

Customer support

Constant Contact offers support by phone, chat, Twitter, and crowdsourced community advice. Phone service is available six days a week, excluding Sundays, but Twitter and crowdsourced support are available all week long, including evenings and weekends. Users can enlist special support from marketing and technical advisors, but this service requires an additional fee.

Mailchimp’s support options are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all paid users. This includes comprehensive email and live chat support for all users on our Essential and Standard plans, with phone support also included for folks on our Premium plan. Our support team has a 92% customer satisfaction rate and won 4 Gold Stevie Awards for customer service in 2020, so you can be sure that we’ll help you find the answers you need so you can get back to business.

In addition to these by-request services, we also offer an in-depth library of resource articles and tutorials and a directory full of third-party experts that are available for hire if you find yourself needing some extra assistance. Of course, Mailchimp earned top ratings for ease of use according to G2, which means you’ll be able to use our platform more easily without support than you would if you were using the more complicated alternative.

All-inclusive marketing services

Constant Contact markets itself as an all-in-one online marketing platform. Its suite of services include email, websites, and social media and Google Ads, but not all of these features are available in every plan.

Mailchimp, however, is a true all-in-one Marketing Platform. Our comprehensive marketing tools include in-depth reporting and analytics as well as multichannel marketing management capabilities. Features include:

• Multichannel subscriber signup forms
• Custom domain and website to establish your online presence
• Landing pages geared toward customer acquisition, sales, and retention
• Posts and ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter

With Mailchimp’s dynamic design studio, you can create unique campaigns on any channel, complete with content and image editing. Our marketing features and services are integrated on one user-friendly platform, so your whole campaign can be consistent and personalized.

We deliver helpful analytics for every digital marketing channel you use in Mailchimp, so you'll always know exactly how your campaigns are performing. Then, you can use easily the insights you’ve gained from one channel to improve your performance on the others.

Why you need an all-in-one marketing platform

Consumers today may need up to six touchpoints when making a purchase, and they can expect communication to be seamless and fully personalized across all channels. Consider these statistics from an article on Forbes.com:

• 70% of customers feel frustrated when emails aren’t relevant to them
• 74% don’t like when website content isn’t personalized
• 47% go to Amazon if a brand doesn’t provide personalized suggestions
• 80% are more likely to buy from a brand that personalizes

If you use more than one channel to collect information and market to your audience, it’s important to have a single marketing platform for managing all your customer data. Otherwise, you end up importing and exporting customer information between platforms, risking error and outdated personalization.

That’s why Mailchimp provides all the marketing tools a small business needs in one convenient location, combining customization with analytics, so you can speak more effectively to each customer.

Use a service that grows with your business

Mailchimp scales with you, adapting to the needs of your business—and offering more advanced capabilities—so you can grow without having to switch providers. At all levels, we help you put the customer at the center of your marketing.

With Mailchimp as your single, centralized platform, you can put your customers at the center of your marketing. We give you the tools you need to market with the personalized attention of the smallest micro-business and the reach of a large corporation. And even as you grow, you can maintain that level of customization.

Serve your needs—and your brand

No matter the size of your business, your brand identity matters. It’s how your customers know you, and more importantly, it’s how they know they maintain a connection with you.

Mailchimp has more than 12 million customers, each of whom has a unique brand image and goals for the future. We provide each of those customers with an opportunity to create emails, ads, landing page content, and more, complete with customized signature design and imaging.

As your brand grows, you can trust Mailchimp to adapt to you. Whether you switch pricing plans or stay where you are, you’ll get an all-in-one Marketing Platform that is fully integrated and covers all essential digital marketing channels.

A final word

Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp earn strong customer ratings; Constant Contact has a G2 Star Rating of 4 out of 5 stars, while Mailchimp has 4.5 out of 5 stars. That's a pretty close comparison, but consider this: Constant Contact has just over 4,000 reviews on G2, while Mailchimp has more than 10,000. In Fall 2020, we won 29 G2 awards for our Marketing Platform, 13 of which were for the Email Marketing category alone. (Source: G2.com, Inc.)

It's not easy to maintain high ratings among so many users, but Mailchimp’s powerful functionality has made a big impression on folks. From our robust collection of flexible, user-friendly features to customization tools that help you unify your message across channels and put the customer first, Mailchimp’s all-in-one Marketing Platform gives today’s businesses everything they need to stay competitive.

Ready to learn what Mailchimp can do for you? Sign up today and test our marketing platform out for yourself.

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