If you want to get the most bang for your marketing buck, you can’t ignore emails. For every $1 you invest in email marketing, your business could earn $35.
So what’s the best way to take advantage of that impressive ROI? When it comes to email marketing tools, your options are endless.
The one that immediately comes to mind might be Mailchimp. Mailchimp has been around for 20 years and is the most popular email marketing software. Even if you haven’t heard of Mailchimp, you probably have Mailchimp emails land in your inbox regularly.
Constant Contact is a powerful email solution that’s even older than Mailchimp. It has a smaller user base but is a formidable Mailchimp competitor.
Which one is better? To find out, we’ll have to dig into the details!
Is Constant Contact the Same as Mailchimp?
Both are tools to help you build and automate emails that speak to your target audience. However, they do have their differences.
In a popularity contest, Mailchimp wins hands-down with 69.84% of the email marketing market share. Constant Contact may be its top competitor, but its market share is only 5.74%.
But just because Mailchimp has the most users doesn’t mean it’s the most effective. To determine the winner in our Constant Contact vs Mailchimp showdown, let’s look at them side by side.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp Pricing
For small businesses, decisions often come down to cost. No matter how many flashy features an email platform has, if you only have a few subscribers, you’re not going to shell out the big bucks.
Mailchimp wins on pricing at all levels.
Its free plan makes it the clear choice for businesses just starting. Constant Contact offers a free trial, but after that, you’re going to pay at least $20 per month for the cheapest plan.
As you grow your email marketing efforts, Mailchimp remains the less expensive choice.
If you have 500 contacts, Mailchimp’s most basic paid plan (Mailchimp Essentials) costs $9.99 per month. Compare that to $20 for Constant Contact’s cheapest plan (Constant Contact Email).
At 50,000 contacts, Mailchimp Essentials will cost $270, and Constant Contact Email will cost $335.
However, keep in mind that Mailchimp’s plans have a monthly email limit. With Constant Contact, you can send unlimited emails.
Companies that plan to send a high volume of marketing emails may tip the scales toward Constant Contact.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp Features Comparison
Of course, choosing marketing technology is about more than getting a good deal. Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp are rich with helpful email marketing features.
Let’s go through them one by one.
Email Design
Your audience’s first impression of your email won’t be the content within it but the email’s appearance. A professional, branded look can go a long way toward making potential customers feel good about your business.
Both Mailchimp and Constant Contact offer a wide variety of easy-to-use drag-and-drop templates. Constant Contact’s templates may be slightly more intuitive for the beginner.
Constant Contact also offers more templates overall.
However, Mailchimp has better customization options, which is essential for adding a personalized touch to your emails, and many reviewers find the Mailchimp templates to be more sleek and modern.
Sometimes the same email can look very different depending on the email client or device.
Mailchimp has a helpful feature that lets you preview how your email will look on over 30 different clients. Constant Contact also offers inbox previews but only for five email clients.
Registration Forms
Your email subscriber signup form can make or break your email list.
Mailchimp has an excellent drag-and-drop editor and a variety of custom fields for your form.
Constant Contact lets you change the color and font, but overall its forms are less customizable.
One unique Constant Contact offering is registration form QR codes that allow users to join your list by quickly scanning the code with their phone.
Unless you love the QR code feature, Mailchimp wins here.
Email Automation
Any modern email marketing platform will let you automate the features of your campaign.
Constant Contact is no exception, but its automated emails are simpler than Mailchimp’s, especially if you’re on a less expensive plan.
With Constant Contact, you can send:
- Welcome emails to greet new subscribers
- Emails to people who don’t open your first email
- Birthday and anniversary emails
You can also send an automated email series on some Constant Contact price tiers. These can be triggered in a few ways:
- A contact opening an email
- A contact clicking a link in an email
- A contact signing up for or being added to a specific list
- A contact taking action in your Shopify store
There’s a lot you can do with those options, but Mailchimp automation is more advanced. Like Constant Contact, it offers the basics:
- Date-based automation
- Autoresponders
- Welcome emails
- Birthday and anniversary emails
It also has a long list of available email triggers, including many types of ecommerce activity.
For example, you can email users who purchase a product. You can even re-engage lost customers by sending emails to users who haven’t purchased in a long time.
Retargeting emails are another helpful type of Mailchimp automation. For example, you can create an email to encourage customers to purchase an item they viewed on your site or abandoned in a shopping cart.
If you don’t see your perfect pre-made trigger on Mailchimp’s extensive list, you can create a custom one from a variety of criteria.
A/B Testing
A/B testing, or split testing, is essential for optimizing a marketing campaign. A/B testing is when you send multiple versions of an email (usually to a small test group) to see which one performs better.
Then you can send the better-performing email to your larger list, allowing the campaign to reach its full potential. You can also use the information from the test to optimize future campaigns.
Mailchimp allows you to test up to three variations of your campaign. You can test the subject line or the content of the email.
Constant Contact only allows you to test the subject line, and you can only A/B test if you’re on the Email Plus plan.
Unlike Constant Contact, Mailchimp allows you to decide how many people receive the A/B test before sending the email to the rest of your list.
List Management and Segmentation
Constant Contact wins here based on both ease of use and available features. For one thing, it provides more options for uploading contacts than Mailchimp does.
Mailchimp also often confuses users by differentiating groups and segments.
According to Mailchimp, groups are “a collection of contacts, categorized by their interests or preferences.” Segments are the list resulting from “the action of filtering and dividing similar contacts.”
Not sure how those are different? You’re not alone. Constant Contact makes it simpler to break your list into segments quickly.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are standalone pages that your contacts land on when they click on one of your campaigns. They can be highly targeted to match the audience of a specific email.
Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp offer customizable, easy-to-build landing pages with ecommerce capabilities. Mailchimp has a slight edge due to offering custom domains for your pages.
Ease of Use
Both Mailchimp and Constant Contact are intuitive and friendly to beginners and advanced users alike.
User reviews on G2 and Capterra give Mailchimp a slightly higher rating for ease of use, although both email platforms receive positive marks on both websites.
Integrations
Constant Contact and Mailchimp both have hundreds of available integrations, which one wins will depend on your business needs and existing tech stack.
For example, your ecommerce platform matters. Mailchimp integrates with WooCommerce and BigCommerce but not Shopify. Constant Contact integrates with all three.
We couldn’t begin to look at every integration for either platform, but we can introduce a few that might interest you. We’ll start with Mailchimp integrations.
- WordPress: Add a Mailchimp registration form to any post or page and give visitors the chance to join your list wherever they’re on your website.
- SimpleTexting: Send SMS marketing campaigns one-on-one texts to customers with SimpleTexting. Integrate your SMS and email lists.
- Google Analytics: Understand how people move between your email campaigns and your website.
- Zendesk: View which email campaigns a ticket requester has received and manage your Mailchimp email lists from within Zendesk.
- Facebook: Publish Facebook ads, share your email campaigns on social, or turn your social posts into emails.
- WooCommerce: Sync customers, orders, products, and promo codes to better engage with your customers.
- Reportei: Combine your Mailchimp reports with analytics from Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn, and more.
- Eventbrite: Sync event attendees to a Mailchimp list.
- Recurly: Manage recurring billing to your email list.
Constant Contact has great integrations, too, including:
- WordPress: Easily add contact forms to your WordPress site.
- Eventbrite: Promote events, track responses, and manage registrations.
- Shopify: Target Shopify customers with customized email messages.
- Outlook: Upload contacts from your Outlook folders, lists, and groups.
- Salesforce: Sync your contacts, leads, and accounts and send targeted campaigns based on Salesforce custom field mapping.
- QuickBooks: Import QuickBooks customers into a Constant Contact list.
- WooCommerce: Sync contacts, insert products into your emails, and send targeted emails based on store activity.
- Vimeo: Create and add videos to emails and landing pages within Constant Contact.
- DonorPerfect: Track and manage your fundraising.
Visit the Mailchimp and Constant Contact websites to browse the complete list of integrations for each.
Deliverability
Email deliverability refers to how many emails end up in users’ inboxes.
We like to think they all make it to their intended recipient, but several factors can hurt your deliverability.
Many of them have more to do with you than your email marketing platform, but the software you use can also help your emails get to their destination.
As of March 2021, Constant Contact had a 91.5% deliverability rate vs 86.9% for Mailchimp. Both are better than the average deliverability rate of 83%.
Fundraising for Nonprofits
Constant Contact has a unique feature for nonprofits that Mailchimp just can’t beat. The platform allows you to collect and track online donations on a custom landing page.
The landing page is easy to put together with a drag-and-drop builder and allows you to set a fundraising goal and suggested donation amount.
Real-time reporting lets you keep track of donations where you view performance statistics for your email campaigns.
Analytics and Reporting
If you’re an email marketing beginner, you might not want to be bombarded with a lot of stats.
The Constant Contact dashboard is easy for anyone to understand. It covers all basics, like email opens, click rate, and bounces. It also integrates with Google Analytics for conversion tracking.
Mailchimp analytics are more extensive.
Constant Contact has been catching up on some of Mailchimp’s unique reporting features, like link heat maps and comparison to industry averages. But Mailchimp still lets you take a deeper dive into your statistics, especially if you’re a premium user.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp Customer Support
When shopping for marketing tools, it’s easy to ignore the differences in customer support — until something goes wrong.
Constant Contact comes out on top in this comparison, at least for paid users.
When you first sign up for Mailchimp, you’ll get access to email support. However, if you’re a free plan user, you’ll only have that option for 30 days. Paid users continue to have it 24/7.
To get Mailchimp phone support, you have to be on the most expensive Premium plan.
On the other hand, Constant Contact offers customer service by phone for all users.
Can You Transfer Contacts Between Mailchimp and Constant Contact?
You’ve learned all about the features that Mailchimp and Constant Contact offer. What if you think you made the wrong choice?
Luckily, you can switch platforms without losing your subscriber list.
Transferring Contacts From Mailchimp to Constant Contact
To move your MailChimp lists to Constant Contact, you first need to export them. And you’ll have to export each list separately.
In your MailChimp account, follow these steps:
- Go to the Audience tab.
- Click View Contacts.
- Click Export Contacts and export as CSV.
You can now unzip the file and upload it to Constant Contact.
If you need more advanced features, like exporting your contacts by tag, Constant Contact has a knowledge base article for you.
Transferring Contacts From Constant Contact to Mailchimp
Mailchimp warns that you remove any bounced emails from your Constant Contact list before downloading it.
After you’ve done that, follow these steps in Constant Contact:
- Click Contacts.
- Click Lists.
- Next to the list that you want to export, click Export.
- Select all the fields you want to include in your file on the pop-up.
- Click Export.
You now have a CSV file that you can upload to Mailchimp. You can also download multiple lists.
Which Is Better: Constant Contact or Mailchimp?
There’s no wrong answer to this question. Mailchimp and Constant Contact are both sophisticated platforms that can advance the marketing strategy of most businesses.
Which one is better for you depends on your unique needs.
Mailchimp commands such a significant market share for a reason. More often than not, it’s an ideal solution for your business. That’s especially true if you:
- Need a plan that’s free or inexpensive
- Prioritize email analytics and split testing
- Want to use remarketing as part of your email strategy
Constant Contact has advantages that would work better for some organizations. Constant Contact is the better choice if you:
- Run a nonprofit that wants to fundraise
- Use Shopify as your ecommerce platform
- Prioritize high email deliverability
MailChimp and Constant Contact Alternatives
Mailchimp and Constant Contact are the most popular email marketing platforms, but they’re not the only ones.
There are many Constant Contact and Mailchimp alternatives out there, each with its feature list and specialties. Here are just a few you might want to check out. This list includes both free and paid email software.
HubSpot
If you’re familiar with HubSpot, it’s probably as a CRM platform or a suite of marketing solutions. Email is just one of its many offerings. The significant advantage Hubspot email offers is its integration with the rest of your sales and marketing tools.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is a paid email marketing platform with many of the same features as Mailchimp and Constant Contact. If you’re an ecommerce business, you may want to check out their ecommerce email marketing solution, CM Commerce.
CM Commerce integrates with platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce to use your existing customer data in email campaigns.
Mailjet
Mailjet’s free and basic plans have much less functionality than Mailchimp’s.
However, Mailjet makes the list of potential Constant Contact and Mailchimp alternatives due to the email API that lets you build transactional emails into your web or mobile app. That means you can automatically send emails in response to some user activity on your app.
AWeber
AWeber is an easy-to-use solution that has been around even longer than Mailchimp. It’s a reliable solution, but it’s only free if you have fewer than 500 subscribers.
The paid plan is relatively inexpensive and only has one tier, so you won’t miss out on advanced features because you’re on a basic plan.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a multi-channel marketing platform with email, SMS, and social media advertising.
It offers native integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento.
Klaviyo has a single-tiered paid plan, which in most cases will be more expensive than Mailchimp or Constant Contact.
ACYMailing
AcyMailing is a beginner-friendly WordPress and Joomla! newsletter plugin that helps you manage email communication. Its free plan has no limitations on the number of users, sent emails, and integrations.
There are also paid plans if you want more advanced features.
Summary
The best email marketing platform for your website depends on your needs.
Mailchimp is a solid overall solution with advanced features but is still easy to use. Plus, it’s less expensive. But some factors might make Constant Contact the winner for your business.
Now that you’re ready to choose the best email marketing platform for you, it’s time to send some emails that convert. Get our top tips for email best marketing practices here.
Leave a Reply