Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: A Complete Breakdown (2023)
By In this Constant Contact vs Mailchimp guide, we’ll break down their pricing structures, unique features, customer support, and more.
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In this Constant Contact and Mailchimp comparison guide, we’ll break down their pricing structures, unique features, customer support, and more.
Torn between choosing a Constant Contact or Mailchimp subscription? Want to know which email marketing software is a better fit for you?
In this guide, we’ll dive into their unique features, tools, and how they work.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: A breakdown
| Constant Contact | Mailchimp | |
| Pricing |
(These are starting prices and depend on the number of subscribers on your list.) |
(These are starting prices and depend on the number of subscribers on your list.) |
| Automation | Multi-step and single-step | Multi-step and single-step |
| A/B testing | Subject lines | Full A/B testing |
| Reporting & analytics | Open rate, click rate, and Google Analytics integration. | Open rate, click rate, and Google Analytics integration, social media reports, geo-tracking, click maps, and provider performance. |
| Integrations | 349 including Shopify, Gmail, and Vimeo | 292 including Stripe, WooCommerce, and Canva. |
| Customer support |
|
|
| Best for | Beginners looking for a simple fuss-free email newsletter platform. | Users looking for all the bells and whistles or beginners who want intuitive features. |
Launched in 1995, Constant Contact has been around before most businesses knew they even needed email newsletter campaigns. The platform serves a base of around 600,000 customers.
Its tools and features are tailored to SMEs and its main focus is on helping smaller brands grow both their audience and engagement.
Email marketing juggernaut Mailchimp is a few years younger than Constant Contact but has captured a bigger slice of the email marketing pie, with a customer base of over 11 million. Again, Mailchimp’s core audience is made up of SMEs.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Pricing
Constant Contact has two different email marketing plans. There’s the basic Email plan for $20/month and the Email Plus plan for $45/month. Both of these plans are for up to 500 subscribers.
Both plans are similar in what they offer with the Email Plus plan offering automation and custom features like pop-ups.
However, if you want to add more subscribers to your list, prices quickly jump. For example, for up to 2500 subscribers, a Plus plan is $70/month and 10,000 subscribers are $195/month. Constant Contact doesn’t have a free tier for users to try.
Mailchimp allows users to have a subscriber list with up to 2,000 contacts for free. There’s also up to 10,000 email send-outs per month for free. The downside of the free plan is not being able to remove Mailchimp’s branding from the footer of your emails.
Upgrading to the Essentials plan has the main advantage of being able to access the pre-built templates.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Key features
Now you’ve got a brief overview of Constant Contact and Mailchimp, let’s dig deep into their key features.
Ease of navigation
Constant Contact and Mailchimp have simple navigation menus suitable for users of all levels to use.
Mailchimp is intuitive to use and features like the bottom navigation menu make it easy to go forward and backward to check each part of the campaign. Mailchimp does come with a lot of different menu options, but everything is presented in a fresh, modern, and user-friendly style making it straightforward to find your way around.
Conversely, some of Constant Contact’s UI looks a bit outdated and the menus aren’t as intuitive.
Verdict: Mailchimp strikes a good balance between offering advanced features as well as simple-to-navigate and intuitive menus. So for that reason, Mailchimp wins over Constant Contact.
Email template design
If we’re talking a number’s game, Constant Contact has over 200 templates. They’re categorized according to their purposes like sales emails, holiday email templates, and thank you email templates.
Mailchimp on the other hand has around 100. Similar to Constant Contact, in Mailchimp, you can find templates organized into categories like selling products, following up, or making an announcement. Within these pre-designed layouts, it’s easy to drag and drop text blocks, headers, videos, or images.
There are also premium templates available for purchase on Mailchimp’s marketplace. You can even reach out to Mailchimp expert template builders via the platform to help you create exactly what you want.
But, if you’d prefer to create your own unique template from scratch, both Constant Contact and Mailchimp enable you to use HTML. Mailchimp also allows you to import the code from a URL or .zip file.
Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp enable you to save your customized templates for future re-use.
Verdict: Although Mailchimp has fewer templates than Constant Contact, their intuitive layouts are easier to customize.
Automation
Automation is where Mailchimp’s paid plans shine. You can automate emails to adapt to the customer journey, create auto-responders, and single-step automation.
Mailchimp’s automation tool can also decide the best time to send emails according to your audience. If you want to send personalized emails to customers for special events like birthdays and anniversaries, you can set date-based automation.
Behavior-based automation enables you to automatically send campaigns according to how a customer interacts with your email campaigns. Using their API, send automated transactional emails that enable you to update customers on their purchases or account activity.
Integrating Mailchimp with your site means you can send emails to your audience according to their site activity.
Constant Contact has some basic but useful automation features. You can automate birthday, anniversary, and welcome emails. At the moment, though, there’s no available access to their API.
You can also automate re-sends of emails to contacts who didn’t open the email the first time. With the Email Plus Plan, personalize email content based on the details you receive about your contacts’ city, job title, state, or any other custom field you create.
Verdict: Mailchimp has powerful automation features that enable complete customization and personalization. But they could be overwhelming for the average user without developer knowledge. Constant Contact has all the basic automation features that most users would need. Since it’s use-case-dependent, it’s a tie this round.
A/B Testing
Mailchimp has strong A/B testing functionality built into the platform. You can test send times, newsletter copy, sender names, and subject lines. It’s also easy to test your whole list or just a percentage of the list.
You can then select different metrics like open rate or click rate depending on what you want to measure.
The free plan enables you to send up to three variations of the same email to different audience segments. This means you can test and compare several versions at the same time.
Constant Contact’s A/B testing is limited––you can only A/B test subject lines. If you need to A/B test other parts of your campaigns, you’ll need to do so manually. You’d have to create multiple versions of the same email, and then build your own segments by splitting up your contact list.
If A/B testing is important to you, it could become a headache trying to split test email copy, images, and CTAs in multiple email versions.
Verdict: Mailchimp has more advanced A/B testing and makes it easier to test and evaluate multiple versions of emails. Constant Contact makes it time-consuming and complicated to test anything other than subject lines, for that reason it’s one point to Mailchimp.
Deliverability
Deliverability measures how many emails land in users’ inboxes instead of going undelivered or landing in their spam folder.
Sometimes you can do everything to the letter––that’s maintaining a clean email list, building a solid sender reputation, and keeping subscribers engaged, but emails just don’t show up in your subscribers’ inbox.
As you might suspect, it turns out some email marketing software is more reliable than others.
According to Email Tool Tester, Constant Contact has better deliverability, with fewer emails landing in the spam folder or going undelivered than Mailchimp.
Verdict: It’s a win for Constant Contact––the software seems to be slightly more reliable than Mailchimp for delivering campaigns to subscribers’ inboxes.
Registration forms
A slick-looking registration form is key for encouraging people to sign up for your newsletters. A well-designed sign-up form tells people that your newsletters will be high-quality too.
Mailchimp enables you to add custom fields, drag and drop existing ones, and change the color.
Constant Contact allows you to change the background color, banner image, and font. Customizable fields include names and company names. You can also create a QR code that links to your sign-up form.
Verdict: While Constant Contact’s QR feature is pretty cool, Mailchimp offers more customization so wins this round.
Reporting and analytics
After spending hours compiling your newsletter campaign, you’re going to want to know how it did. You’ll want to track open and click rates at a minimum and depending on the newsletter’s content and aims, you may want access to other metrics like conversion rates.
Constant Contact tells you who opened your email and who clicked through. You can also take advantage of a Google Analytics integration for tracking conversions.
Mailchimp can do all of this and more. If you have an ecommerce business, take advantage of their ecommerce conversion tracking feature which tells you when products are sold through your store and how.
Mailchimp also gives you social media reports, geo-tracking to see how your campaigns perform in different locations, and click maps. You can see how your newsletter performed according to providers––e.g. Gmail vs. Outlook. All these insights are invaluable for honing in on how to improve your campaigns.
Verdict: Mailchimp has an extensive reporting system that digs deep into the success of your campaigns, so again wins on this round.
Integrations
Currently, Mailchimp has 292 integrations. These include many essentials like Stripe, WooCommerce, Typeform, Chargebee, and Canva.
In comparison, Constant Contact has 349 integrations including Vimeo, Gmail, and HubSpot. They also have some key integrations like Shopify that Mailchimp doesn’t currently offer.
Verdict: Constant Contact has more integrations including Shopify, so they win over Mailchimp on this round.
Customer support
Constant Contact has a huge knowledge base with guides, video tutorials, and notes on product updates. There is also live chat and call support available Monday through Saturday for all subscription tiers.
Mailchimp’s free plans enable you to ask a help bot that surfaces the self-help articles you may need. You also get 30 days of free email support to help get you started. Paid plans get access to weekday 24-hour chat support and the marketing premium plan can use weekday phone support.
Verdict: Since Constant Contact provides phone and live chat support for all plans, they come out on top this time.
AppSumo’s final verdict
Where Constant Contact lacks in intuitive features and powerful analytical tools, Mailchimp shines. But where Mailchimp lacks in integrations and customer support, Constant Contact stands out.
Constant Contact is ideal for first-time email marketers looking for simple features and templates. Sign up to Constant Contact if you want:
- Top customer support
- More integrations–specifically to Shopify
- Simple templates
Mailchimp is best for experienced email marketers looking to take their campaigns to the next level. Sign up to Mailchimp if you’re looking for:
- An intuitive content builder
- Customized automation
- In-depth analytics
The best email marketing software platform for you will depend on your newsletter goals and how confident you feel using different tools.
And if you’d like one less software subscription to think about, why not choose one of our lifetime deals over on the AppSumo Store?