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Both Mailchimp and Constant Contact claim to offer essentially the same thing, which makes things a little tougher for you as a potential user – how do you choose between the two? That’s where this comparison comes in, which digs into the specifics of what Mailchimp offers – compared to Constant Contact – to help you make the right choice for your business. 

Every email campaign starts with a list – the select group of people who’ll receive whatever email you’re sending. What’s key is that you’re able to properly manage that list – adding, editing, and segmenting as needed – so that it’s effective when you start sending out automated emails from your platform.

Naturally, both of these email tools easily let you handle the basics, such as uploading contacts to lists. However, comparing Constant Contact to Mailchimp reveals that the former may do a slightly better job in list management.

Why?

With Mailchimp, it’s difficult to organize your email at the click of a button, leading to the best approach being to upload contacts into a master list before segmenting them into specific recipient groups from there. Constant Contact offers a much cleaner interface and allows you to tag new uploads with helpful information, such as data about who they are – social media influencer, etyc. – and which pre-created segment(s) they should be entered into.

Score

Constant Contact – 1

Mailchimp – 0 

Check the above stats from Influencer Marketing Hub and you’ll see that marketers have clear frustrations when it comes to figuring out how well their campaigns are doing. Just over 10% say they have poorly defined goals – making measuring against those goals almost impossible – while 8.1% claim their tool offers low visibility in terms of performance. Click-through rates and overall deliverability are mysteries to them, which is a major problem when trying to maximize ROI from an email campaign.

You won’t have that visibility problem with Mailchimp or Constant Contact – both offer in-depth analytics suites.

But one goes a bit more in-depth than the other.

Both feature a dashboard that gives you insight into the basics. Successful sends, bounce rates, and open rates are all covered. You could even argue that Constant Contact’s dashboard is a little cleaner – and certainly less cluttered – than Mailchimp’s, aided by the ability to remove metrics as needed.

However, Mailchimp simply offers more data thanks to its integration with Google Analytics. That makes it a much better tool for businesses that use their email campaigns to drive traffic to websites and landing pages – you can see how many clicks your pages get and (crucially) whether those clicks translate into revenue.

Score

Constant Contact – 3

Mailchimp – 2

Six categories down and we have a perfectly level score. Next up is automation – how well does each tool help you to cut down on the costs, both in terms of time and money, that manually sending emails creates?

Before we dig into that, take a look at this chart: 

It shows why automation matters in the first place – 73% of respondents say that automating workflow processes has saved between 11% and 50% of the time they previously spent on those processes.

So, who does it better?

Mailchimp starts pulling ahead here for the simple fact that many of its email automation features are available via its free plan, making up for its lack of customer support in that plan. You can create custom email flows – even going as far as to trigger certain emails to send at specific times, such as a customer’s birthday – and can incorporate entire lists and segments into your automated flows.

You can do that with Constant Contact too…for a price.

Most of the platform’s automations are gated behind its paid packages, with the only one available to free users is the resending of emails when the recipient didn’t open the original one. Welcome emails, sales and marketing flows, and even retargeting emails are all available (as they are with Mailchimp). You just pay a higher price to access them.

Score

Constant Contact – 3

Mailchimp – 4

The concept behind split (or A/B) tests is simple – send out multiple versions of an email covering the same subject, only with a tweak in one area to see which performs better. That tweak could be the color scheme, the font used, or even a line of the content. The point is to create an iterative process in which you send the two variations of the same email simultaneously to see which performs better.

Constant split testing eventually leads you to the best possible version of your email, meaning it’s no wonder that 59% of companies do it.

And it’s here where Mailchimp strengthens its lead for a simple reason – Constant Contact only allows you to split test your subject lines. At least, you can only create defined split testing campaigns around subject lines, meaning you’re forced to create a pair of campaigns – each with separate lists – if you want to get more in-depth.

That’s a far cry from Mailchimp’s split testing, which lets you create up to three variations of your campaign in which you can tweak whatever you want, from subject line to content to colors. Upgrade to the “Pro” plan and you can increase your variations to eight.

Score

Constant Contact – 3

Mailchimp – 5

For as wonderful as having access to the most popular email marketing platforms at your fingertips may be, your choice will come down to something that affects all of your marketing efforts:

Your budget.

MailChimp Pricing

Beyond its free tier – which gives access to a lot of Mailchimp’s email automation tools for nothing – Mailchimp has three tiers:

• Essentials – $13 per month
• Standard – $20 per month
• Premium – $350 per month

Bear in mind that these are starting prices – they increase if you bolt on additional stuff, such as SMS messaging campaigns. The key difference between these tiers is the monthly email sends available to you. At the free level, you can shoot 1,000 emails per month over to your list, which is ideal for smaller businesses. The Essentials plan bumps that up to 5,000, while Standard users can send 6,000 emails per month. Once you’re at the Premium level, you unlock everything that Mailchimp has to offer:

An unlimited list and 150,000 email sends monthly.

Split testing is available at all paid tiers, as are analytics, though these are limited in scope for Essentials users. If list segmentation and automated targeting are your things, you’ll want to be at least at the Standard tier – anything lower has far too many limitations.

Constant Contact Pricing

Constant Contact‘s pricing is a mixed bag in terms of how it stacks up as one of the leading Mailchimp Competitors. Like Mailchimp, it offers three tiers with the following starting prices:

• Lite – $12 per month
• Standard – $35 per month
• Premium – $80 per month

However – as you may notice from the above image – those prices vary depending on the number of contacts you have in your list. So, the more people you want to email (even if you’re not sending emails to all of them every month) the more you’re going to pay. You’ll also notice that Constant Contact falls into something of a middle ground. Its Lite and Premium plans are cheaper than their Mailchimp equivalents, but the Standard plan is much more expensive.

The tool also has an interesting way of determining how many emails you can send per month. At the Lite level, you can send 10 times the number of emails as you have contacts. So, if you have 100 people on your list, that means 1,000 emails per month. Standard brings that up to 12 times, with Premium giving you 24 times. Comparing the two, we’d argue that Mailchimp has the simpler pricing structure – especially because it’s clear about the number of emails you get to send – and Constant Contact is maybe a little better on price.

Let’s call this one a tie.

Score

Constant Contact – 5

Mailchimp – 8

A clear winner is already emerging, but let’s wrap things up with a quickfire comparison of some advanced features offered by these email marketing platforms.

SMS Marketing Campaigns

Both platforms offer SMS marketing campaigns. Both also charge for them, though in different ways. You get access to SMS in any of Mailchimp’s paid tiers, whereas Constant Contact charges a fee that starts at $10 per month (and could increase based on your list’s size).

Website Builder

Mailchimp excels as the all-in-one marketing tool it’s trying to be when it comes to websites – its paid tiers offer access to a basic website builder you can use in your email marketing campaigns. If your campaign needs a landing page, you can knock one out with the tool. Constant Contact doesn’t have that. Any webpages you need have to be developed separately.