Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Which Should You Choose in 2023?
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp vs DirectIQ – which is best? As there is an abundance of useful email marketing platforms to choose from, it is important to understand what separates them.
The three email marketing platforms in question today stand out as the cream of the crop. This guide will explore the three solutions and determine which platform is superior.
As you probably originally came here for Mailchimp vs Constant Contact comparison, we will first explore their features, what both Mailchimp and Constant Contact have to offer, and where one surpasses the other, as well as which email marketing tool would be the best fit for your business.
While Mailchimp and Constant Contact are well-known platforms on the market, if you have specific segmentation, A/B testing and reporting needs relevant to your niche, you might find that these tools were not made with those needs in mind.
So we would invite you to read further, and find out a little bit more about DirectIQ as well.
Table of contents
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Overview
Overview of Constant Contact
Constant Contact is known for advanced features like its management of contact metrics, social media integration, easy to use drag and drop editor and many more advanced features that make this email marketing tool a great option for people looking to create automated email marketing campaigns, with a complete support package (email, chat and phone support) to guide them along the way.
Social media marketing is a great selling point for Constant Contact, and if you’re looking to go omnichannel for your ecommerce platform, Constant Contact will make it easy to set up Facebook and Instagram ads.
Overview of Mailchimp
Both Mailchimp and Constant Contact offer chat support, email support, a drag and drop editor for emails, affordable plans for small businesses and they both have the required features to be a complete email marketing solution for their customers.
Mailchimp is an email tool that has been created with ease of use in mind: its user interface is very simple, and it allows those who’ve never used an email tool for automated messages before to quickly get the hang of it.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Best Features
Mailchimp and Constant Contact are both email marketing tools that offer Google Analytics integration to allow you to examine your marketing automation features more closely, and Constant Contact integrates with Shopify as well, making it a good choice for those in Ecommerce email marketing.
Regarding uploading contacts from your list, Constant Contact makes it more accessible than Mailchimp.
It’s also a bit handier when trying to transfer contacts, so if you already have an email campaign that you’re looking to migrate, that might be a factor for you.
Best features of Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a popular solution among those looking for an easy-to-use email marketing platform.
With hundreds of email templates and customizable sign-up forms to grow your list, Constant Contact is suitable for both beginners and more experienced marketers.
You can integrate the platform with all the other solutions in your tech stack for a unified workflow.
Constant Contact provides phone support for their paid plans, and the high quality of that support is often mentioned in the reviews, while both Constant Contact and Mailchimp offer email support.
Best features of Mailchimp
Mailchimp is perhaps the best known email marketing platform on the market. The solution is packed with a full suite of features designed to support the creation of email newsletter content.
You can connect the platform with the rest of your technology stack to streamline workflows and keep everything running smoothly. Mailchimp offers no shortage of useful integrations.
Mailchimp provides pre-made segments to make contact management simple, allowing you to identify patterns in your data and decide how to proceed with your email campaigns in the audience dashboard.
The paid plans offered by Mailchimp feature distinctive email templates, behavioral targeting, and A/B testing tools to enhance the effectiveness of your email campaigns and fully engage your email subscribers.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: List Management
Constant Contact List Management
Constant Contact’s list management is strong. It makes adding contacts manually, via file formats, or via Salesforce or LinkedIn integrations easy. It helps categorize contacts into varied lists depending on demographics or past campaigns, enabling more targeted email campaigns. Custom tags help improve segmentation.
Constant Contact proactively manages unsubscribes, bounces, and inactive emails to preserve list quality. The ‘List expansion Tools’ feature offers sign-up forms, QR codes, and a text-to-join capability to make list expansion easy. These attributes drove a 37.5% median list growth rate in Q1 2023.
Mailchimp List Management
Mailchimp excels in list management. It lets you import contacts from Google Contacts, CSV, and connected CRM platforms and tag them for better targeted marketing. Custom fields allow you to capture audience data for more personalized campaigns.
Mailchimp also manages bounced emails and removes duplicate contacts to keep contact lists clean. Its technology handles harsh and mild bounces, improving advertising performance. Mailchimp’s improved bounce control solution reduced bounce rates by 10% in Q1 2023. These features improve list quality, engagement, and deliverability.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Segmentation and Automation
Constant Contact Segmentation and Automation
Constant Contact lets you create lists by geography, purchase history, and engagement level. This enables for highly personalized and targeted marketing. It also gives established criteria for novice users and lets more experienced users define their own custom criteria, giving flexibility across user expertise levels.
Constant Contact’s autoresponder tools ease email marketing. These solutions automate welcome emails, birthday and anniversary emails, and behavior-based follow-up emails. User ratings and Q1 2023 data suggest its automation skills may be limited compared to other industry leaders. It lacks sales funnel automation and behavior-triggered email sequences. Constant Contact handles the fundamentals well, but advanced automation may be lacking.
Mailchimp Segmentation and Automation
Mailchimp’s features enhance segmentation and automation. You may design complex audience groups based on demographics, email engagement, purchase activity, and consumer behavior. Users can also establish “look-alike” categories to attract leads that match your top clients’ profiles.
Mailchimp automates more. According to Q1 2023 data, it offers advanced automation capabilities to create a variety of automated programs for specific corporate needs. These include onboarding sequences, re-engagement tactics for dormant subscribers, and automated cart abandonment emails to save sales. Mailchimp’s automation features can also be used to build brand-specific customer journeys. For advanced email marketing automation, Mailchimp is a powerful solution.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: A/B Testing and Deliverability
Constant Contact A/B Testing and Deliverability
Constant Contact adds A/B testing to its capabilities. To find out what your audience likes, try multiple subject lines, email content, and send times. Data-driven decisions can improve campaign efficacy.
Constant Contact excels in email deliverability. Its Q1 2023 deliverability rate of 97% places it among the top email marketing platforms. It does this by optimizing your emails’ inbox placement. These include automatic list maintenance to remove inactive or incorrect email addresses, authentication tools to verify your sender reputation, and spam avoidance best practices. Constant Contact’s strong A/B testing and deliverability make it a powerful email marketing tool.
Mailchimp A/B Testing and Deliverability
Mailchimp’s powerful A/B testing solution lets users test up to three variables at once, improving user experience. Subject lines, email content, graphics, and send times are examples. Open rates, click-through rates, and total engagement define the “winner” of these experiments, offering useful data to improve your email campaigns.
Mailchimp boasts an above-96% deliverability rate. Due to extensive spam filter inspections, your emails are less likely to be reported. Mailchimp’s strong authentication capabilities show ISPs (Internet Service Providers) that your emails are trustworthy, improving the likelihood of landing in the recipient’s inbox. Mailchimp excels in email marketing thanks to its extensive A/B testing and reliable deliverability.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Email Design and Templates
Constant Contact Email Design and Templates
Constant Contact lets you create brand-appropriate emails using a wide range of pre-designed themes. An easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder is available on the platform. To develop a brand-appropriate email design, you can easily move items, change fonts, colors, and include images.
Responsive design makes Constant Contact stand out in the mobile-first era. This guarantees your emails look professional on smartphones, tablets, and desktops by automatically adjusting to the screen size. Constant Contact can import content from your website and has an image library. Constant Contact makes developing and sending aesthetically appealing emails easy.
Mailchimp Email Design and Templates
Mailchimp, like its competition, offers several themes and an easy email builder to make email creation simple. Mailchimp adds advanced features like integrating product recommendations and promotional offers straight into emails to enhance consumer engagement and conversions.
Mailchimp’s templates are mobile-responsive, ensuring your emails look and work well on any device. A built-in photo editor lets you customize images on the platform. This feature streamlines design by eliminating the requirement for photo editing tools. Mailchimp is a complete solution for designing and sending aesthetically beautiful, personalised emails.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Campaign Analytics
Constant Contact Campaign Analytics
Constant Contact delivers thorough email campaign metrics. The platform provides open, click-through, bounce, and other reports. It also allows you identify the most clicked links and the people that engaged most with your emails.
Constant Contact’s “Heat Map” function shows where contacts click in your emails, helping you determine what material is most engaging. This level of reporting helps you modify your email strategy depending on recipient behavior and preferences, making future campaigns more effective and focused. Businesses can optimize email marketing and boost engagement using Constant Contact’s statistics.
Mailchimp Campaign Analytics
Mailchimp provides campaign insights beyond open and click-through rates. When you link your online store, revenue statistics let you measure the direct financial impact of your email campaigns. This insight covers automated campaigns and social media.
Mailchimp’s comparative reports shine. These compare your campaigns against others in your field. These technologies help visualize your audience’s behavior along with click maps and geo-tracking. Mailchimp’s rich analytics enable data-driven email marketing strategy optimization.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Reviews
Constant Contact Review
As of the writing date, Constant Contact has 4.3 out of 5 stars and 2,350 reviews on Capterra.
“A program with many good features, such as marketing automation, communication with customers, cheap price, ease of communication with the support team, ease of conducting surveys, ease of communication directly with customers, ease of generating different analyzes, ease of creating and tracking emails.”
Click here to read more reviews.
Mailchimp Review
As of the writing date, Mailchimp has 4.5 out of 5 stars and 15,840 reviews on Capterra.
“The ability to personalize our marketing messages (emails) based on how an audience has previously engaged with our Mailchimp marketing emails, our mobile app. or even their past purchasing behavior, is what I like the most about this platform. Being able to do the above makes our marketing messages to resonate more with our target audience, resulting to more effective email marketing campaigns.”
Click here to read more reviews.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Pricing
Constant Contact’s free plan
Unlike many other email marketing tools, Constant Contact offers no free plan at all. This might be a surprise for you if you’re used to free plans in email marketing software, however they compensate for this by having their Core plan be very affordable.
Constant Contact’s paid plans
Constant Contact offers two main plans: Core and Plus. The Core plan is $9.99/month and comes with everything you need to kickstart your marketing campaigns, including hundreds of email templates and sign-up forms to begin growing your email list.
The Plus plan is $45/month and offers dynamic content personalization and automated campaign communications.
Mailchimp’s free plan
Unlike Constant Contact, Mailchimp offers a free plan which comes with all the standard features you would expect from an all-encompassing email marketing platform, such as a marketing CRM and website builder. 500 contacts and 1000 email sends are included in their free plan, however practically all additional functions are not available.
Mailchimp’s paid plans
Mailchimp’s paid plans offer significantly more features, including unique templates, behavioral targeting, and dynamic email content.
The pricing is based on how many contacts you have. The price for 1,500 contacts and 15,000 email messages under their Basic package is around $26.50.
Unfortunately, that plan is deficient in several of Mailchimp’s essential features, including Multivariate Testing, Advanced Segmentation, Campaign Manager, and Comparative Reporting, making it a less desirable choice for specific markets and industries where segmentation and analytics are highly valued.
Hence, you would have to pay either $60 per month for the Basic plan or $350 per month for the Premium plan for 1,500 contacts.
Another thing you should know is that for Mailchimp’s Standard and Essentials plans, your first month is free of charge.
Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Which Is Best For You?
Who would benefit more from Mailchimp
If you are searching for a platform that can neatly integrate with the rest of your technology stack, Mailchimp is the better option. Mailchimp wins heavily in the amount of integrations with other apps (with some exceptions).
Mailchimp also boasts great email deliverability and the ability to create automated emails in a very brief period of time.
Mailchimp offers up to three variations when doing A/B testing, while Constant Contact offers only subject line testing.
Since A/B testing is one of core tenets of email marketing, you would probably prefer Mailchimp if you’re looking to spend a great deal of time and effort carefully crafting converting email campaigns.
Who would benefit more from Constant Contact
Both Mailchimp and Constant Contact have affordable email marketing plans that can suit basic needs of small businesses, but Constant Contact’s $9/month Core plan makes it one of the most accessible paid plans for email marketing software on the market.
They also offer much more comprehensive phone support, while Mailchimp only offers that in their most expensive plan.
If you don’t mind the fact that A/B testing is a bit limited compared to Mailchimp’s (only subject line testing), then Constant Contact’s plans might give you more benefits then Mailchimp’s.
In addition, if you don’t mind paying more for the premium features, if you are using Constant Contact’s Plus plan, you can unlock a full range of exciting features that are designed to streamline campaign creation and delivery.
While Mailchimp and Constant Contact both offer an ability to create SMS marketing campaigns, Constant Contact offers more advanced automation features. Constant Contact also integrates directly with Shopify which Mailchimp does not do.
But these two platforms aren’t the only choices on the market. If you rely on data for email marketing and things like advanced segmentation and A/B testing for emails are of high importance to you, then read further to find out more about DirectIQ.
What are DirectIQ best features?
DirectIQ is an immensely powerful email marketing platform that’s equipped to meet the needs of both small business owners and marketers working at large organizations.
With the ability to split-test various campaign techniques, you can maximize key performance indicators like open rates and click-through rates for your email campaigns.
When you have access to the appropriate solutions, you can experiment with email marketing and exercise more of your marketer’s creativity.
Your marketing team will have the information they need to decide which tactics work best with your audience by split-testing several versions of your emails using DirectIQ.
You can access a full range of responsive email templates for modern campaigns and create automated email sequences to set your campaigns on autopilot and reap the rewards of email marketing.
The premium features DirectIQ offers (Landing pages, Inbox Preview, Spam Doctor) allow for a head start when comparing to other platforms.
DirectIQ Review
As of the writing date, DirectIQ has 4.9 out of 5 stars and 22 reviews on Capterra.
“I’ve been really happy with this email marketing service, and I really like the Spam Doctor feature. It essentially offers a diagnostic report, detailing which email clients (e.g. yahoo, Gmail etc.) will analyze my messages as spam, and why… So that I can go back and change my emails around using the advice that there reports offer. This way, I can make sure that I don’t waste time sending out emails that will never make it to my clients and potential clients… The Mailbox preview is also pretty cool, somehow it shows you how your email will look on each and every device that email can be accessed from. For example, I can see how it compares when opened on my iPad vs. my iPhone… Another example, I can see how it will look on Microsoft Outlook (which I use at work), vs. yahoo mail which I use at home. It’s a really nice and useful feature to have. Also, great support team at DirectIQ too, very responsive, caring, and ready to help :)”
Click here to read more reviews.
What is DirectIQ’s pricing structure?
You can start using DirectIQ without charge. That’s right, we have a forever free plan. A new user can add up to 250 contacts and send up to 1,000 emails per month with no fees attached.
From there, you can scale up your campaigns with more contacts and a higher send limit with flexible per-month pricing.
All the features are included (with some limitations on the free plan ). This makes DirectIQ suitable for those with large growth ambitions and the first go-to email marketing platform.
Constant Contact vs Mailchimp vs DirectIQ: Which Is Best for You?
If you are looking for the ultimate email marketing automation and contact list segmentation solution, DirectIQ is ready to support your business. This platform is designed to elevate the potential of your email campaigns and steer things in the right direction. No matter the size of your ambitions, DirectIQ has the necessary tools to support your email campaigns.
Are you ready to get started? Sign up to DirectIQ for free today!
Adrian is a specialist in researching and implementing email marketing for businesses of all sizes. He’s particularly knowledgeable and focused on the niches and nuances of eCommerce email marketing, and he chose to work with DirectIQ as he knows that segmentation can make or break a successful email marketing campaign.
