This is a features comparison of MailChimp vs Constant Contact from my perspective. I am a small business owner with a staff of one: me. The features comparison shared in this article is from the perspective of my needs. However, your needs might be different. So I talk about all the features and present them here so you can find the right email marketing solution for your needs. I offer my opinion so you can learn how one business uses or doesn’t use the features offered.
MailChimp vs Constant Contact: Who has a free account?
MailChimp has a Forever Free account. MailChimp’s Forever Free account will let you have up to 2,000 subscribers before you have to pay. But, if you want any of the advanced features, you have to start paying. MailChimp’s base price is $10 a month until you get to 500 subscribers. How useful is their free account? It’s great when you are getting started because you can make full use of their email templates, their email lists, their email sign-up forms, and their groups within their lists. And even though you don’t get use of their autoresponder (otherwise called automation) features, you can send a “welcome” email upon someone joining a list; this is totally a way to at least have the most basic automated feature. You could deliver your opt-in offer through the “welcome” email. I used MailChimp’s Forever Free account for a number of years until I decided that I wanted to get a more sophisticated with automated emails and free offers.
Constant Contact has a 60-day free trial. After 60 days, the lowest entry point is $20 a month until you get to 1,000 subscribers or if you decide you want to use their more advanced features, like autoresponders. For me, I never wanted to join Constant Contact in the years before getting serious about email marketing because I knew I’d have to pay right away (60 days flies by quickly) and I wasn’t sure about the value of growing an email list and I had no idea how to grow an email list. So I stayed away from Constant Contact since there was no free account.
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How many emails can I send with MailChimp vs Constant Contact?
MailChimp’s Forever Free account will let you send up to 12,000 emails a month. Once you get a paid account with MailChimp, you can send unlimited emails.
Constant Contact doesn’t specify how many emails you can send per month. However, really, if you are like me and are just getting your email campaign habits established, you probably aren’t going to be sending even 1,000 emails a month. So unless Constant Contact has a super low limit to the number of emails you can send, you’ll probably be just fine. My guess is they don’t have a limit, but after poring over the site a few times, I just don’t see any mention of limits, so this is truly my speculation.
Does MailChimp or Constant Contact Have Landing Pages?
Neither MailChimp or Constant Contact provide landing pages. What are landing pages? Landing pages are dedicated web pages promoting just one thing, typically. They are geared to get you to sign up for something, like a free offer, a webinar, a course, etc. Most landing pages won’t have navigation to other areas of your website because they are focused on one thing. So landing pages are considered a valuable an email list-building tool. Some email marketing providers do provide landing pages, such as GetResponse.
In my case, I use LeadPages. I like that LeadPages is dedicated to focusing just on landing pages and the features that supplement landing pages, like embedded clickable text or images within web pages for opt-in offers and highly customizable templates that are able to be optimized for search engines and Facebook. As a side note, I am not an affilate of LeadPages (or MailChimp or anything else, for that matter).
Does MailChimp or Constant Contact have free email templates?
Yes. MailChimp and Constant Contact have free email templates as part of their service. They also both have blank email templates that you can customize. In all fairness to most email marketing software platforms, I think most come with a lot of free email templates for you to use as a base. Constant Contact advertises that they will help you customize an email template; I believe this service comes with their “Email Plus” package, which is the higher level package of the two that they offer. You can see what it is like to work with MailChimp vs Constant Contact’s email templates in my inside-the-software video walkthrough.
Does MailChimp or Constant Contact have autoresponders (drip campaigns)?
MailChimp’s Forever Free account doesn’t allow you to do autoresponders. This is a paid feature. You will get full autoresponder functionality when you upgrade to a paid account. If you decide to roll out the big guns, you can get even fancier with MailChimp’s Pro account. I don’t use the Pro account now. I don’t need it at this point in my business and at $199 a month, I really need to feel confident that its added features would at least pay for the cost of the service and the time it would take to implement the Pro features before I embarked on added MailChimp Pro to my toolbox. However, MailChimp’s normal automation features are pretty amazing, honestly. I don’t find myself wishing I could do more. As soon as you start paying for MailChimp you get their automation tools, so for $10 a month (if your list is under $500), you will have a plethora of autoresponder options at your fingertips.
Constant Contact has autoresponders as well. This is included in its higher-level plan, Email Plus. I haven’t tested out the autoresponder features from Constant Contact. BUT in addition to autoresponder features, Constant Contact has some very specialized offerings with their Email Plus plan. Constant Contact can let you take surveys and polls and track the results. It will also let you collect donations in your emails and will handle the credit card processing for you; this could be awesome for non profits! Are you someone who wants to offer coupons? Constant Contact does that too; create mobile-responsive coupons that you can share via social media or send in email and track response rates; this has lots of fantastic potential. Lastly, if your business does a lot of events, Constant Contact’s Email Plus plan can help you create the event, promote it on social media and email marketing, communicate with attendees, and even print name badges. I don’t need any of these features, but I can think of many of my clients that would benefit from them; to my knowledge, MailChimp doesn’t have events, coupons, surveys, or donations as part of their offerings. You can embed these features into a MailChimp email, but you would need to get another service involved to do any of them, like use Survey Monkey to create your survey and then embed it in your MailChimp email.
MailChimp vs Constant Contact: Who integrates with LeadPages and similar services?
MailChimp integrates with LeadPages, Salesforce, Eventbrite, Google, and SurveyMonkey. Constant Contact integrates with LeadPages, and Salesforce.
Does MailChimp or Constant Contact integrate with Shopify?
MailChimp integrates with Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce and more.
Here’s the list of their integrations: https://connect.mailchimp.com/
Constant Contact integrates with Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce and more. Here’s the list of their integrations: http://marketplace.constantcontact.com/Home
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