Email marketing matters. Even in an age when you can reach your customers across many channels, email is still an effective way to engage your audience.
But while email remains an important marketing tool, small businesses need more than that to succeed. An all-in-one Marketing Platform brings many channels—including email—together and allows you to sell your products, too.
If you use separate platforms to manage different aspects of your marketing, you may be sending performance data back and forth between them and manually importing customer files to make sure everything contains the latest information. This leaves room for error, and can allow crucial data—and customers—to slip through the cracks. An all-in-one platform streamlines your workflow and helps you get the most out of your marketing budget.
Among the most popular marketing platforms for small businesses are Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Here’s a comparison of what the 2 services can offer your business.
Of the thousands of reviews for Mailchimp (12,000+) and Constant Contact (5,000+) on G2.com, Mailchimp outperformed Constant Contact in 32 areas of user satisfaction in the email marketing category, including:
| Plan | Mailchimp Standard Plan | Constant Contact Email Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $20+ per month | •$9.99/month for Core plan and •$45/month for Plus plan |
| CRM | • Full-service Marketing CRM functionality at every level • Audience segmentation tools • At-a-glance dashboard • Interactive analytics |
• Contact list management |
| Marketing Channels & Features | • Email marketing • Social ads and post scheduling • Custom domains and landing pages • Creative Assistant • Free website builder (publish at no additional cost) • Transactional emails (via API or SMTP and at extra cost) • Customize with your branding |
• Email marketing • Websites (to publish, additional fees apply) • Facebook and Instagram ads and insights • Google Ads • Social posting and monitoring |
| Email Design | • Drag-and-drop builder • Customizable templates • Built-in photo editor • Image library • A/B testing for subject lines, send time, content, & more |
• Drag-and-drop design • Customizable templates • Image library • A/B testing for subject lines |
| Single-step Automation Series | • Pre-built automations • Welcome and birthday messages • Event and behavior-based automations • Abandoned cart emails • Product retargeting • Product recommendations |
• Automated message response • Some personalized email functionality |
| Multistep Automations | • Visual automation builder • Multiple starting points • Branching points • Pre-built journeys • Dedicated explore page • Drag-and-drop builder |
• Visual automation builder • Single starting point • Branching points • Triggered email series |
| Reported Data | • Data on many key marketing metrics including open, bounce, and clickthrough rates • Real-time campaign analytics • Click map • Interactive data visualization • ROI tracking across all channels |
• Interaction tracking and reporting • Subscriber updates |
| Customer Support | • Email and chat support 24/7 • Social media support • Award-winning customer support • Comprehensive support article database |
• Phone and chat support 6 days per week • Twitter & crowd-sourced support • Learning resource library |
Ready for a closer look? Check out how Mailchimp’s features compare to those offered by Constant Contact and why it matters.
Constant Contact offers a variety of email automation features, but to use all of them, you’ll need to sign up for their highest paid tier, the Email Plus plan, starting at $45 per month.
Mailchimp’s Standard plan offers several different automation tools to keep you connected with your customers, including:
Mailchimp’s marketing automations keep you connected to your audience while you attend to other areas of your business. With Mailchimp’s Customer Journey builder, you can create experiences for your customers based on their interests and how they interact with your business, from prospect to purchase. The builder’s visual interface makes it simple to use and understand. Drag-and-drop functionality for your starting points, branching points, and specific actions allow you to tailor your journeys to deliver personalized, targeted messaging at every stage. Plus, pre-built journeys keep your audience engaged from the start.
With Mailchimp, you can choose the messages you automate based on your business’s needs, and you get several pre-built automation options at every level, including on the Free plan. Although the Customer Journey builder is a paid feature, you can build a journey on the Free plan to see if it's the right automation solution before you upgrade.
Constant Contact and Mailchimp both offer the opportunity to build and host an online store. You can sell an unlimited catalog of products, accept online payments, and send transactional confirmation emails.
If you use Constant Contact for your store, you’ll enjoy integrated shipping management and the ability to schedule local pickups. However, to build a store in Constant Contact and get tools like email marketing reports, e-commerce segmentation, and customizable pop-up forms, you have to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
Mailchimp empowers you to take control over your online business by giving you what you need to market and sell your products all in one place. Best of all? You can do it on the Free plan, which includes Mailchimp stores and marketing channels like email, social media post scheduling, digital ads, and more. You only pay when you make a sale.* The Free plan also includes a Marketing CRM and analytics. This means you can create an online storefront, add and edit unlimited products, process orders, and configure payments, tax, and shipping—and you can do all your marketing and audience management, too. You can send and track personalized messages across channels, driving sales and generating data to improve as you go.
If you already have an online store, you can connect it to Mailchimp and start using your customer purchase data to improve your marketing. Mailchimp integrates with major e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce and BigCommerce, and the ShopSync integration makes it easy to sync your Shopify data to Mailchimp, too.
The value of an email campaign lies not just in how much revenue it generates, but also in the insights it provides about what works and what doesn’t.
Constant Contact gives you numbers for opens, click-throughs, and forwards, but they offer fewer advanced reporting features than Mailchimp.
Mailchimp’s in-depth reporting capabilities let you analyze audience responses and see what parts of a campaign draw the most customer interaction. You can also track your return on investment (ROI) across all channels, including your website, email list, and social media accounts when you connect your store to your Mailchimp account. This helps you learn which campaigns are working and if you should use any of your marketing funds differently.
CRM tools are valuable because they help businesses of all shapes and sizes build, strengthen, and manage their customer relationships. And while Constant Contact offers contact list management features and email list segmentation, Mailchimp gives all users—even those with Free accounts—access to a larger selection of Marketing CRM tools at no additional cost.
Mailchimp’s Marketing CRM tools make it easy to segment your audience and personalize your messaging. Once you’ve imported your audience data, you can create tags and segments and set up automated messages based on them.
There’s even an intuitive audience dashboard where you can see important data like growth sources, customer locations, and email engagement patterns at a glance.
You’ll get digestible reports and real-time analytics each time you run a Mailchimp campaign, and you can organize the resulting data and segment your audience however you’d like. When you combine this functionality with Mailchimp’s advanced personalization tools, you’ll have the power to send highly targeted—and highly relevant—messages to each customer.
If you’ve got a paid Mailchimp account, you’ll also have access to information like customer lifetime value and purchase likelihood, which use your e-commerce data to make predictions about customers’ future purchase activity.
Constant Contact offers website and domain services separately from email marketing, making it less convenient to coordinate your marketing efforts between channels. After a free trial, users can choose between the $9.99+/month Email core and the $45+/month Email Plus plan. Larger businesses—or businesses with more specialized needs—may need to pay extra for additional services.
Mailchimp offers flexible pricing plans with robust features to meet the needs of any size business. No matter which plan you select, Mailchimp makes it easy to streamline your marketing across channels. For example, users starting with Mailchimp’s Free Websites & Commerce plan have access to email marketing and the ability to build and publish a website with a Mailchimp-branded domain at no cost. However, larger businesses or those with specialized needs may be required to pay extra accordingly.
Mailchimp marketing plans
Mailchimp websites & commerce plans (These plans include everything in the Free marketing plan)
*Websites & Commerce plans include access to stores. If you publish a store, you will be charged non-refundable transaction fees on a per-transaction basis based on the total order value (+ tax & shipping). Stripe payment processing fees also apply.
Lots of people are talking about us on TrustRadius. Here are just a few examples.
Constant Contact promotes usability through premade templates and a drag-and-drop email builder.
Mailchimp earned top ratings for ease of use, according to G2. Mailchimp offers pre-designed templates, too, and gives you everything you need to create custom designs for your email campaigns and other channels. Plus, Creative Assistant is the first AI-powered design tool** in a major online marketing platform that makes beautiful multichannel designs for you. It gets to know your brand, then creates and resizes designs for you instantly so you can build better marketing materials and grow your sales.
**As compared to Shopify, GoDaddy, Hubspot, CM Commerce, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, Wix, Squarespace, Zoho, Klaviyo, Mailerlite, Sendinblue, and Aweber.
Constant Contact features a knowledge base on their website with resource articles, tutorials, and guides. If you need more help, Constant Contact has a directory of 3rd-party experts who you can hire.
Mailchimp’s award-winning support team offers all users 30 days of chat and email support and paid users ongoing 24/7 chat and email support in English, Spanish, or French. Premium plan users also have access to phone support.
Mailchimp’s support team has a 92% customer satisfaction rate and won 14 prestigious Stevie Awards for exceptional service in the last 3 years. You can count on them to provide the answers you need for your growing business.
In addition to these by-request services, Mailchimp also offers an in-depth library of resource articles, guides, and tutorials and a directory full of 3rd-party experts who are available for hire if you need extra assistance.
Constant Contact markets itself as an all-in-one online marketing platform. Its suite of services include email, websites, and social media and Google Ads, but not all of these features are available on every plan.
Mailchimp’s all-in-one Marketing Platform, however, features comprehensive marketing tools and in-depth reporting and analytics, as well as multichannel marketing management capabilities to help you sell more, no matter which plan you select. Features include:
With Mailchimp’s dynamic content studio, you can create unique campaigns on any channel, complete with content and image editing. Its marketing features and services are integrated on one user-friendly platform, so your whole campaign will be consistent and personalized.
You’ll also get helpful analytics for the digital marketing channels you use in Mailchimp, so you’ll always know exactly how your campaigns are performing. You can easily use the insights you’ve gained from one channel to improve your performance on the others.
Consumers today may need up to 6 touchpoints when making a purchase, and they expect communication to be seamless and fully personalized across all channels. Consider these statistics from a Forbes article:
If you use more than one channel to collect information and market to your audience, it’s beneficial to have a single platform for managing all your customer data. Otherwise, you end up importing and exporting customer information between platforms, risking error and outdated personalization.
Mailchimp provides the marketing tools a small business needs in one convenient location, combining customization with analytics, so you can speak more effectively to each customer.
Mailchimp scales with you, adapting to the needs of your business—and offering more advanced capabilities—so you can grow without having to switch providers. At all levels, Mailchimp keeps your audience at the center of your marketing.
With Mailchimp as your single, centralized platform, you’ll gain the tools you need to market with the personalized attention of a small business and the reach of a large company. And you can maintain that level of customization as you grow.
No matter the size of your business, your brand identity matters. It’s how your customers know you, and more importantly, it’s what drives connection to your brand.
Mailchimp has over 12 million customers, each of whom has a unique brand and goals for the future. Each of those customers has an opportunity to create emails, ads, landing page content, and more, complete with customized signature design and imaging.
As your brand grows, you can trust Mailchimp to meet your needs. Whether you switch pricing plans or stay where you are, you’ll get an all-in-one Marketing Platform that’s fully integrated and covers the essential digital marketing channels.
Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp earn strong customer ratings. As of the date of this article, Constant Contact has a G2 Star Rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, while Mailchimp has 4.3 out of 5 stars. That’s a pretty close comparison, but consider this: Constant Contact has 5,159 reviews on G2, while Mailchimp has 12,204. In fall 2022, Mailchimp won 35 G2 awards for its Marketing Platform, 11 of which were for the Email Marketing category alone.
It’s not easy to maintain high ratings among so many users, but Mailchimp’s powerful functionality has made a big impression. From a robust collection of flexible, user-friendly features to customization tools that help you unify your message across channels and put the customer first, Mailchimp’s all-in-one Marketing Platform gives today’s businesses the tools they need to stay competitive.
Ready to learn what Mailchimp can do for you? Sign up today and test it out for yourself.
More comparisons
You’ll be up and running in no time.
