Why Our Team Moved From Constant Contact To Mailchimp
As a digital marketing and technology consulting firm, we work with a large number of clients looking to participate in email marketing. And with a wide variety of email service providers available, our clients often ask us which provider will give them the best bang for their buck. We’re not going to lie, our company used to be team Constant Contact all the way, but as our client list grew and their needed capabilities expanded, we realized Constant Contact just wasn’t living up to its hype. So, we made the switch to Mailchimp … here’s why.
Mailchimp Allows For Better Business Integration
Aside from sending out basic newsletters or email campaigns, most of our clients are looking for email software that allows for simple integration into other aspects of their business.
And when it comes to third-party integrations, Mailchimp is the clear winner. They offer a great variety of third-party native integrations, like Shopify, Magento, Square, Eventbrite, WooCommerce and Salesforce. Constant Contact does offer a lot of integrations, however for most of their integrations, you have to pay for Zappier and then create Zaps to integrate your desired services.
Mailchimp also offers a suite of tools to help create ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google. This feature is great for remarketing and reaching an audience that is similar to your most valuable email subscribers. We will say that Constant Contact does allows users to develop Facebook Lead Ads to help grow email lists, but that is as far as their social ad capabilities go.
Businesses nowadays need to look at their company as a whole when building an email marketing strategy, and what we love about Mailchimp is that they make connecting the marketing pieces of any great business as painless as possible.
Mailchimp Has Better Automation Options
We. Love. Marketing. Automation. So, the fact that Mailchimp offers great email automation options at a reasonable price makes us their number one fans. Constant Contact really only offers a few options for triggering auto emails with their Autoresponder feature, including triggers such as add to list/group, birthdays and anniversaries.
Don’t get us wrong, these are all great automation triggers, but if you’re a business wanting to really take advantage of email automation, Mailchimp is your best option. It provides a whole slew of trigger options for auto emails that Constant Contact does not, including tagged contacts, blog updates, specific dates, subscriber activity and more. If you have a developer on hand, you can also trigger an email series with an API call.
Plus, if you connect your store with Mailchimp, you’re able to unlock a whole other world of automation, such as abandoned cart, product recommendation, order notification, reengagement and product retargeting emails.
To make us fall even more in love with Mailchimp, they offer all of these automation features in their free plan, whereas with Constant Contact, you must pay for their Email Plus plan for automation options.
Mailchimp Is Cheaper
Everything else aside, Mailchimp is also cheaper than Constant Contact. Mailchimp offers a free plan for users with up to 2,000 subscribers. Constant Contact begins their pricing at $20 a month for up to only 500 subscribers after their free one-month trial ends. Moving from their free plan, Mailchimp allows for unlimited contacts in their additional pricing tiers, whereas Constant Contact increases how much you pay based on your number of subscribers. So, if your subscriber lists continue to grow (which is the whole point of email marketing), Constant Contact will make you pay accordingly.
Mailchimp Has Stronger API
In our opinion, Constant Contact’s API feels like an afterthought. At the time of this blog post, Constant Contact is completing version three of their API, and after looking through it, we weren’t impressed with the flexibility it offered our clients both now and into the future. In fact, it looks like version three of their API will actually offer less features and flexibility than version two …
On the other hand, Mailchimp’s API makes it easy to sync email activity with customer databases, link campaign stats, test various calls and endpoints before sending to production, and provides awesome references and resources for developers to review when working in the platform. Basically, Mailchimp’s API allows marketers and businesses to take their email marketing to the ultimate level, whereas Constant Contact feels best suited for smaller businesses looking to manage single contact lists and send general newsletters.
Mailchimp Offers More Granular Analytics
Both of these platforms provide basic campaign data and analytics … open rates, click rates, bounce rates, unsubscribes, etc. However, Mailchimp takes their reporting to the next level by providing a very granular look at how subscribers interact with emails using various analytic filters.
In Mailchimp, you can see the performance of your campaigns per hour so you understand at what times your emails perform best, and you can also see top locations by opens so you understand if you’re hitting the right markets.
And, you can not only track opens and clicks of your emails, but you can compare your results to industry averages so you see how well you’re doing as it relates to competitors.
Mailchimp Has Overall Stronger Features
A/B Testing
Testing is an important element to any marketing strategy. Mailchimp offers A/B testing for all major elements of an email, including the subject line, send time, content and images. Constant Contact only lets you A/B test the subject line.
Advanced Segmentation (Available With Pro)
Mailchimp lets users add a set of conditions that apply logic to customer data like purchase activity, gender, age range and more. You can even use e-commerce data, campaign activity data and subscriber preferences to discover more factors that relate to or connect your customers.
Landing Page Builder
Constant Contact offers a contact collection landing page option (it’s basically a signup form), whereas Mailchimp lets users build a variety of landing pages, including product promotion, lead generation and even products / online store pages.
Personalization
Mailchimp offers a wide range of Merge Tags, which allow users to send truly personalized emails to each of their contacts. Constant Contact offers this too, however their selection of tags is fairly limited.
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Contact our team for help with your email marketing. We’re ready to talk!
