Email is the strongest medium of communication. But with personal email delivery systems falling short of their standards, premium email delivery systems come to the rescue. This article tells you about MailChimp and Constant Contact and presents their best features in a comparison table.
Did You Know?
Constant Contact has been banned from sending emails to military addresses.
The fifth estate has spread its tentacles on the Internet. Be it the latest fashion trend or a scandal, there’s a higher possibility that you have read about it on a blog rather than the mainstream media. Email marketing plays a major part of the fifth estate.
Email marketing has evolved from being a personal invite to email buddies to sending business newsletters to every potential customer. It’s one of the tools adopted by social media managers to launch their new products. With time being a major factor, and the local email providers only allowing a limit of 500 emails per month, it’s the premium email providers who come to the rescue. Presenting the two most popular email providers today, we take a look at their features and provide a summary of which one best suits all users.
MailChimp
Founded in 2001, MailChimp is an email marketing service that has over 7 million users. It began as a paid service but started a freemium service eight years later. It has a list of apps that cater to the user’s needs – Gather, an SMS app for event organizers, TinyLetter, a free personal newsletter by MailChimp outlining the newest features and updates as well as AlterEgo, a two-step authentication process that generates temporary security codes. MailChimp provides the click rate of each newsletter as well as the average performance list in relation to the industry average.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is an online marketing service that offers email providing services in addition to social media marketing that started in 1998. It recently launched Toolkit, an online marketing tool that integrates with social media sites for web campaigns. It has over 600,000 users.
Comparison
| MailChimp | Constant Contact |
| Templates | |
| ◼ MailChimp offers 500 templates which are mobile-friendly that you can edit using a drag and drop editor. | ◼ Constant Contact offers 425 customizable templates separated by category that are used to create personalized newsletters for your company. |
| Images | |
| ◼ MailChimp offers unlimited storage of images. | ◼ Constant Contact lets you access a library of images but can store only 5 images at a time. |
| Third party integration | |
| ◼ MailChimp offers integration with WordPress, Twitter, Magento, Salesforce, ZenDesk, BigCommerce, Drupal, Mandrill, Eventbrite, and Google Analytics. | ◼ Constant Contact offers integration with Outlook, Facebook, Salesforce, ACT!, Quickbooks, and WordPress. |
| Delivery | |
| ◼ MailChimp has a strict CAN SPAM policy and offers a one-click unsubscribe option to users. | ◼ Constant Contact has a better delivery rate than MailChimp since most of the sites flag MailChimp emails as spam. |
| Support | |
| ◼ MailChimp offers online support via Knowledge Base as well as 24/7 email and chat support. It provides a contact form in which the user can submit a question, which will be answered promptly. | ◼ Constant Contact offers phone, chat, and email support during business hours on weekdays but only email support during the weekends. |
| Pricing | |
| ◼ MailChimp lets you send 12000 emails to 2000 contacts for free. If you exceed the sending limit, it’s better to subscribe to their premium plans to better suit your needs. | ◼ Constant Contact offers unlimited emails to 100 contacts for free on a 60-day trial period. After that, you pay $15 per month for 500 contacts. For 500-2500 contacts, it comes at a price of $35 per month, for 2500-5000 contacts, the price is $55 per month, and for 5000-10000 contacts, the price of $85 per month. |