2025 Showdown: Which Email Marketing Platform Reigns — Constant Contact or Mailchimp?

If you’re starting an online business, it’s essential to include email marketing as part of your comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

Among the most well-known email marketing services are Constant Contact vs Mailchimp.

Since email remains one of the top marketing channels, which platform is better for your needs?

This detailed comparison of Constant Contact and Mailchimp will explore the features of each option, helping you determine which email marketing platform suits your business best.

Recent studies show that the median return on investment for email marketing is 122%, making it four times more effective than other digital marketing channels.

In fact, it’s estimated that the US alone will spend around $350 million on email marketing in 2019.

Your choice of email service provider is crucial—so which should you pick? Constant Contact or Mailchimp?

Let’s review their features in detail to help you make an informed decision.

Constant Contact was founded in 1995, with its headquarters located in Waltham, Massachusetts. It reports annual revenue exceeding $330 million, employs over 1200 staff members, and serves more than 600,000 customers worldwide, making it one of the largest email service providers globally.

Some key features include:

Some of its main features include:

Mailchimp, launched in 2001 and based in Atlanta, Georgia, is another leading marketing automation platform and email service provider. It employs nearly 1000 staff members and reports annual revenue over $500 million, often featuring on the Forbes Cloud 100 list.

Its key features include:

At first glance, Mailchimp and Constant Contact seem quite similar. However, a closer look reveals distinct differences that can influence your choice depending on your needs.

Constant Contact offers two main pricing tiers, named ‘Email’ and ‘Email Plus.’

The core plan is priced at $9.99 per month, while the Plus plan costs $45 each month. Both pricing options depend on the number of contacts you have.

Although the basic Email plan is ideal for small businesses aiming to send professional-looking emails, the Email Plus plan is better suited for those wanting to automate their email marketing efforts. The great news is that both plans come with a two-month free trial, giving you the chance to explore the tool and see if it fits your needs.

All paid plans include common features such as customizable templates, contact management tools, email scheduling, live support, list-building tools, a mobile app, Facebook and Instagram ad integration, a marketing calendar, various apps and integrations, contact list import options, an image library, pre-designed landing pages, advanced tracking and reporting features, and an easy drag-and-drop editor. Constant Contact offers over 240 mobile-responsive, custom-designed templates, providing plenty of options for every campaign. Additionally, it features a lightweight image library that makes adding visuals to your emails quick and straightforward.

Mailchimp also offers plans tailored to your audience size, but all plans restrict the number of emails you can send each month. Since May 2019, new users and those upgrading from the free plan are charged based on contact counts rather than just the number of subscribers. The platform has four main plans, including a free option that provides essential email features for startups or small businesses starting out.

The Mailchimp pricing structure includes the free plan with a monthly limit of 10,000 emails, an Essentials plan starting at $11 per month for 500 contacts and up to 500,000 emails, a Standard plan starting at $17 per month with advanced automation features, and a Premium plan beginning at $299 per month, offering comprehensive access to all features. Mailchimp’s services enable users to sell products, make announcements, share stories, conduct follow-ups, and provide in-depth information about their offerings. It boasts over 100 highly customizable templates and offers email personalization options, allowing users to include their names and schedule emails based on recipients’ time zones.

Winner: Constant Contact

Constant Contact outshines with a wider selection of templates—more than double what Mailchimp provides—and offers highly customizable plans tailored to various business needs. Its features are comparable to Mailchimp’s but at a more affordable price point, especially for larger subscriber lists.

Email Marketing Automation Features

Email marketing automation simplifies communication by automatically sending targeted emails to your entire list, depending on the audience and context. Constant Contact includes built-in automation capabilities designed especially for small businesses and nonprofit organizations, allowing users to set up unlimited automated email campaigns easily.

Using Constant Contact’s automation tools, you can increase customer engagement and provide an improved experience, which can lead to higher sales and better customer loyalty.

Constant Contact’s automation features enable you to send automatic welcome emails when new contacts join, nurture leads through well-designed drip campaigns, and target your audience carefully by segmenting them and delivering personalized messages. Additionally, you can expand your contact list easily and set up auto-responders for new subscribers, maximizing the value of each email interaction.

Mailchimp also offers robust email automation options. It can integrate with your website to send targeted messages based on visitor activity, such as following up after specific page visits or using purchase data to recommend products. You can choose to send single emails or automated email series with just one click. However, it’s important to note that in Mailchimp, automation features are not included in the free plan and require a subscription.

With Mailchimp, you can implement strategies like sending follow-up emails after visitors view specific pages, integrating campaign goals to track leads moving to certain pages, and utilizing purchase data for personalized product suggestions. This makes Mailchimp a powerful tool for behavior-driven email marketing.

Choosing between the two is tough, but Mailchimp narrowly leads in this comparison because of its advanced behavior targeting capabilities, which are critical in modern email marketing.

List management and segmentation are crucial in email marketing success. Constant Contact provides some of the best tools for organizing and targeting your contacts. You can add contacts to your lists, create groups using tags based on interests, locations, or customer status, and send highly targeted campaigns to these segments. Tagging contacts is also straightforward, allowing precise targeting for your marketing efforts.

You can easily perform this task with just a click of a button on the toolbar. It’s very user-friendly and straightforward to deploy effectively.

Additionally, it is simple to remove contact details for individuals who are unresponsive or disinterested in your communications. The platform also provides a free video tutorial to visually guide you through list management and advanced segmentation techniques. You can build your email list by using opt-in or sign-in forms, or import contacts from Excel, Outlook, Salesforce, your ecommerce platform, or any other storage location for your email contacts.

They also offer a powerful email list cleaning service that automatically eliminates duplicate entries and unsubscribed contacts, ensuring your list remains accurate and effective.

In contrast, Mailchimp does not prioritize user-friendliness to the same extent. Its concepts of groups and segments can be confusing—groups are used for organization, while segments are meant for filtering. To create a segment, you simply click on ‘Create a segment,’ add your desired filters, and preview the results. You can also create groups via the ‘Manage contacts’ section by clicking on ‘Create groups.’ The platform provides ample opportunities for personalization. Importing a list can be done in four main ways: uploading a CSV file, copying and pasting from Excel, importing from apps like Salesforce or Google Docs, or creating a new list manually.

Constant Contact is the clear winner in this category because of its exceptional user-friendliness. Its unique ‘tagging’ feature, which is absent in Mailchimp, makes managing contacts more efficient and straightforward.

Email deliverability refers to the rate at which your emails successfully land in the inboxes of your recipients, rather than being diverted to spam folders. One advantage of using dedicated email marketing software is that, unlike personal email services like Gmail, these platforms notify you when your message reaches the inbox. Without such tools, it’s nearly impossible to know whether your emails are delivered properly or end up as spam.

Constant Contact leads the industry with its high email deliverability rates, maintaining about a 97% success rate owing to compliance with CAN-SPAM and CASL laws, which regulate commercial email practices. This high success rate is verified by third-party audits, ensuring trustworthiness. Constant Contact employs proactive monitoring to prevent network abuse, feedback analysis through major Internet Service Providers, authentication methods, continuous tracking of blocklists, rigorous compliance routines, and regular account reviews—all contributing to its superior performance in delivery rates.

Constant Contact maintains high deliverability by continuously monitoring its network to prevent abuse, analyzing feedback from major Internet Service Providers, implementing strong authentication protocols, actively tracking blocklists, ensuring compliance with regulations, and reviewing accounts regularly to minimize errors. Mailchimp also performs well, with a typical 96% delivery rate, which is decent but slightly lower than Constant Contact. Although Mailchimp emphasizes fast delivery, capable of sending up to a million emails within 45 minutes, exact delivery statistics are not openly published. It maintains high deliverability through feedback loops with ISPs, abuse detection, and authentication measures.

Thanks to its comprehensive features for maintaining high delivery rates, Constant Contact achieves a remarkable 97%, making it the industry’s best and the winner of this category.

Ease of Use: Importing and Exporting

Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp excel at offering flexible options for importing your existing contact lists into their platforms.

Constant Contact supports importing contacts saved in formats like XLS, XLSX, CSV (spreadsheet files), vCard (VCF), and plain text files, allowing you to add contacts either individually or all at once. The platform provides multiple ways to store, import, and manage customer contact information efficiently.

When importing contacts, ensure you follow some key steps: include only one email address per contact, choose a compatible file format, clearly label your column headers, and remove any unnecessary spaces or special characters. Constant Contact can process files with up to 40,000 contacts quickly. However, the ability to import new contacts may depend on your subscription plan.

Mailchimp allows you to import CSV or plain text files directly. If your contacts are in XLS or XLSX formats, you’ll need to copy and paste the data manually. Additionally, Mailchimp offers an API for advanced users to automate adding contacts to specific audiences. One downside is that importing large contact lists can slow down the process significantly.

For detailed guidance on importing contacts into Mailchimp, you can refer to their step-by-step instructions at this link. Both platforms also provide comprehensive troubleshooting resources to assist users.

Constant Contact offers broader compatibility with various file formats and tends to handle large contact uploads more smoothly than Mailchimp. Therefore, in this comparison, Constant Contact is considered the better option for importing contacts.

Having detailed analytics makes marketing campaigns more measurable, allowing companies to track their return on investment (ROI) more effectively.

By monitoring opens, clicks, purchases, unsubscribes, and other metrics, you can gain insights at both the individual email level and the subscriber level. Constant Contact offers an integrated email tracking tool that provides easy-to-understand reports for real-time insights into your campaign performance. It includes features like:

The Constant Contact app simplifies analyzing vital email marketing metrics, enabling data-driven decision-making.

Mailchimp also provides a robust built-in analytics platform that helps you identify what’s working in your email campaigns. These tools facilitate easier performance tracking and the creation of more effective marketing strategies.

Mailchimp’s built-in analytics tools help you:

In addition, Mailchimp provides a mobile app that empowers you to:

While both Constant Contact and Mailchimp offer excellent features for analytics and reporting, Constant Contact slightly outperforms due to its more comprehensive capabilities in this area.

This feature allows you to monitor your potential customers’ reactions and better target your campaigns. Unfortunately, this A/B testing tool is limited to subject lines only and does not allow testing other elements like email templates or content variations.

In contrast, Mailchimp offers a more comprehensive A/B testing feature that lets you compare up to three different versions at once, helping you determine which performs best. Their premium plans even support multivariate testing, where you can test multiple variables simultaneously, with the ability to compare up to eight variations in one go.

Their platform also provides guidance on how long to run tests to get optimal, reliable results. You can experiment with various components such as subject lines, email content, from names, send times, and the number of recipients to refine your campaigns.

Winner: Mailchimp. While Constant Contact offers solid features, Mailchimp stands out with its advanced testing capabilities, broader metrics options, and greater flexibility.

Constant Contact excels in customer support with a wide array of assistance options, including live chat, phone support, educational resources like tutorials and events, community forums, and integrations. They also provide support through Twitter and developer resources, making help accessible across multiple channels. Their support services extend to billing and international support, available even on Saturdays, with community and social media support available every day of the week.

Such extensive support options are uncommon among online service providers. Mailchimp also offers good support, including free email assistance for the first 30 days for new users, demonstrating their commitment to customer satisfaction.

The level of customer support depends on your subscription type. Generally, users can access support 24/7 via email, with phone support available during standard business hours.

They also offer a comprehensive self-help knowledge base and an efficient live chat service for personalized assistance.

Additionally, their extensive FAQ section addresses most common issues you might encounter with their email marketing platform.

Thus, this round ends in a draw.

Previewing your emails before launching a campaign is crucial, as templates can display differently across various devices and email clients.

Constant Contact addresses this by allowing users to see exactly how their emails will appear on different devices.

It enables you to preview how your email looks on:

Using this feature, you can customize the look of your emails to ensure clear communication and user-friendliness.

Key aspects you can review include:

Any detected issues can be quickly fixed to optimize user experience.

Mailchimp also offers a robust preview tool called Inbox Preview, powered by Litmus, which accurately simulates how your email will appear in various inboxes.

All Mailchimp users receive free 30-day access to Litmus upon signing up, and paid plans include 25 Inbox Preview tokens monthly.

Each preview or update consumes one token, but even if tokens run out, you can still verify your email by comparing how it looks on mobile and desktop, sending test emails, or using push notifications.

Constant Contact provides a wide array of integrations that enable users to maximize their email marketing capabilities.

A recent survey found that 69% of respondents credited these integrations as a key factor in their business success.

You can connect Constant Contact with various third-party tools, including CRM systems, to sync contact data, embed sign-up forms on your blog, curate content for newsletters, and more.

Constant Contact seamlessly connects with many popular platforms, such as:

A notable feature of Constant Contact is its integration with event management software, giving it a significant edge over competitors in this sector.

See more about event management software here. This integration sets Constant Contact apart, making it a top choice for managing and promoting events.

Similarly, Mailchimp also offers widespread integrations, making email marketing more accessible with many popular apps. See Mailchimp’s integrations here. Mailchimp can connect with:

In addition, Mailchimp has integrated with newer platforms aimed at improving user experience, such as Xero for accounting, Canva for graphic design, and Shopware for product and order management.

Winner: Constant Contact. Although both services are competitive, Constant Contact offers better integration options and greater flexibility overall.

Both platforms have their strengths, but when considering comprehensive features, higher connectivity options, and advanced analytics, Constant Contact takes the lead.

For those just getting started, there’s a special offer: a 10% discount on your first year plus additional benefits such as dedicated account management, expert support, a client management hub, extensive training resources, certifications, and professional marketing tools. Start with Constant Contact today.

Further comparison insights are available at StepThroughThePortal.com where you can explore how Constant Contact stacks up against other email marketing solutions like ActiveCampaign.