MailChimp versus Constant Contact

Lately, a lot of our work in the area of email correspondence systems has been in weening clients off of Constant Contact or other third party systems and setting them straight on the MailChimp path.

MailChimp is by far my favorite third-party, hosted email campaign system. The user interface is spectacularly well designed, the mail servers fly ridiculously fast, the analytics are more detailed than I could ever imagine, the optional spam inspection tools are helpful in ensuring your campaign reaches as many customers as possible, and the fully branded HTML emails are a sweet deal (i.e. no annoying “Powered by Constant Contact” badges).

I was going to do a detailed comparison between MailChimp and Constant Contact, but decided it wasn’t worth the energy. This does the trick for me: compare Constant Contact’s featured client list with MailChimp’s.

No offense, Boston Duck Tours, but you’re on the wrong boat. Contact us when you’re ready to make the switch.

Products

17 Comments

Alexander

— July 24, 2008

How does mailchimp compare to icontact?

Jeff

— July 24, 2008

@Alexander, I haven’t ever used iContact, but if you demo both MailChimp and iContact I’d love to hear your impressions!

Sterling Silver Jewelry

— August 6, 2008

Do they have the same deliverability rates? We’re strongly considering switching – automatically creates inline css, strong analytics, and A/B split testing for the same price as Constant Contact. Constant Contact seems more geared towards endusers that do not know what those mean and have noone on staff that know html.

Jeff

— August 6, 2008

I’ve found delivery rates for MailChimp to vary between 25% and 85% for my clients. The low end was a list of 12,000 users from years ago, which was likely a stale list. The high end was a list of around 1,500 users from an active double opt-in list (standard procedure for MailChimp.) See this MailChimp blog posting for more details about delivery rate.

As for end users, you do not need to know any HTML or CSS. MailChimp provides visual editing tools that happen to be much better than Constant Contact’s tools. The templates are cleaner and better looking as well.

Jeffrey Simons

— May 27, 2009

We’ve worked with iContact for some of our clients who use it and hate it. Some of their functionality is downright dangerous, such as the “Reuse existing creative” that gums up the code horribly. We far prefer Mail Chimp.

Zac Craven

— June 23, 2009

I tested ConstantContact(CC), VerticalResponse (VR) and MailChimp (MC) in detail before selecting MailChimp.

VC was quite poor in terms of usability and features. The HTML WYSIWYG editor particularly irritated me, and the templates looked crap.

I switched to CC and found it a lot better but stumbled across a killer problem. It couldn’t put non latin characters in the email Subject line. I am sending mail magazines in various languages including Chinese and Korean, so this was not acceptable.

I then found MC and was pleased to find it was much better because:
- cheaper (for my usage rate, one mail shot every 3 months to 5000 users)
- easier to use (quicker to create campaigns)
- allows unicode in the mail To and Subject fields
- superior statistics
- API allows for automation of data synchronisation in future (when I get round to it)

Jeff

— June 23, 2009

@Zac, thanks for the additional info. Since I wrote this blog post nearly a year ago, MailChimp has continued to outpace the competition in terms of new features, user experience improvements, and analytics.

rohit

— November 17, 2010

Mail chimp is too good

Peter Genuardi

— January 22, 2011

You’re right, at the end of the day feature comparison is a good objective way to divine which is a better platform. I just did a similar informal comparison for our clients (small biz and nonprofit organizations) and came up with a similar conclusion (http://soapbxx.com/blog/40-mailchimp-vs-constantcontact).

I’d love to hear from anyone who’s compared MC to iContact. I hear iContact integrates better with salesforce that MC or CC. Anyone looked at that integration lately?

Joey Aquino

— January 26, 2011

Hi Jeff,

Your companies portfolio is very impressive and your strategic insight is easily seen through your blog. A couple days ago I got in contact with J.J. about a startup I am working for, but hasn’t gotten back to me, so I wanted to reach out to you. You seem very active in the online community, so I thought it was fitting.

The company I work for is called OnCompare.com. We are building a site where businesses can make decisions on which online services to implement into their companies.

We have a decision wizard, but we also want to implement a community aspect, which we know will make for very compelling decisions. We want to bring small businesses and experts like yourself together.

Ultimately, we will have a pool of customers who are reaching out to the community to have their needs met. This is a great opportunity to promote your expertise and find future leads as well. We want great content like this post has created.

It would be great to talk to you about how we can better build a site to promote your expertise.

Feel free to email me directly.

Cheers,

Joey

Tweets that mention MailChimp versus Constant Contact | Bust Out Solutions Web and Mobile Design, Development, and Strategy -- Topsy.com

— February 22, 2011

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Equipe TeiaMG, Oswaldo. Oswaldo said: MailChimp versus Constant Contact | Bust Out Solutions Web and Mobile Design, Development, and Strategy http://t.co/5DIafdJ via @teambustout [...]

Julie Gorham

— June 7, 2011

Thanks for the comments on CC vs. Mail Chimp. Very helpful!

Patti

— September 6, 2011

Without a doubt MailChimp far superior to ConstantContact. I’ve just spent an hour with “Live Chat” at CC and they still don’t have a resolution for what is happening. Further, they will not let you download the HTML. I’ve designed numerous email in Dreamweaver and upload them to MailChimp without a problem. I’m now 3 days trying to get 1 email out with CC.