MailChimp versus Constant Contact
Posted on July 6th, 2008 by JeffLately, 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.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
How does mailchimp compare to icontact?
Posted at 6:57 pm on July 24th, 2008@Alexander, I haven’t ever used iContact, but if you demo both MailChimp and iContact I’d love to hear your impressions!
Posted at 10:55 pm on July 24th, 2008Do 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.
Posted at 4:36 am on August 6th, 2008I’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.
Posted at 8:20 am on August 6th, 2008