When it comes to communicating, we want the most efficient and hassle-free solution out there for our team. One of the easiest ways to reach out to our community is via email. Through email, it allows us to send announcements, postcards, newsletters, personal messages easily and quickly. Email automation also saves us the hassle of sending mass emails to groups manually.
Now when email solutions are brought up, two applications immediately come to mind: Constant Contact (CC) and MailChimp (MC). Both companies have been in the industry for more than a decade now. But what differences do these two apps have? And which is better for our needs? Here we made a comparison between the two to help you choose which software to use!
UI & Design
Both applications offer direct and clear navigation, which is suitable and ideal for beginners and for those who just want to use an application without spending too much time learning. Yet MailChimp may seem cluttered compared to CC when the list of your contacts is long. Users may encounter some occasional navigational issues that could be bothersome for some people. Comparing both their interface, CC may come more as intuitive than MC, but MC doesn’t fall too far behind.
Ease of Use
MC provides an overview of your every progress in one dashboard, which is very helpful especially when creating email campaigns. It makes everything organized with a checklist-style user interface to help you take note of the progress you’re making. CC, on the other hand, tailors its main dashboard to your experience. It asks you on your first login to ease your first experience in using the software. For beginners, it provides a simple dashboard with simplified steps and actions that you can take, along with the description and explanation of each task.
Integration
From the gist of it, MailChimp provides 800 app integrations while Constant Contact has only 270. Yet both still provide integration with the most in-demand software and sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, and more.
Features
Both apps offer autoresponders or the emails sent to individuals during special occasions or if they are signed up or subscribed to your mailing list. But MailChimp has automation that can be triggered by segments. They have A/B testing, which is a method that lets you test different variations of emails to find out what connects best with your recipients.
Another feature of MC is their segment builder, this feature helps you create faster templates and emails as their app has a machine learning model that creates segments automatically based on your previous actions and templates. The segment creator also adjusts itself based on your previous actions. Like adding and removing contacts on a specific mailing list, the segment automatically does it for you and will base its decisions on the contact list details of your previous emails.
Both applications have good and easy-to-use features, utilizing the drag-down feature for them. CC ups its game with dynamic content management functionality, which is very useful when you have a growing mailing list. CC suggests different actions and approaches to building up your list like creating a sign-up page for your website and collecting email addresses, adding an option where users can send a text message to join your mailing list, connecting additional apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more.
Pricing
MC is very generous, having a free plan aside from the two more paid subscription plans. These offers are:
- Free – allows up to 2000 subscribers and 10000-12000 emails every month with free reports, signup forms, templates, automation, and 30-day email-only support.
- Grow – starts at 10$ a month and increases subscribers and emails to unlimited capacity, also provides advanced reports, segmentation, and email delivery tools.
- Pro – Pro is for big enterprises, starting at 199$ a month, the same as their Grow plan with unlimited subscribers and emails but provides API access, comparative reports, advanced testing, and support for higher volumes of sending.
In contrast with MC, CC doesn’t have a free plan but provides a 60 day free trial of their product. They have 2 paid plans instead:
- Constant Contact Email plan – starts at 20$ a month which provides 500 contacts, unlimited emails, 1GB of file storage, reporting, and contact management.
- Constant Contact Email plus plan – start at 45$ a month, and has additional features like an additional 1GB of file storage totaling 2GB, increased contacts up to 2500, event marketing, email automation, coupons, online donations, polls, and surveys.
Conclusion:
When choosing a product, it all boils down to your preference. But when comparing the two apps’ functionality and performance, MailChimp is better with its more advanced features like A/B testing, segment builder, and a generous free plan. However, we still urge you to try both apps to find out which is better suited for you. Luckily, you can test out both for free to see which fits your church’s needs more.
