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Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp vs. EngageBay: Which Tool Is Better?

Your quest for the best email marketing tool has you stuck between three good options.

Is Constant Contact the platform for you?

Maybe it’s Mailchimp.

What about EngageBay?

Is this the tool you’ve been looking for?

You want to make a solid decision that will serve your small business well for the year ahead, maybe even the next several years.

In today’s post, that’s exactly what we’ll help you do.

Ahead, we’ll introduce you to all three email marketing tools.

Then we’ll cover features, ease of use, customer support, and pricing per platform.

We’ll share our own winner at the end, which should help your choice be a lot clearer.

Let’s jump right into it!

Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp vs. EngageBay Overview

The first contender in the great battle of Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp vs. EngageBay is Constant Contact.

Constant Contact at a Glance

Constant Contact

Although you may have only heard of Constant Contact around 2004, the company was founded back in 1995 under a different name, Roving Software.

As an email marketing software, Constant Contact promises to aid businesses in areas like social marketing, website development, ecommerce, and email.

Features

Here is a closer look at Constant Contact’s email marketing features:

  • Social and email polls and surveys: Let your audience’s voice be heard when you email polls and surveys or send them through social media.
  • Email marketing automation: Personalize your emails, send them to targeted segments, and schedule when your communications will go out with Constant Contact’s automation.
  • Tracking tools: Never wonder who’s opening your emails and when, as Constant Contact’s email tracking tools update all the time. You can even segment analytics data for portions of your audience.
  • List management: Import your contacts list into Constant Contact from Salesforce, Outlook, or Excel as well as through social media or your website.
  • Ecommerce email marketing: Continue growing the audience for your online store with email automation, segmentation, and other tools for audience nurturing and engagement.

Integrations

The Constant Contact Marketplace shows you the full breadth of their integrations.

We’ll highlight some of the bigger names now:

  • Office 365
  • Eventbrite
  • Gmail
  • DonorPerfect
  • MINDBODY
  • Facebook
  • Formstack
  • Shopify
  • BigCommerce
  • Zapier
  • Xero
  • QuickBooks
  • Leadpages
  • MailMunch

Ease of Use

Constant Contact strives to help you over the learning curve with all their helpful services.

For example, they offer a free guide called The Download that’s full of tips and tools for making the most of their software.

You can also read through their knowledge base or blog as well as get in touch with a Constant Contact marketing advisor.

Customer Support

The customer support Constant Contact offers is pretty rock solid.

They have separate phone numbers for billing support, sales, and customer service.

If you’d rather chat online with a customer service rep, that’s an option too.

The Constant Contact Help & Support page is another good resource.

Here, you can access online chat, phone support, resources, video tutorials, Constant Contact’s blog, free webinars, and the community forum.

Pricing

For their email marketing services, Constant Contact offers two plans: Email and Email Plus.

Email starts at $20 a month. Email Plus costs $45 a month.

constant-contact-pricing

Both plans include features like:

  • Phone support, chat support and learning resources
  • List segmentation
  • Marketing calendar
  • Sign-up forms
  • Integrations
  • Social post monitoring and inbox
  • Contact management
  • Contact list importing
  • Welcome email builder and list builder
  • Subject line split-testing
  • Automated email re-sending
  • Reporting and tracking
  • Custom templates
  • Email marketing

Here’s a great list of Constant Contact alternatives.

Mailchimp at a Glance

Mailchimp

An integrated marketing platform intended for businesses big and small, Mailchimp and its smiling monkey mascot is a viable choice for many businesses.

The company started in 2001 when founders Mark Armstrong and Ben Chestnut created it as a side gig.

In the decades to follow, its growth would continue at a steady rate.

Although Mailchimp is mostly known for email, the company offers services like social media marketing, digital ads, landing page design, and automation as well.

Features

Let’s look at some email-centric Mailchimp features now.

That will make it easier to compare Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp vs. EngageBay.

  • Transactional emails: Mailchimp’s transactional emails include signup confirmations and password recovery emails that your customers will come to expect from your small business.
  • Social email sharing: Spread your emails further by using social sharing to platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Mailchimp’s email builder lets you craft emails per each social site.
  • Mobile app: Use Mailchimp’s email templates even if you have to travel for work with their mobile app. You can also send, draft, and review email success through the app.
  • Ecommerce emails: If you have an online-based store, Mailchimp lets you sync your store to their platform to send more targeted promotional emails to leads and customers alike.
  • Google Workspace email address: Set up your own pro domain name through Mailchimp using Google Workspace. That makes it easier to sync with other Google services collaboratively such as Google Slides, Sheets, and Drive.
  • Analytics: Mailchimp’s reports present data such as segmented audience groups, email open rates, email click-through rates, and more.
  • Automation: Select from basic-level automation or more advanced workflows that suit your audience.

Integrations

Mailchimp’s Tools & Apps Integration Directory showcases the entirety of their integrations.

We compiled this shortlist to show you some of your integration options when using Mailchimp:

  • WooCommerce
  • Stripe
  • Google Analytics
  • Hootsuite
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Calendly
  • Eventbrite
  • Patreon
  • Vimeo
  • LinkedIn

Ease of Use

Mailchimp 101 is a resource on the Mailchimp website for those new to this platform who want to learn quickly.

Whether you’re trying to import your contacts, create your first audience, make a signup form or email template, or segment your contacts, you’re guided along when doing it all.

Once you’re in the software, Mailchimp’s built-in tutorials will also help you get a feel for this tool relatively quickly.

Customer Support

Do you need some extra assistance?

Mailchimp doesn’t offer as many customer support avenues as Constant Contact, that’s for sure.

You can browse their help page, which is their knowledge base.

You can also contact customer support, but only if you’re a paid user.

Since we’re pitting Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp, we have to give Constant Contact the win for customer support.

Pricing

Mailchimp divides its many services into four pricing plans: Free, Essentials, Standard, and Premium.

mailchimp pricing and plans

The Free plan at $0 includes these features:

  • Email support for 30 days
  • Marketing Tips
  • Marketing Glossary
  • Knowledge base
  • Integrations
  • Subject Line Helper
  • Next Best Action
  • Personalized product recommendations
  • Basic reports
  • Classic automation builder
  • Single-step automation
  • Marketing calendar
  • Social posting
  • Email
  • Free Mailchimp domain
  • Basic templates
  • Mailchimp Mobile App
  • Contact profiles
  • Tags
  • Basic segmentation

The paid plans are priced on a sliding scale that increases as your contacts do.

The Essentials plan starts at $9.99 a month for 500 contacts.

Besides the features above, here’s what that plan has:

  • 24/7 chat and email support
  • A/B testing
  • Pre-built templates

The Standard plan costs $14.99 a month for 500 contacts and boasts everything above as well as these features:

  • Send time optimization
  • Dynamic content
  • Social post scheduling
  • Behavior-based automation

With a significant price jump, the Premium plan is $299 a month, but for up to 10,000 contacts.

expensive

Here’s what the plan gets you:

  • Phone support
  • Multivariate testing
  • Comparative reporting
  • Advanced segmentation

EngageBay at a Glance

engagebay-crm

The third option in the battle of Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp vs. EngageBay is EngageBay.

Founded in 2017 by Sreedhar Ambati, EngageBay’s team couldn’t believe how expensive the sales and marketing options were for small businesses and startups at the time.

They started EngageBay as a more affordable alternative to HubSpot.

The company’s all-in-one software encompasses sales, marketing, customer service, and CRM into one comprehensive platform.

Features

EngageBay’s email marketing features are all part of their Marketing Bay.

Here’s what’s included.

  • Customer journey data: When a new lead or customer enters the sales funnel, you’ll never miss it with EngageBay’s detailed customer journeys. Build customer insights through Marketing Bay features and understand your customers even better.
  • Email templates: EngageBay’s rich drag-and-drop email templates are ready to go right out of the gate so you can move on to sending emails faster. The templates are even editable so you can put your own unique stamp on all your correspondence.
  • Email marketing campaign management: Create emails, automatically send them, and then review all your successes as they come in through EngageBay’s platform. Your email marketing campaigns will be more effortless.
  • Email automation: We all can’t sit at our desks 24/7 sending emails. EngageBay’s easy-to-use automation lets you launch email sequences that follow your automation rules. From welcome emails to follow-ups and everything in between, your emails reach your customers at the right point in their journeys.
  • List segmentation: You select the filters that segment your audience, such as source, date, country, buyer behavior, and more. Add tags to access your segmentation rules again in the future!

Take a look at this screenshot to see how building an email in EngageBay is super simple.

email-marketing

Integrations

In the EngageBay Integrations Library, you can see the full extent of the many integrations EngageBay offers with its software.

As we’ve done already, we’ll cherry-pick some of the top ones:

  • Pabbly
  • JotForm
  • LinkedIn
  • reCAPTCHA
  • DocuSign
  • Twilio
  • JustCall
  • QuickBooks
  • Stripe
  • Amazon Web Services
  • Shopify
  • Xero
  • Mandrill
  • Mailgun
  • SendGrid
  • Zapier

Ease of Use

Before you sign up for EngageBay’s Marketing Bay, you can try a product demo of their software.

This does require scheduling an appointment to discuss the demo, but being able to access all the features of EngageBay before paying is quite convenient.

They also have a comprehensive product demo video that we’d say is worth a watch!

Customer Support

EngageBay makes it easy to connect should you need customer support.

On their homepage, you can access all their social media handles, including Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

You can also dial their support phone number or send them a support-related email.

Their support page is chock full of webinars, guides and articles, and product videos that walk you through all facets of using EngageBay’s software.

Pricing

Select from one of four pricing plans as an EngageBay subscriber: Free, Basic, Growth, or Pro.

engagebay-pricing

The Free plan is free forever.

You’re capped at 1,000 branded emails and 1,000 contacts, but you get many features, such as:

  • Chat and email support
  • Email sequences
  • Email broadcasting
  • 1 gigabyte of file storage
  • Desktop notifications
  • Custom fields
  • Reporting dashboard
  • Integrations
  • Social suite
  • Tag management
  • Email template builder
  • Email templates
  • Predictive lead scoring
  • Segmentation
  • Lists

The Basic plan adds 10,000 branded emails and 10,000 contacts for $12.99 per month per user.

For the Growth plan, you’d pay $24.99 per month per user for 20,000 branded emails and 20,000 contacts.

This plan includes everything above as well as:

  • Free onboarding
  • Dedicated account manager
  • Time zone-based email delivery
  • Workflows and automation
  • A/B testing for email broadcasts
  • Marketing automation
  • 5 gigabytes of file storage

The Pro plan gives you 30,000 branded emails and 30,000 contacts for $49.99 per month per user.

like

Here is what’s included:

  • Phone support
  • Custom reporting
  • 20 gigabytes of file storage

Which Email Marketing Tool Is the Winner?

Between Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp vs. EngageBay, we saw three great email marketing tools, but you only need one.

How do you decide?

Let’s go factor by factor.

In the integrations department, all three services excel with no real advantage from one platform to another.

Regarding features, Constant Contact has a lot of them, but not as many targeted email marketing features as you may have hoped for.

Mailchimp is definitely a step in the right direction, but EngageBay is an even better choice, especially when you compare pricing.

Mailchimp says their services are made for small businesses, yet a pricing plan that costs $300 a month is far too expensive for most startups.

Remember, at that price, you only get access to 500 contacts. EngageBay supports 30,000 contacts with their most expensive plan, the Pro plan, which is $250 less.

EngageBay’s plans are more affordable than Constant Contact’s as well, even though Constant Contact isn’t admittedly an expensive service to use.

In ease of use and customer support, EngageBay stands out as well.

Our bottom line is this: for an affordable yet complete email marketing tool, choose EngageBay.

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