If you’re trying to choose between Mailchimp and Constant Contact to pair up with your Salesforce account, you’ve come to the right place. We’re power users of all three of these solutions (their respective APIs included), so we’ll definitely be able to help you make the right choice.
A quick primer before we dig in:
Email marketing has an insane ROI: $36 for every $1 spent. This puts it way above any other paid or unpaid marketing channel.
However, no ROI is ever guaranteed. You need good, data-driven campaigns to get there.
This is where the platform choice comes into play: choose the wrong platform, and you won’t have access to all the features you need to leverage email marketing fully. Or you can opt for a platform that’s overly complicated and far too bulky for your needs.
This will make every campaign setup needlessly complicated. You’ll be swimming in features that do nothing else than crowd your dashboard.
Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that both Mailchimp and Constant Contact do more than email marketing, they are full-fledged marketing automation platforms. So comparing their features matters more than ever.
| Constant Contact | Mailchimp | |
| Pricing | No free plan, just a free trial. Cost depends on the number of contacts and features (starts at $12/month) | Free plan up to 500 contacts. Cost depends on the number of contacts and features (starts at free) |
| Support | Phone support Mon-Sat and chat support Mon-Fri for all plans | Phone support for the highest tier only. 24/7 chat support for paid plans. Email support for all plans |
| A/B testing | Subject lines | Subject lines, content, send time, send name |
| AI Tools | AI Content generator for all levels of content in email marketing | 20+ built-in tools for marketing using AI |
| Templates | 200+ | 100+ |
| Automations | eCommerce workflows, birthdays, welcome sequences, email resends, path templates (15) | 40+ built-in automations, plus custom triggers and various scheduling tools, Zapier |
| Reporting | Open rates, clicks, conversion rates, bounces | Open rates, clicks, conversion rates, bounces, plus click maps, ROI tracking, and comparative reports |
| Email composer | Drag-and-drop | Drag-and-drop, plus a new email editor that allows you to edit directly within the email. |
| List management & organization | Organize by lists, segments, and tags | Organize by lists, segments, tags, and groups. |
| Beyond email | Landing pages, social media integrations | Landing pages, social media integrations, SMS marketing |
Let’s take a closer look at each relevant feature. Before we do, though, an essential note for Salesforce users:
Your email marketing platform and your CRM should go hand in hand to create data-driven, high-performing campaigns. Whether you choose Mailchimp or Constant Contact, SyncApps has your back with bi-directional integration. You’ll have one dashboard for all your combined insights and reports with powerful built-in features.
Explore the Salesforce and Mailchimp integration here.
Mailchimp Webhooks update Salesforce records
Explore the Salesforce and Constant Contact integration here.
Constant Contact lacks Webhooks to update Salesforce records
We’re starting here because this is where your subscribers are starting, too. Registration forms can influence the size of your list and its growth rate.
On Mailchimp, the registration forms are very flexible — from a bare-bones form that only asks for the email address to complex forms that ask for a lot of details. [Be careful with complex forms, though, only use them if you absolutely must. Very few people are willing to give out a lot of personal details.]
You can also edit the colors (with HEX codes only) and customize the forms enough to look native on your website. Need to change the opt-in message? It’s very easy to do so.
On Constant Contact, you have fewer options. The fields are limited to the standard name, company name, and so on. You can, however, change the colors (easier than in Mailchimp), the fonts, the background, and so on. There’s one feature that Mailchimp doesn’t have: a QR code that links to your opt-in forms. Pretty cool!
At first glance, you may think that the Constant Contact editor is easier to use. In a sense, it is, but only because it has fewer features.
The Mailchimp email editor comes with a lot of modern features. Our favorite is the navigation that allows you to move between the steps of your campaign to make sure everything is in place.
However, when you get the hang of them, both Constant Contact and Mailchimp editors start to feel second nature.
On Constant Contact, you can A/B test your subject lines, and that’s pretty much it. If you want to run any other A/B test, you’ll have to do it manually.
Mailchimp offers A/B testing for subject lines, send time, body, and send name. More importantly, their Send Time Optimizer feature lets you calculate the optimal time to send the email to each user based on their engagement history. The Timewarp feature lets you send the email at the same time in different time zones.
Constant Contact has over 200 templates, while Mailchimp only has 100+. If you want to keep things fresh, Constant Contact allows you to switch between many different templates.
On Mailchimp, the templates are a bit easier to navigate because they are grouped by industry: eCommerce, newsletters, holidays, and so on. But who said you can’t choose a template from a different industry?
Prefer to add your own template? You can use HTML on both platforms. On Mailchimp, you can also import the code from a .zip file or a URL.
On Mailchimp, the templates are more flexible, too. They have many more blocks you can move around, duplicate, or delete.
Both platforms offer good autoresponders (the welcome emails or the automated emails you send on special occasions).
Mailchimp has something extra, though: automation. For instance, if someone clicks on a link in an email campaign, this is viewed as a trigger that triggers (d’oh!) an email sequence to be sent their way.
This feature is perfect for sales sequences. Here’s how you can use it: let’s say you sent an email about two products, X and Y. Some recipients clicked on X, and others clicked on Y. You don’t have to spend ages sorting who clicked what. You can set up an automation that sends each of these groups a sequence about the exact product they clicked on.
No one wants their emails to end up in spam. Unfortunately, neither Constant Contact nor Mailchimp offers a reliable spam prevention feature.
On Mailchimp, you can use their Inbox Preview tool to see how the email would look in your audience’s inbox and if it looks like spam. Constant Contact launched a spam prevention feature that isn’t very promising yet (yet! We’re rooting for them!).
If you’re serious about spam prevention, you’re better off with a third-party tool like MailTester.
No email marketing automation platform can deliver all your emails. But the closer they get to 100%, the better.
Mailchimp has a 91.39% deliverability rate, while Constant Contact does better with 91.72% of emails delivered. You may think that this difference is too small to matter, but depending on your list size, it can add up to a few (tens of) thousands of emails that don’t get delivered each year.
We’re BIG fans of detailed and relevant reporting, so we paid extra attention to this one.
Constant Contact allows you to track who opened and clicked your emails, along with bounce rates and unsubscribers — the basic stuff. The cool factor comes from a Google Analytics integration that allows you to track conversions.
Mailchimp, on the other hand, offers a ton of metrics you can dig into. You have the usual opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes, but also click maps, geo-tracking, social media analytics, and metrics per provider (Gmail vs. Yahoo, for instance). You also have a neat eCommerce conversions tracker — pure gold if you’re selling stuff in your eShop.
But don’t stress too much about the native reporting features, though. If you use Salesforce, you’re definitely going to integrate it with either Mailchimp or Constant Contact. All you’ll need then is the integration dashboard to get more detailed metrics and deep dives than any single platform can give you.
Just check out the detailed dashboards of the SyncApps Salesforce integrations for Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
Mailchimp has over 800+ internal and 3rd party integrations, with most eCommerce ones built into Mailchimp, while Constant Contact offers 46 CRM, App, and eCommerce internal integrations, however, both do not offer NetSuite eCommerce.
Constant Contact and Mailchimp suggest using the 5000+ more via Zapier if they do not support your CRM, eCommerce solution, web solution, or app.
Their strategy, when Cazoomi started over 15 years ago, was to utilize vendors such as Cazoomi, Tray.io, Zapier, and integration solution providers to populate their integration marketplaces and generate internal leads. However, over the years, they transitioned from this approach to an internal integration model for all supported eCommerce, and now primarily suggest using Zapier.
I know, these differences are quite extensive; however, Mailchimp and Constant Contact only have one built-in Salesforce integration, which is not bidirectional in nature, and lacks feature depth and support for NPSP editions and other verticals built on top of Salesforce.
But don’t worry; you’ll unlikely be missing a key integration on either of these platforms. Plus, some of the native and free integrations are lacking in many ways, so you’ll probably have to look elsewhere anyway.
Take the Mailchimp for Salesforce integration on AppExchange, for instance. It’s very, very bare bones, rarely updated, clunky, and buggy. Frankly, you’re better off with no integration. Many SyncApps users came to us after trying this free integration. It took them less than a week to realize it takes more time to set up and manage than it saves.
We see Mailchimp moving in a slightly different direction than Constant. They add new features that aren’t email-related, which means that you will be able to do cross-channel promotions more easily.
To be fair, Mailchimp has been around for slightly less time than Constant Contact, but it remains one of the automation platforms that provides a free tier, even after its acquisition by Intuit.
However, the final choice depends on your needs — the channels you use or think you’ll use in the future, the features you rely on most, and so on.
And don’t worry — you can always switch between automation platforms when you need to. The migration process is relatively seamless.
Plus, you’ll always have your trusted SyncApps dashboard to fall back on.
Our recommendation? Test them both before you make the choice! Use the SyncApps free trial to figure out which of them complements Salesforce better. And, if you need help choosing between Mailchimp and Constant Contact for Salesforce, remember that our consultants are just a call away.
