Written by Ria du Plessis - Digital Marketing Expert Updated 9/1/2021 |
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Score | 8.1/10 | 8.3/10 |
Summary | This platform offers good email design options and useful extras such as event management tools. | This platform excels at automation and segmentation. |
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A robust email marketing strategy can bring you great conversion rates and a consistent ROI. To achieve these results, you need a good email marketing platform and two of the best options you can currently choose are ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact. Discover their features in this ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact comparison.
Written by Ria du Plessis - Digital Marketing Expert Updated 9/1/2021 |
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Score | 8.1/10 | 8.3/10 |
Summary | This platform offers good email design options and useful extras such as event management tools. | This platform excels at automation and segmentation. |
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Pros |
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Cons |
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Key Features |
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Pricing |
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Support |
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Ease of Use |
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Best fit for | Small companies, those who need advanced automation | Beginners, small companies |
Let’s start this comparison by looking at the templates you get from ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact.
ActiveCampaign provides modern and good-looking ready-made emails. There are more than 125 templates you can choose from, and they are divided into several categories, according to different goals. You can customize these templates or create new ones from the ground up.
Constant Contact offers an impressive gallery that gathers approximately 500 email templates. They are suitable for different types of purposes (newsletter, product promotion, etc.) and they can be customized with different colors, photos, and styles. You can also create new templates from scratch and integrate your company’s logo in their content.
Winner
Constant Contact offers more templates.
Segmenting your audience according to different criteria such as purchase behavior or age allows you to craft more targeted campaigns.
ActiveCampaign provides advanced segmentation features. You can segment your contact list based on behavioral criteria such as clicked links, opened emails, replies, viewed pages, devices. Other segmentation criteria include deals, attribution, location data, contact details, IP address. Your audience can be divided into lists and segments.
Constant Contact offers a few segmentation features that are applied through tags. You can segment your audience according to behavioral data, clicked links, recent purchases, etc. This platform’s segmentation features are not very advanced, but they are easy to access and sufficient for beginners.
Winner
ActiveCampaign offers far more options.
Both platforms offer different statistics on how customers interact with campaigns or social media posts.
With ActiveCampaign, you can access a useful lead scoring feature that enables you to choose what type of customer data you want the platform to monitor. For example, you can keep track of how your customers are interacting with the products or content of your website. Event tracking features are also available, as well as social media tracking.
Constant Contact also offers several customer interaction tracking features. Just like ActiveCampaign, it allows you to customize these features. Based on the actions customers take on your website and what links they click on after reading your email messages, you can configure specific follow-up messages. You can also see what website pages get the highest number of clicks or what social media posts get the most views and likes.
Winner
Both platforms offer similar features.
| You may also like the following comparison: MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign |
Automated email flows help you save a lot of time while communicating with your customers.
ActiveCampaign features advanced automation tools that allow you to create email flows of any complexity. You have full flexibility in choosing the triggers and conditions that will help you branch off email sequences. The process is based on if/then logic triggers and behavioral tags. Pre-made workflows are also available.
Constant Contact offers several automation features; however, they are rather limited compared to other platforms. The simple automation triggers you can use include clicked links, opened emails, or new subscriptions. Combining different conditions and actions to create more advanced sequences is a bit time-consuming.
Winner
ActiveCampaign is more advanced.
Sign-up forms allow you to collect contact data easier. Discover how ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact allow you to create forms.
ActiveCampaign allows you to create 4 types of forms - inline, pop-up, floating box, or floating bar forms. There are numerous customization options available. ActiveCampaign’s forms work on an opt-in basis.
You don’t need any coding skills to build forms with Constant Contact. The platform offers an intuitive editor that allows you to create inline, pop-up, or landing page forms. You can add or eliminate fields to customize your forms and use lists to facilitate subscription. The forms feature dynamic content, and they are responsive.
Winner
Constant Contact offers more options.
Let’s see the different subscription options each platform offers.
This platform offers 4 pricing plans. There is no free plan available, but the platform offers a 14-days trial. They also offer different discounts if you pay yearly. The Lite plan costs only $9 per month. The next tier is the Plus plan - $49 per month, followed by the Professional plan ($129 per month) and the Enterprise plan ($229 per month). The final tiers are pricier because these plans include more advanced features such as personalized reports, custom domains, or send-time optimization.
Constant Contact has three different plans. The first is free and you can use it to send emails to up to 1,000 subscribers. There is also a 30-days free trial. The next plans are the Email and Email Plus, both having variable prices based on the number of contacts. The first one costs $20 per month for 500 contacts and the second is $45 per month for the same number of subscribers. You can also get different discounts if you pay upfront for 6 months or a whole year.
Winner
Constant Contact is more affordable and offers a free plan.
Let’s compare ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact from a usability point of view.
ActiveCampaign is one of the most intuitive platforms currently available. Even first-time users will find it easy to get used to its dashboard. All the main functions are available in the left-hand menu. While building campaigns, you get a menu where each process stage is available in a separate tab and you can easily turn back to previous steps. Spam testing and templates are easy to access and use. However, given its multitude of features, this platform feels a bit cluttered.
Constant Contact excels at usability. This platform offers a neat and clean dashboard where all the main features are easy to access. The entire layout focuses on simplicity and practicability. Building an automated workflow or importing and segmenting your audience is far easier in Constant Contact compared to other email marketing platforms.
Winner
Constant Contact is more intuitive.
If you use multiple tools for your marketing strategy or a CRM for your contacts, you can connect them with your email marketing platform to facilitate data sharing.
This platform offers around 300 integrations with different third-party apps. You can integrate it with marketing tools, CRM’s, eCommerce platforms, or social media accounts, among others. Some of the most popular integrations include WooCommerce, Shopify, Stripe, Xero, SurveyMonkey, Facebook, Vimeo, Google Analytics.
Constant Contact offers more than 400 integrations. Some of them are Zapier, Shopify, Facebook, Salesforce, FreshBooks, Mindbody, Lead Pages, Instapage, Microsoft Outlook, WordPress.
Winner
Both Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign offer more or less the same integrations, but Constant Contact is a bit more comprehensive.
To understand how well your email campaigns are working, you need to track their results. Therefore, your email marketing platform should offer different reports.
ActiveCampaign offers robust analytics. You can monitor all the essential aspects regarding your campaign’s progress such as the number of opened emails, link clicks, unsubscribes, click maps, etc. The platform also allows you to track your open rates according to the time they were registered, your segments, or create goals for each campaign and monitor their success rate. You can monitor your campaigns’ unique reads and total reads. It’s also possible to compare campaigns according to different criteria such as tags, conversions, or automation and get ROI analysis or custom reports.
Constant Contact offers different metrics and stats. It allows you to monitor your open rates, the number of delivered emails, clicked links, bounces, unsubscribes, etc. The reports are displayed in graphs you can easily follow, and you can also export them as a spreadsheet. You can compare campaign metrics and obtain heat maps to see which part of your message was more engaging for your contacts. It’s also possible to generate social media campaign statistics that include likes, views, shares, etc.
Winner
ActiveCampaign is more comprehensive as it also includes ROI reports.
| You may also like the following comparison: Ontraport VS ActiveCampaign |
Both platforms offer different customer support options. Here is a quick overview.
ActiveCampaign offers support by email or live chat. Phone support is only available for the Enterprise plan. There is a helpful sticky help button you can access at any time from your dashboard. It will take you to the extensive knowledge base of the platform where you can find articles, tutorials, or guides. A community forum is also available as well as one-on-one training sessions with an ActiveCampaign staff member - for the Professional plan only.
With Constant Contact, you can benefit from support via email, live chat, or phone. The support service is not available 24/7, however. A plus is the fact that it is multilingual. There is also a vast knowledge base with plenty of articles and tutorials.
Winner
ActiveCampaign offers more support options.
Discover the audience each platform targets.
ActiveCampaign is ideal for marketing teams that require advanced segmentation and automation features. Its affordable entry price makes it suitable for small companies.
Constant Contact is an excellent choice for beginners given its intuitive interface. It is also good for anyone who is looking for a free plan that offers basic email campaign features. Small companies and those that often host events are the main audience of this software.
Here is a summary of the major pros and cons of ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact.
This platform offers everything you need to create engaging email campaigns and track your results: a good selection of templates, numerous reports, excellent automation, and segmentation features. Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer a free plan and the support options are limited for the lower tiers.
Constant Contact offers an intuitive dashboard and reliable customer support options. It also boasts an impressive gallery of templates and good form-building options. However, it lacks the advanced automation, segmentation, and reporting you get with ActiveCampaign.
Two great alternatives to these platforms are:
GetResponse: this platform offers automation capabilities that can easily compare to ActiveCampaign. It also offers different reports and email design options, as well as the possibility to create ads for social media.
Sendinblue: with this platform, you can also use SMS marketing to further boost your customer engagement. Sendinblue has no cap for the number of contacts you can have and it offers advanced automation features, as well as a CRM.
Due to its powerful automation, great segmentation, and tracking features, ActiveCampaign is our final winner.
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