What’s The Difference Between MailChimp, Emma, And Constant Contact?

Most marketing professionals agree it was a struggle to keep pace with shifting consumer habits throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Marketers had to evolve paid advertising and social media marketing tactics while growing content marketing and video marketing to meet increasing consumer demand. These were challenges faced by companies across all industries. 

And despite this, one channel remained dominant: email marketing. This channel persevered and even emerged as an increasingly relevant communication channel capable of reaching consumers directly in their inbox.

The pandemic revealed a consumer base hungry for connection and engagement, and email provided one of the most reliable points of access to a population isolated by quarantine measures and social distancing. As those conditions have eased and the economy has opened up, email marketing campaigns have largely shifted focus from data gathering and customer  acquisition to customer retention.

Regardless of how you’re leveraging email marketing, it’s not a marketing tactic that brands should attempt to execute manually. 

Email marketing software platforms provide the automation and customer relationship management (CRM) tools necessary to engage with customers. These software tools provide powerful methods of engaging with leads as well as offering added value to existing customers and building ongoing rapport.

The marketplace for email marketing software platforms is highly competitive, and it can be difficult to identify the right solution for your brand. In order to help our community who might be exploring solutions for themselves, we’ve performed a comparison of three leading solutions in the email marketing space.

In this email marketing platform comparison, we’ll break down the value that MailChimp, Emma, and Constant Contact deliver, and provide points of comparison on pricing, customization, integration, and other additional key features that might help set each of these platforms apart.

MailChimp

MailChimp is a web-based application that acts as an all-in-one marketing platform. Part email marketing tool, part CRM platform — MailChimp helps users maintain healthy customer contact practices through the use of well-designed campaigns and powerful, data-driven analytics.

The platform was founded in 2021 as an alternative email marketing solution designed to provide small businesses with access to a set of marketing tools that allowed them to compete with larger corporations. 

With offices in the United States and Canada, the company’s original owners grew the brand through a series of acquisitions, until MailChimp itself was officially acquired by Intuit Inc. in 2021. 

Pricing Plans And Features

MailChimp has established four primary pricing tiers, each targeted at supporting an increasing volume of email and providing additional services.

Free

Designed for small businesses and entrepreneurs to quickly access the tools needed to grow their customer base, the free tier allows 1,000 monthly emails with a single user. With support limited to email and only through the first 30 days, the email marketing platform provides basic functionality at this level to allow for integrations with other software platforms and access to basic analytics and reporting functionality.

In addition to pre-designed templates, users at this level also get access to creating forms and landing pages. At the free-tier, MailChimp users do not get access to the power of automation or scheduling. 

Essentials

• $13 per month
• Free 1-month trial
• 5,000 monthly email sends
• 3 users, 2 role tiers
• 24/7 email and chat support

Users gain access to scheduling tools and partially automated customer journeys. MailChimp Essentials customers also gain the ability to remove branding and perform A/B testing.

Standard

• $20 per month
• Free 1-month trial
• 6,000 monthly email sends
• 5 users, 4 role tiers
• 24/7 email and chat support

MailChimp’s standard plan opens the door for users to manage customizable campaigns through the use of pre-built and more complex automated customer journeys by allowing users to leverage content optimization tools.

Campaign engagement and impact can be maximized through the use of tools tracking the times when open rates are highest and which members of your community are most likely to engage with your emails.

Premium

• $350 per month
• 150,000 monthly email sends
• Unlimited users, 5 role tiers
• Priority access to phone and email support

At this enterprise-level account tier, multiple campaigns can be compared for effectiveness and engagement. Users gain access to comparative reporting and data-driven segmentation of your recipient lists. The platform also opens access to client onboarding systems. 

Customization

While there are several customizations possible throughout the lower membership tiers, MailChimp’s Standard membership tier offers the most rounded and complete experience for email marketing professionals who are managing the marketing outreach for small business owners. 

Standard users gain access to the full range of templates and tools necessary for creating, launching, and managing sophisticated email marketing campaigns. These include:

• Flexible automation features: Allow users to build enhanced customer journeys with multiple entry points, allowing it to react to reader behaviors. Includes pre-built journeys to use or customize to match your sales process.
• Audience management tools: Allow users to create a lead database from the ground up and then segment it according to the goals and targets of specific campaigns. Tracks subscribed users, unsubscribed users, and non-subscribed users. Learn about your audience and their engagement directly through the Audience dashboard and the Stats overview interface.
• Suite of smart tools: Powerful tools designed to automate and simplify the creation of engaging, on-brand emails and assets. Creative assistant allows you to upload branded assets, which it then uses to help you create email marketing tools that look and feel as if you’ve created them in-house. Dynamic content tool helps you quickly and easily send out highly personalized communications to your user base across multiple channels. Analytics to track when campaigns should be launched and CRM tools to determine where to focus lead conversion efforts to maximize purchase activity.

Integrations

The MailChimp platform offers an extreme degree of flexibility and functionality as it offers integration compatibility with more than 300 popular business applications and software platforms, across the full range of business processes, including:

• Social media integrations on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other major platforms to assist with lead conversions and user data acquisition
• Utilize Jotform Survey Maker, Typeform, Formstack, and other survey generation tools to post and manage surveys across your other platforms that are designed to grow your audience base
• Connect with crowd-funding platforms such as Patreon to capture lead data and increase subscriptions and profitability
• Connect with design applications such as Canva and Adobe to allow your designs to be easily integrated into MailChimp templates
• Increase traffic to your eCommerce platforms like Shopify by tracking customer activity and generating campaigns designed to capture and convert leads
• Connect with your payment platforms, such as Stripe, to integrate payment functionality into your email campaigns

What Sets MailChimp Apart?

In reviewing what others say about MailChimp as an email marketing solution, the consensus is clear. The email marketing platform offers businesses a number of advantages over the competition, such as:

• Accessible and simplified tools that are most necessary to carry out an effective email marketing campaign. 
• The platform has a reputation for being easy to use, with an interface that allows users to quickly execute their marketing goals. 
• Known for having best-in-class analytics tools that allow users to track campaign performance and success.
• Highly effective for the redistribution of social media content and scheduled engagement with customer base.
• Integrations allow a high level of versatility and adaptability, especially for eCommerce platforms.
• MailChimp offers users an integrated all-in-one solution that supports multiple marketing tactics centered around email engagement with clients, making it a powerful lead generation and CRM tool.

Emma by Marigold

The Emma email marketing platform is a product of Marigold, a relationship marketing-focused company that specializes in providing scalable marketing solutions to organizations of all sizes. 

Previously known as the CM Group, the recently rebranded Martech services provider has a more than 30-year history helping clients evolve their businesses through their full-solution portfolio of powerful relationship marketing software platforms.

Emma is a cloud-based solution that is targeted specifically at mid-sized businesses operating multiple locations, such as higher education institutions, brands operating under a franchise model, non-profits, and other distributed businesses.

Pricing Plans and Features

While there is no free plan tier, Emma does offer interested parties the ability to schedule a product demo, and provides new and potential users with an in-depth product overview via video and blog content. There are four defined membership tiers for businesses to take advantage of, depending on the scope of their operation.

Emma Lite

• $99 per month
• Annual contract allows 10,000 contacts
• 5 users, 2 role tiers
• Limited email sends per month
• Email and phone support, access to training videos

At the basic plan level, users are given access to a drag-and-drop editor for email templates, built-in integrations, and a robust support plan. Users can also access scheduling tools and signup forms, and they are able to access an asset library and a general template gallery.

Audience management tools are fairly robust at the Lite level, with users able to segment recipient lists and access tools to create dynamic content and manage subscriptions. Analytics are provided through real-time reporting tools and the ability to A/B test subject lines, and users are able to access the API and a number of integrations to streamline their marketing technology software stack. At this level, users can access the automation builder to create only a single customer journey.

Emma Essentials

• $159 per month
• Annual contract allows 10,000 contacts
• 2 subaccounts, 10 users, 5 role tiers
• Unlimited email sends per month
• Email and phone support, access to training videos, access to 1:1 onboarding support

The Essentials membership tier provides users with additional access to more tools to customize their email marketing campaigns. At this level, users gain full, unlimited access to the platform’s automation tools, including the ability to create an unlimited number of customer journeys, each with multiple starting points and branching points, and the ability to include custom event-driven automations.

Essentials users also gain access to the platform’s Approvals and Activities dashboards, and the ability to white-label emails with their organization’s branding. This membership tier includes the ability to utilize the brand’s new marketing calendar service, the customized landing page builder, access to the ability to code customized emails, and expanded access to analytics tools.

Emma For Teams

• $249 per month
• Annual contract allows 10,000 contacts
• 5+ subaccounts, 25 users, 6 role tiers with custom user permissions
• Unlimited email sends per month
• Email and phone support, access to training videos, access to 1:1 onboarding support and single sign-on tying all locations to a single support channel

This is the membership tier that truly leans into providing Emma’s targeted client base of multi-location operators with the full-functionality necessary to execute effective email marketing campaigns in that space.

In addition to all other services and functionality, the Teams membership tier provides users access to custom user permissions, the ability to share assets, templates, and campaigns across locations. This tier is intended for teams managing multiple departments or locations who want to centralize their marketing efforts. 

Emma Corporate

• Pricing requires a consultation with Emma by Marigold sales representatives
• Allows for more than 10,000 contacts
• 10+ sub accounts, unlimited users, 6 role tiers with custom user permissions
• Unlimited email sends per month
• Priority phone support in addition to full access to other channels of support

A tier designed especially for larger organizations that need to scale and control marketing with efficiency across multiple locations. In addition to the services and features available to the Teams account tier, this is the only tier that allows audience sharing between sub accounts and provides clients with priority support access. 

Customization

For Emma clients, customization comes at a price, as the most powerful branding tools for design and email customization aren’t fully accessible until the Emma Essentials membership tier. 

While Lite tier members are able to access the drag and drop editor, asset library, and the template gallery, the ability to fully customize and code your own emails comes only with higher tier memberships. Compared to other software solutions on the market, Emma does provide audience customization tools across all membership tiers that are extremely powerful.   

Integrations

Emma has built its business partner community and available integrations to meet the needs of fitness brands, nonprofits, restaurants, retailers, and universities to provide streamlined functionality across all relevant business processes. The list of integrations can be browsed either according to the client’s industry needs or by specific business process.

Perhaps the most versatile of the platform’s integration partners, Salesforce provides solutions across all of the industries supported by Emma, and boosts the impact the platform can provide to users for their email needs. 

There are approximately 80 integrations listed on the site at the time of writing, including key business partners such as Shopify, Eventbrite, Zapier, and Hubspot. The platform features several integration partners known for providing solutions for booking, reservations, subscription management and tools for non-profit organizations that include:

• Blackbaud
• Mindbody Business
• ClubReady
• OpenTable

What Sets Emma Apart?

While many platforms either target small businesses or large enterprise operations, Emma fills a unique niche by offering multi-unit and multi-location businesses the ability to centralize their marketing efforts under a single account. This allows a marketing team or department to manage brand messaging and ensure that all communications sent from field offices and personnel match the overall corporate messaging and support organizational strategies and goals. 

Those considering Emma should take a detailed look at the features available to each tier, as the Emma Lite membership tier doesn’t provide access to many of the tools multi-location clients would need in order to make the investment in the email marketing platform profitable.

Emma’s Essentials, Teams, and Corporate plans provide users with access to an Approvals and Activity dashboard that allow the centralized marketing professionals to review and approve mailings, track campaign performances across locations, and provide guidance and insight to support field staff to ensure optimum performance. Optimization can be further maximized by Teams and Corporate users through customized user permissions.

Of the available email marketing platforms on the market, Emma provides access to all user tiers with the same powerful audience segmentation and content customization tools. The platform is also known for its robust subscription management, email scheduling, and list sign up tools. 

Constant Contact

The Constant Contact software platform started providing small business owners with the email marketing tools necessary to compete with larger competitors in 1995. 

The platform has since grown and evolved into a multi-channel marketing tool that splits services into two lines of business: one handling lead generation and CRM and the other supporting email and digital marketing needs. 

“Digital marketing has evolved a lot since we first started our company in 2004, but one thing has remained true — despite the world of email experiencing many changes — Constant Contact has stayed the course, evolving the platform to provide more value each year. Constant Contact is deeply invested in empowering small businesses through powerful email and digital marketing toolkits, ongoing education seminars, and training workshops that Conscious Commerce Corporation has been part of delivering as an authorized local expert. We see a lot of value in the partnership we have with Constant Contact.” – Brandon Klayman, Founder & President, Conscious Commerce Corporation

Pricing Plans And Features

Of the three email marketing platforms that we explore, Constant Contact offers the most modular pricing options relative to services offered. While other platforms provide email marketing tools in conjunction with CRM and lead generation tools, Constant Contact breaks its services into separate plans, allowing the most flexibility and value for the membership cost.

The costs listed below do not take into account the company’s policy at the time of writing of offering a 15% discount for annual prepayments and 30% discounts for the same for non-profit clients.

Free Trial

The platform offers potential users a 60-day trial run with access to creating campaigns and the ability to send a total of 100 emails during that period. You can test action-focused blocks of code in your emails to get a feel for how the interface handles calls to action.

During the trial run, you also have access to email automation tools, landing page and survey page builders, and event creation, which you can save to then deploy properly if you convert to a paid plan. 

Email and Digital Marketing Core 

• Tiered pricing based on number of contacts: $9.99 per month for 0-500 contacts; $35 per month for 501-2,500 contacts. Prices scale from here, ranging from $55 per month to $300 per month for a contact list up to 50,000 contacts. If contact lists grow to more than 50,000 contacts, the user is automatically shifted to the appropriate Plus plan, outlined below.
• Monthly send limits of 24 times your total contacts, with an average fee working out to $0.002 per email
• 5 users
• Live phone and chat support, and access to an online tutorials and learning resources

Constant Contacts’ Core tier plans are designed for reaching targeted prospects, building clients lists, and encouraging customer engagement. 

The features at this level provide varying levels of value. Growth tools include access to Facebook and Instagram ads, website-based signup forms, and lead generation-focused landing pages. 

The Core tier email marketing tools include a drag and drop editor, a large cache of email templates, subject line A/B testing, and video integration. 

There is a limited amount of automation available at this tier, with automation reserved to welcome emails for new contacts only. Data reporting includes recipient engagement, list growth by source and time, and social reach of posts integrated into emails. Contact lists can be managed from a central dashboard and segmented according to specific campaigns.

The Core plans include a number of features and other services crucial for a small business looking to grow. Brands can upload up to 1GB of images, and also have access to Canva integrations and a diverse stock image library. Users can take advantage of an event management tool and marketing calendar to plan out emails and supporting social posts for their campaigns.

Email and Digital Marketing Plus

• Tiered pricing based on number of contacts: $45 per month for 0-500 contacts; $70 per month for 501-2,500 contacts. Prices scale from here ranging from $95 per month to $410 per month for a contact list up to 50,000 contacts. If contact lists grow to more than 50,000 contacts, the user must contact a customer support representative to establish pricing
• Monthly send limits of 24 times your total contacts, with an average fee working out to $0.002 per email
• Unlimited users
• Live phone and chat support, and access to an online tutorials and learning resources; adds a personal kickoff call from support to ensure a smooth deployment of services according to client needs

The Plus tier adds additional growth tools in the form of Facebook ad targeting and integrated Google ads. Plus clients are also able to synchronize with Shopify, eBay, and Etsy eCommerce tools, as well as tools to create dynamic email content and create an archive of newsletters that is accessible to customers to help bring additional value. 

Constant Contact’s Plus tier is also where clients are truly able to take advantage of automation tools. The tier adds access to automated resending of emails to non-openers, outreach based on special events such as birthdays and client business anniversaries, an automated reminder when users abandon an eCommerce cart, and other automated tools designed to maximize the effectiveness of campaigns over time.

Segmentation tools are expanded to include the ability to categorize mailing lists according to recipient level of engagement, as well as their purchasing behaviors. Data analytics are also added to include the ability to track sales and conversations resulting from campaigns, and the performance of ads across Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Additional services remain the same, with the additional feature for Plus clients of being able to create and distribute surveys and additional storage for images.

Customization

With the relatively straightforward breakdown of features between Constant Contact’s two tiers of email and digital marketing services, the bulk of customization is reserved for Plus tier clients through the use of the dynamic content tools in conjunction with the hundreds of email templates accessible at all membership tiers.

The Pricing page also offers potential clients who work for organizations with multiple locations the ability to negotiate partnerships and special account arrangements. Regardless of the number of offices a potential client might operate, further customization of services are available through the platform’s Lead Generation and CRM service plans, all three of which integrate email marketing services and additional services to support business growth and client management. 

Integrations

Constant Contact boasts a catalog of more than 300 integrations, but unlike the other services discussed here, the platform keeps the categories and specific service providers behind an invitation to start a trial account. Featured integration partners include Google and Facebook for ad management, and the ability to connect a WordPress site to easy-to-create form builders used to collect email and invite feedback.

Additional integrations can be leveraged through Canva and Vimeo to create and share content about your products and services. Other integration partners include Salesforce, Shopify, Stripe, WooCommerce, and social media tools to leverage the power of social platforms where you might work to gather leads.

What Sets Constant Contact Apart?

Many SaaS platforms in the marketing industry are guilty of trying to be everything to every client in order to maximize their market share. Constant Contact does an excellent job of providing a very straightforward email marketing tool with multiple tiers in order to provide a proper scaling of prices relative to a client’s size and business needs. It’s also one of the few services to be very open about their deliverability rate, as they should be with an impressive 97% deliverability rate to their credit.

The added weight of lead generation and customer relationship management tools is relegated to a separate product pricing tier, allowing businesses just getting started the ability to properly scale how they structure their approach to email marketing without having to overcommit to services and features they might not immediately need.

This gives small organizations the ability to establish a strong foundation and well-thought plan for outreach before then scaling that plan for future growth through the use of the Lead Generation and CRM tier’s automation tools, dynamic content generation, customer journey and automation workflows, chatbots, and other tools to enhance and improve client engagement. 

Best Practices for Choosing the Right Platform for Your Needs

In researching these three industry-leading email marketing solutions, we’ve uncovered several necessary considerations that marketing professionals must take into account when assessing potential additions in this vertical of their marketing technology stack.

This decision process is largely built around a team planning to take on a new email marketing campaign themselves; brands who plan to outsource this functionality should work alongside their managed service provider to ensure the tool in use meets the overall business goals.

How much of your marketing budget can you devote to email marketing solutions?

As with any major investment, you want to first assess your existing budget, and how much you can realistically dedicate towards your email marketing strategy. Once you’ve determined the economic resources you’re able to dedicate to this marketing channel, you can make an informed and fiscally sound decision as to what tool you can leverage for both short-term growth and long-term profitability and stability.

What do you want to achieve through your email marketing efforts?

Before starting the search, your marketing team and leadership should identify what you are attempting to achieve through the distribution of emails to your client and leads database? There are four general types of emails: email newsletters, lead acquisition emails, client nurturing and retention emails, and product and service promotional emails.

It’s important that the platform you choose has the ability to support whichever channel you might need to focus on at any given point in your current growth cycle. 

What are your must-have features?

In reviewing and assessing the three platforms we’ve covered in this article, it should be clear that not every email software offers the same level of value. Some platforms include crucial features (such as automation tools and integrations) by default at the lowest point of entry, while others layer these tools deeper under higher-cost tiers. In other cases, you might see a service provider offering basic functionality at a free or low-cost tier, only to offer more complex and expanded versions of specific features at higher-cost membership levels. 

It’s important to determine what features you absolutely need in order to get your email marketing strategy up and running, and have an idea of the features you will need to support your future growth and conversion goals. With those features in mind, you’ll be better able to determine which product provides those features at the price-point you’ve previously established.

Take advantage of no-cost and low-cost memberships to test out options

The above steps should provide your team with a short-list of options, but you don’t have to make a decision as to which platform to adopt blindly. It’s common practice for these types of platforms to offer potential users a free demo ahead of having to make any sort of financial commitment.

Other options for testing out options include free or low-cost entry level tiers and free trials in order to get a feel for workflows, functionality, and ease of use for your team. This can help you avoid platforms that have a steep learning curve, don’t provide the right balance of value for the cost, or that don’t actually help your team achieve your marketing goals.

Remember That Email Marketing Is Worth The Investment

Email marketing has provided users with massive returns on investment since the first email marketing blast, sent out in 1978 by Digital Equipment Corp. to 400 recipients, generating $13 million in sales. Since then, email has been increasingly leveraged for both business and personal purposes.

In 2022 alone, Statista reported that more than 330 billion emails were sent and received daily. Email paid off immensely, with marketing professionals reporting in 2022 an average of $40 return for every $1 spent on email marketing campaigns. 

Email marketing platforms are a proven method for achieving goals of nurturing and building customer relationships, and your team should be considering the adoption of such a platform into your current martech stack—if you’re not already using one—to execute your email marketing strategies.

If your team needs to consult a marketing expert in order to help in the decision process, you can find an email marketing provider that will help narrow down the options and find the best solution to meet your company’s goals.