Campaign Monitor

For a Maximum of 500 Subscribers:

Basic: $9/month
Basic allows you to send up to 12,500 emails per month.

Unlimited: $29/month
Send unlimited emails every month

Premier: $149/month
Send unlimited emails every month, and get other premium customer service features like email design consultants, online training, and a customer success manager.

For a Maximum of 2,500 subscribers:

Basic: $29/month
Send up to 2,500 emails per month

Unlimited: $59/month
Send unlimited emails every month

Premier: $149/month
Send unlimited emails every month, and get other premium customer service features like email design consultants, online training, and a customer success manager.

For a Maximum of 10,000 subscribers:

Basic: $89/month
Send up to 75,000 emails per month

Unlimited: $149/month
Send unlimited emails every month

Premier: $249/month
Send unlimited emails every month, and get other premium customer service features like email design consultants, online training, and a customer success manager.

Campaign Monitor will give you a custom quote for more than 50,000 subscribers.

There are no setup fees, and Campaign Monitor offers a limited free trial to test out their software.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact offers 2 list based pricing plans:

E-mail Plan:

$15/month
for 0-500 subscribers,

$35/month
for 501-2,500 subscribers,

$55/month
for 2,501-5,000 subscribers,

$85/month
for 5,001-10,000 subscribers,

Custom quotation for more than 10,000 subscribers.

Email Plus Plan (includes more advanced features like surveys, registration forms, coupons, and more):

$45/month
for 0-500 subscribers,

$60/month
for 501-2,500 subscribers,

$80/month
for 2,501-5,000 subscribers,

$110/month
5,001-10,000 subscribers.

Custom quotation for more than 10,000 subscribers.

Constant Contact has no setup fees, 60 day free trial (for 100 contacts), 10% discount if you prepay for 6 months in advance, or 15% off for a year in advance. They also offer double the incentive to prepay for nonprofits, with a 20% discount for 6 months and a 30% discount for annual payments.

Campaign Monitor

There are only 35 templates to choose from, but you can also import your own HTML file. This requires a little knowledge of coding.

That said, the templates offered are very well designed. They are very professional in appearance, responsive, and highly customizeable.

You won't have to worry about how your email will look on other devices. Campaign Monitor offers a preview of how your newsletter will look in all the major email clients.

The drag and drop editor gives you the option to add buttons, images, social share items, and dividers. This can completely change the overall look and feel of your layout and really make your email pop.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact's design looks a bit dated. The email templates are kind of boring.

You still get access to more than 400 built-in templates and with the use of the drag and drop editor you can customize the templates to put your own personal spin on them.

A HTML editor is also available if you are planning to code a custom email.

If you want to ensure that your email will render well on mobile devices you’ll have to look for mobile-friendly templates. The downside is that you don’t have a mobile preview, so you have to be careful when you design your template.

Sadly, Constant Contact does not offer preview for mobile devices or different kinds of email clients. This is a big deal, and using Constant Contact will have you wasting hours in testing. Campaign Monitor is much better about letting you see what your emails will look like before you send them out.

Campaign Monitor

The Basic plan has access to a limited set of features. They have a drag and drop editor, sign-up forms, landing pages, autoresponders, limited inbox previews, and spam testing.

With the Unlimited plan you'll have access, to deliverability experts, unlimited inbox previews, and spam testing.

The Premier plan includes all of the features in the monthly Unlimited and Basic plans plus access to online training, an email design consultant, a customer success manager, and 24h support on weekdays.

Campaign Monitor's iOS and Android apps let you manage subscribers and give you real-time access to campaign and subscriber reporting when you’re on-the-go. Their app is not quite as impressive as Constant Contact's.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact gives you access to the basics, like subscriber profiles, list growth tools and list segmentation, social media support, multiple user accounts and signup forms.

Other features like split A/B testing and trigger-based messaging aren't in Constant Contact. If you want to use either of those you'll need third party integrations. This is a bit of a shame. A/B testing can be really useful in making a successful email marketing campaign, and it is disappointing that it's not included in Constant Contact.

Constant Contact also only lets you create one sign-up form per account. That is a little absurd. Any email marketing campaign has to target different kinds of users, and they won't all respond to the same form.

They've got Android and iOS apps as well. Those are pretty impressive. They allow you to create new emails, send emails, and track your data from your phone. This strikes me as pretty slick for a program that doesn't have mobile preview.

Campaign Monitor

The user interface is one of Campaign Monitor’s strongest points. With over 10 years of experience in the business, they have managed to create a user-friendly marketing tool that offers straightforward access to all its features.

Lets explore the items on the menu bar.

• Overview - Here you'll find your dashboard where you'll see an overview of your recent activity.
• Campaigns - In this section reports for every campaign you'll find reports for all of your campaigns.
• Automation  The automation tab lets you streamline your workflow by automating common tasks. If you know what a macro is in computing, this is the same idea.
• Transactional - Transactional email are treated separately in Constant Contact. The emails are triggered by your site or app when a user performs a certain action, like confirming an order or renewing their membership.
• Lists & Subscribers - Under this section you have all the necessary tools for managing your subscribers and lists.

The avatar next to you name gives you access to your account and billing settings, your integrations, and your template library.

Campaign Monster's backend is well designed and maintained.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact's interface might look a bit dated, especially for tech-savvy users with a background in web design.

Nevertheless, the user interface is pretty intuitive.

There's five huge buttons on the left side of the screen:

• Home - This is where you go when sending your first email. Once you get started these options will be replaced by a dashboard with your recent campaign activity, list growth, and other recent events.
• Campaigns - You'll find all the necessary tools for customizing email templates and managing a campaign here.
• Contacts - This lets you manage your subscriber lists and your lone sign-up form.
• Reporting - This has real-time reporting on all your campaigns.
• Library - Here you can manage you stored files and access the image library, where you can find a huge collection of stock photos, both free and paid.

Campaign Monitor

You’ll find your reports under the campaigns tab after sending out your first email campaign.

Clicking on a report will open an overview of the performance of your email marketing effort. These reports are well designed and easy to read, so you won't have to deal with arcane statistics and confusing graphs.

Campaign Monitor sticks to the basics when it comes to reports, but they still provide enough analytics to help you made good data-driven decisions.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact sticks to the basics when it comes to reports. You'll be able to track opens, clicks, spam reports, unsubscribes, bounces, and contact growth by source.

You can't do A/B split testing, or location tracking in the app itself. You'll have to use their Google Analytics integration if you want that kind of data.

You can view both total opens and unique opens, and you can also view a list of individual subscribers who opened your email or clicked on a link.

You can also see contact growth by source, which is handy if you want to see where your new subscribers are coming from.

One nifty feature is their industry average comparison. You can select an industry and compare your statistics against the industry average.

Campaign Monitor

Importing data into Campaign Monitor is very easy, you can upload CSV, TXT or XLS files. You can also simply add subscribers manually or import data from you Outlook, Gmail or Apple contact list.

Campaign Monitor can be re-branded to look like your own product, and if you have multiple clients you can give them access while still managing all of their subscribers from a single account. There is no limit to the number of clients you can add to your account.

Campaign Monitor allows you to give your clients access to almost everything. This allows for a great deal of flexibility.

You may close your account at any time, but Campaign Monitor also allows you to switch to pay per campaign billing. This way you will pay only when you send a campaign or run a design and spam test.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact’s import tool makes it very easy to gather your subscribers into a single list without needing to reconfirm their subscription.

You can upload spreadsheets and TXT files, or you can import contacts from mail or CMS services service like Salesforce. For creating small lists, you have the option of manually adding contacts.

Constant Contact offers a 60 day free trial, but after that it’s quite difficult to cancel your subscription. You cannot suspend your account over email over chat so you have to call a billing specialist. If you cancel your account and then change your mind, it can be reactivated within 90 days of the cancellation.

Constant Contact also only allows you to store up to 2GB of files online before they charge you for more storage.

Campaign Monitor

Setting up autoresponders is easy in Campaign Monitor. Emails triggered by your own site or app in response to a subscriber's action are treated separately and called "Transactional" emails. This lets you deal with these emails in a different environment from your other emails. Its really helpful to separate theses because it de-clutters your workflow substantially.

Campaign Monitor allows you to send automated emails when somebody joins a list, is having a birthday, or any other custom event that is associated with a specific user.

If you want to compile a newsletter based on your recent blog posts, you can set up an automated workflow for site updates, and convert your RSS feed to online content.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact's autoresponder feature lets you set up an email series for similar customers and send targeted messages.

You can also send automated emails to customers that make a purchase or sign up for your mailing lists.

Strangely, you have to wait a day after adding your contacts to your autoresponder list before sending out any autoresponse emails. This might get old pretty quickly.

Also you can't copy emails created in autoresponder to use as standard emails. That is also pretty weird. There are definitely a few situations where that might be necessary.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor integrates with lots of survey, customer relationship management, and blogging apps.

There are 250+ integrations you can use including 3rd party apps like Salesforce, Magento and WordPress.

Campaign Monitor has a few more integrations than Constant Contact.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact offers over 200 apps and integrations.

They also let you develop your own apps, if you are so inclined.

Some of the most popular integrations are Google Analytics, WordPress, PayPal and social media-specific apps, including the Constant Contact Facebook app.

Campaign Monitor

Although Campaign Monitor does not provide phone or chat support for Basic and Unlimited plans, Premier plan customers have access to 24-hour phone support from Monday to Friday.

If not on the Premier plan, you may only contact support through the support form. Sadly, Unlimited and Premier users have priority over Basic, so if you have the Basic plan you may have to wait to get your questions answered.

They have plenty of helpful online user guides, forum discussions, and FAQs to help get you started, but this is really where Constant Contact shines. They offer much more in depth customer support.

All in all, Campaign Monitor's support is a bit sluggish and disappointing.

Constant Contact

Perhaps Constant Contact's best feature is their support (the company has even won three Stevie awards over the years for its customer service). They offer phone, chat, and email support and they have a dedicated Twitter account for customer service @CTCTHelp.

Phone support is available for different time zones:

USA & Canada: Monday - Thursday 7am - 11pm EST, Friday 7am - 9pm EST, and Saturday - Sunday 10am-8pm EST;

UK: Monday - Friday 9am - 4am GMT,
Saturday - Sunday 3pm - 1am GMT;

International: Monday - Thursday7am - 11pm ET, Friday7am - 9pm ET, Saturday - Sunday10am - 8pm ET

Online Chat is available Monday-Friday, 7am-9pm EST.

Constant Contact offers a variety of live and recorded webinars, blog posts covering tips and industry news, and a massive knowledge base with frequently asked questions arranged by different topics.

Constant Contact offers in-person classes and seminars for an additional fee ($199+).

Their customer support is really responsive and helpful.