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Based on weighted criteria below
Low Pricing icon

Low Pricing (weighted 11%)

MailChimp

Forever free plan
for 0-2,000 subscribers/ 12,000 emails per month.

This plan may be all that you need when you're just starting out. It is a pretty generous free plan.

MailChimp offers two basic types of plans (with a flexible pricing structure): list-based and send-based

Here are a few pricing examples.

List-based:

$10/month
for 0-500 subscribers,

$15/month
for 501-1,000 subscribers

$25/month
for 1,001-2,000 subscribers

$180/month
for 26,001-36,000 subscribers

$1,050/month
for 225,001-232,000 subscribers

MailChimp's rates are highly segmented. There are a lot more pricing plans in between these options.

Send-based:

At $0.03  per email:
300 Emails – $9
2,000 Emails – $60 

At $0.02 per email
10,000 Emails – $200

At $0.005 per email
375,000 Emails – $1,875

High-volume pricing (CPM)
2,000,000 Emails – $2,500 ($0.00125/each)

MailChimp also offers a Pro add-on for $199/month that adds extra analytic tools made for growing companies.

Note: MailChimp has an extremely flexible pricing structure. There is a plan at every $5 interval beginning at $10, but it’s not a strictly linear progression. You can use the billing calculator to figure out exactly how much your plan would cost.

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.

Design icon

Design (weighted 11%)

MailChimp

MailChimp has hundreds of built-in beautiful HTML templates with lots of different color schemes.

Your emails can look different depending on the email client your customers use. In MailChimp you can preview how your email will look in 10 of the most popular email clients.

All the templates are also mobile optimized, so you don't have to worry about sending you customers emails that will lag on their phone.

You can also add your own HTML email design, customize an existing template, or code a completely new one from scratch.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor doesn't have that many templates, but you can also import your own custom template as an 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.

Frontend Features icon

Frontend Features (weighted 11%)

MailChimp

MailChimp’s complete features are only available to paying customers, so if you are using the free plan some of these may not be available.

Paid users get access to all MailChimp's features including: email designer, multi-user account, analytics /reports, autoresponders, custom forms, subscriber profiles, geolocation and deliver by time zone, audience segmentation, integration into other web services, or any of their support options.

MailChimp has a seven, count-em seven, mobile apps available for Android or iOS that can help you manage your email list while away from the computer.

MailChimp Mobile - Lets you send campaigns, view reports, and add new subscribers.
MailChimp Coupon Scanner - This lets you put coupon codes into your emails.
MailChimp Editor - You can edit emails right from you phone with this app.
MailChimp Snap
- This lets you take a photo, or select an existing photo, and build a simple email around it that you can send out to any of your lists.
MailChimp VIPs - mark extra-special subscribers as VIPs and receive notifications when they open and click
Mobile Signup Forms - a great app that will help you collect email addresses in person at a storefront or conference.
SMS for Events - This sends text messages to your subscribers during events.

These apps let you do most of the things available in the MailChimp web app right from your smartphone.

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.

An iOS and Android app lets you manage subscribers and gives you access real-time campaign and subscriber reporting when you’re on-the-go. However, MailChimp has a number of apps that have much more functionality than the Campaign Monitor app.

Backend Features icon

Backend Features (weighted 11%)

MailChimp

The dashboard is very well designed. It is very clean and intuitive, and seems to be geared towards users of any skill level. They obviously put a lot of care into the design of their interface.

On the main menu you'll find the following links:

  • Campaigns - where you can access your current campaigns.
  • Templates - the starting point for creating your email designs.
  • Lists - where you can manage you current subscriber lists or create new ones.
  • Reports - where you can track how well your campaigns performed, check open and click rates, and more.
  • Automation - here you can setup your automated emails to users that subscribe to your lists, open links from your newsletters or buy your products (only available to paying users).

MailChimp's backend is really very usable no matter your skill level. It is really hard to pick one of these applications above the other in terms of backend features. They are both very good at what they do.

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 emails 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.

Reports & Statistics icon

Reports & Statistics (weighted 11%)

MailChimp

MailChimp has a strong reports section, they track data on open and click rates, top links clicked, performance over time, subscriber activity, revenue reports, opens by location, and unsubscribes.

There are also maps that show the locations of the people who have opened emails. This can be pretty cool to look at. It is always fascinating to see where your emails end up.

You’ll also have access to reports for successful deliveries, forwards, unique opens, and abuse reports, and you can view bounces and social activity.

Don’t forget that you can track higher-level stats (ROI, conversion rate, revenue and the average value per visitor) using the Google Analytics integration (Analytics 360). You can download reports for both single and combined campaigns in CSV format.

This all adds up to a lot of useful data. You won't have a shortage of information to help you fine-tune your email marketing campaign.

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. That said, MailChimp really works to get you good analytics that are both useful, and look pretty. Constant Contact isn't quite up to snuff.

Flexibility icon

Flexibility (weighted 11%)

MailChimp

MailChimp offers several ways to add subscribers to your list. You can import subscribers from a CSV, TXT, manually add contacts from XLS or XLSX files, or import from services like Google Contacts, Salesforce, Highrise, Zendesk and even Constant Contact. This makes it really easy to get started.

You can import the contacts to a new list or append them to an existing one. Import new subscriber data to an existing list is also possible.

Keep in mind that when you import a new list or switch to MailChimp from another email service provider, you may need to reconfirm your subscriber list, especially if your current list hasn't been recently or regularly cleared of unsubscribes and bounces. Other ESPs handle bounces differently than MailChimp so double check that your bounces aren't included when you upload your subscribed addresses.

There are no contracts and you can cancel at any time, but you won’t get a refund for fees you’ve already paid including email credits. You still have the option to temporarily pause monthly billing if you don't need to use MailChimp for a while.

Keep in mind that if you are on a paid account and want to go back to the Forever Free plan, you can downgrade only once over the life of your account.

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.

Automation icon

Automation (weighted 11%)

MailChimp

MailChimp offers an easy way to set up autoresponder emails. The interface is intuitive and has a lot of features.

Autoresponders allow MailChimp users to engage with their subscribers one-on-one by sending automated welcome emails, birthday messages, purchase follow-ups or even provide product recommendations based on previous purchases.

All the emails can be personalized based on customer interests, and you can send emails based on customers' website activity and behavioral targeting.

Keep in mind this is one of the features only available on paid plans, so free users will have to upgrade before using the automation features.

MailChimp has a few more features than Campaign Monitor, but the "transactional" emails in Campaign Monitor provide a nice way to deal with automation.

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.

The "transactional" email is a very elegant way to simplify automation, but there aren't quite as many features in Campaign Monitor when compared with MailChimp.

Extensibility icon

Extensibility (weighted 11%)

MailChimp

MailChimp offers an enormous number of integrations and add-ons.

Their Integrations Directory lists more than 800 integrations, so its pretty likely that your favorite apps will be included.

A few of MailChimp’s most popular add-ons and integrations are Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Shopify, Bigcommerce or Zoho.

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.

Campain Monitor has far, far fewer integrations than MailChimp .

Support icon

Support (weighted 11%)

MailChimp

MailChimp doesn’t have live telephone support.
The only way to communicate with them is by Email (you can reach them 24/7) or live chat (available Monday-Friday from 8am-6pm EST)

Email or chat support is only available after you become a paying customer, so free accounts can only use the self-service support available through their online knowledge base.

MailChimp’s team is active on social media especially on their Twitter and Facebook pages so if you are looking for a quick answer this might be the best option.

Overall, MailChimp's support is not quite as good as Campaign Monitor. Campaign Monitor at least lets some of their customers have access to phone support.

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. Campaign Monitor has a bit of an advantage over MailChimp in the support department.

 

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