Constant Contact is a great email marketing tool with an excellent campaign builder, sufficient automation capabilities, and social media marketing integrations.
However, it may not be the best tool for you due to some cons, like basic automation, no free plan, and limited omnichannel integrations.
This post discusses the three leading Constant Contact alternatives that may fit your business best depending on the features and functions you need.
For instance, businesses looking for advanced automation, segmentation, and analytics may opt for a tool like ActiveCampaign. etc.
Before the detailed review, here’s a quick overview of our top Constant Contact alternatives.
Let’s have a quick overview of the three leading Constant Contact alternatives.
Best overall: ActiveCampaign
No
$39
Powerful automation features
Broad functionality including CRM
Robust reporting capabilities
Well-established ecommerce businesses, B2B companies
ActiveCampaign is Constant Contact’s best alternative overall for its wide range of features. The platform provides powerful automation, excellent segmentation, and intuitive email marketing and CRM capabilities.
If you find Constant Contact’s automation feature basic or need a more advanced email marketing solution overall, then ActiveCampaign would be a great alternative. This is especially true for established businesses looking for a wide range of functionality.
ActiveCampaign also offers excellent reporting and compatibility with other marketing channels, including SMS, web push, and social media.
However, the SMS add-on costs an extra fee and is unavailable on the lowest-tier plan. There are also endless third-party integration options to try.
ActiveCampaign pros and cons
- Robust marketing automation features
- Extended tracking and reporting capabilities
- Very broad functionality, including CRM, sales management, transactional emails, etc.
- High price
- Might be overwhelming for marketers
- No signup form templates
Runner-up: Mailchimp
Yes
$13
Easy to use basics
Very good landing page builder
A lot of different reports available
Solopreneurs, startups, non-profit organizations
Mailchimp is another one of the best Constant Contact alternatives that is equally affordable. Mailchimp is amongst the most popular email marketing platforms, and it’s well known for its ease of use and wide range of features.
Mailchimp’s email automation and segmentation features are pretty robust. Also, this may be a good alternative if you’re looking for more in-depth analytics.
Mailchimp is best suited for small businesses or beginner marketers looking for an easy-to-use platform.
The tool also offers a relatively generous free plan for businesses on a budget or beginner marketers looking to try out email marketing. The tool has many unique email marketing features, including postcards and inbox preview tokens.
Mailchimp pros and cons
- A wide range of integrations with ecommerce platforms and other tools
- Advanced segmentation
- Behavioral targeting
- Pre-built marketing automation
- Beautiful email templates
- Priority phone support
- Pricing similar to Constant Contact
- Mailchimp doesn't have built-in SMS channel
- Mailchimp doesn't have multi-step popups
Best cheap alternative: Brevo
Yes
$25
Transactional emails
WhatsApp and Facebook marketing
Multi-list subscriptions
Bloggers, non-profit organizations, ecommerce beginners
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is among the best Constant Contact alternatives for its affordability and omnichannel marketing features.
Brevo’s pricing plans are suitable for businesses that have long contact lists. The pricing plans aren’t based on the number of subscribers but rather on the monthly emails you send.
This makes Brevo cheaper than most other email marketing automation software.
Further, Brevo provides multiple marketing options to combine with your email marketing workflows. These include SMS, live chat, social media chat, web push, and WhatsApp chat.
Unlike Constant Contact, Brevo provides a great free plan with access to several essential features. This is excellent for beginner marketers on a budget. You can also send transactional emails through this platform with ease.
Brevo pros and cons
- A generous free plan
- Great compatibility with marketing channels
- Sufficient marketing automation features
- Transactional emails
- Friendly pricing plans and more
- Basic signup forms
- Quite basic reporting in comparison to Mailchimp
- Many features don’t work out of the box, require extra setup
Best Constant Contact alternatives
ActiveCampaign: features that stand out
- Built-in CRM: The ActiveCampaign CRM feature helps you track your customers at every point of the sales pipeline and build automation journeys to help you close the deal.
- Innumerable prebuilt workflows: ActiveCampaign has a marketplace with 700+ automation workflow templates that you can customize to fit your customer needs.
- Message variables: This feature helps you create constant blocks of text, like a signature, and allocates personalization tags to them, which you can pull directly into your emails when building campaigns.
- Comprehensive reporting: Customers on the highest-tier plan get attribution reports, site tracking, and custom reports in addition to the standard customer engagement reports.
- Free design service: With this feature, you can choose a design from the template options provided, and ActiveCampaign team will customize it to match the look and feel of your brand (available to higher-tier plans).
Building an email campaign
The ActiveCampaign email campaign builder has a wider range of functionality, but just like Constant Contact, it’s pretty easy to navigate.
ActiveCampaign also has numerous content block options, including countdown timers and banners. The platform also offers 230+ modern-looking email design templates that you can customize.
Constant Contact offers free templates, but some of them look outdated.
You can also save your email campaign templates and edit them for future campaigns instead of starting from scratch every time.
Another useful feature is the saved history feature which allows you to view all the changes you’ve made to an email campaign. This is a unique feature you won’t find on Constant Contact.
Marketing automation
ActiveCampaign has one of the market’s most comprehensive sales and marketing automation functionalities. The tool provides 700+ prebuilt templates with workflow logic that you can customize to fit your audience’s needs.
Constant Contact’s automation feature isn’t as robust. The platform only provides 15 prebuilt automation templates, which is a limited number.
The only downside to ActiveCampaign’s automation feature is that it can be too advanced for beginner marketers.
Forms and list management
ActiveCampaign forms aren’t as robust as tools like Omnisend, but they’re better than Constant Contact. You’ll get a few basic layouts that you can customize. You can choose for your forms to appear as:
- Floating boxes
- Popups
- Floating bars
- In-line forms.
There are landing pages but only on the Plus plan going up. ActiveCampaign provides 50+ landing page templates that are modern-looking and easy to customize. Constant Contact’s landing page builder is pretty basic, with no templates.
ActiveCampaign’s CRM feature makes list management easier as you can access and communicate with all your contacts from a single platform. Constant Contact’s CRM feature isn’t as comprehensive as ActiveCampaign’s.
ActiveCampaigns segmentation feature is pretty robust — you get 150+ segmentation triggers. It’s also unique to create segments and select lists from the email campaign builder.
Constant Contact provides beginner-level segmentation capabilities.
Compatibility with other marketing channels
ActiveCampaign integrates with a wide range of marketing channels. You can combine your email campaigns with
- Web push notifications
- SMS messages
- Facebook Leads
- Facebook Custom Audiences
Constant Contact provides a wide integration with social media platforms and provides an SMS add-on at an extra fee but lacks a web push feature.
Price
Compared to Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign is expensive since it provides more features. The sales and marketing features are provided as separate bundles; you can choose either. You can also buy add-ons like SMS separately.
Why choose ActiveCampaign instead of Constant Contact
If you feel that you’ve outgrown Constant Contact capabilities and looking for an advanced platform overall with a wide range of functionalities, excellent automation, and in-depth reporting, then ActiveCampaign would be the best ConstantContact alternative.
Why choose Constant Contact instead of ActiveCampaign
While ActiveCampaign has robust features, it may be too complex for smaller businesses. So if you’re looking for a platform that is easy to use, has good enough automation, and great social media marketing, then Constant Contact is a better choice.
Mailchimp: features that stand out
- Dynamic content block: This feature allows you to send a single email campaign to multiple recipients but only allows them to see what’s relevant to them.
- Postcards: This feature allows you to engage your customers offline by sending them postcards for as low as 75 cents.
- Subject line recommendations: This feature uses AI to generate compelling subject lines based on performance data from past emails sent through Mailchimp.
- Inbox preview tokens: Mailchimp partners with Litmus to help you view emails exactly as they appear in your customer’s inbox.
Building an email campaign
Like Constant Contact, the Mailchimp email editor is intuitive and easy to use. You can easily remove and add content blocks and images, edit subject lines, content, etc.
While some of Constant Contact’s email templates appear outdated, Mailchimp provides users with 100+ modern-looking email templates, which are only available on paid plans. On the free plan, there are 6 templates, and they all look very basic.
Mailchimp, however, has some unique functions like dynamic content blocks, postcards, and an inbox preview feature that Constant Contact lacks.
Marketing automation
Mailchimp’s marketing automation feature is pretty robust compared to Constant Contact. The tool provides 70+ prebuilt workflow templates, called customer journeys, that you can customize and add content.
Unlike Mailchimp, Constant Contact provides fewer (15) email automation workflow templates, which come with logic and ready copy. This is convenient for beginners.
With Mailchimp, you can integrate with social media, but the platform doesn’t have built-in SMS functionality. However, if you have already started your SMS marketing using Constant Contact, you will be able to continue it on Mailchimp by integrating it with Twilio or another SMS provider.
One thing that Mailchimp has over Constant Contact in this category is that it provides multiple automation triggers and more complex conditions.
Constant Contact has limited automation triggers, and you’ll only get common ecommerce use cases, such as welcome series, offers, re-engaging customers, etc.
Forms and list management
Constant Contact’s forms and landing page builders are limited. The platform also lacks beautiful templates.
Mailchimp may be a better option if you’re looking to make attractive signup forms and landing pages.
Mailchimp offers modern-looking signup page layouts and boasts an excellent drag-and-drop landing page builder with comprehensive features. There are 9 attractive landing page templates that are easily customizable.
List management is easy for both Mailchimp and Constant Contact. However, with Mailchimp, you’ll be required to pay for duplicate contacts, which is a downside.
Mailchimp’s segmentation feature is also quite robust compared to Constant Contact. You can easily add tags to your audiences and include up to five conditions for each segment.
Compatibility with other marketing channels
Mailchimp is compatible with other marketing channels like:
- Google Analytics
The platform lacks SMS and web push notifications.
Constant Contact offers SMS at an extra fee (only for US users) and connects seamlessly with more social media channels like Twitter and LinkedIn.
Price
Mailchimp’s prices are generally lower on lower-tier plans compared to Constant Contact. The platform also offers a free plan with access to a few essential email marketing functions.
Why choose Mailchimp instead of Constant Contact
You can choose Mailchimp instead of Constant Contact if you’re looking for an affordable email marketing tool with a wider range of functionality. Mailchimp offers a free plan, more in-depth reporting, automation, and advanced segmentation.
Why choose Constant Contact instead of Mailchimp
You can choose Constant Contact over Mailchimp for its integration with most social media platforms and SMS marketing. The platform also has a mobile app that you can use to monitor your email campaigns on the go.
Brevo: features that stand out
- Transactional emails: Brevo allows you to send transactional emails in real-time, a great feature, especially for email marketing beginners.
- Best time function: Brevo generates ideal times to send emails based on performance data from previous emails sent.
- Omnichannel marketing: Brevo provides multiple integrations with other marketing channels like SMS, web push, WhatsApp chat, and more.
- Multi-list subscription: You can include this feature in your signup forms, and your audience can choose which mailing list to subscribe to.
Building an email campaign
Building email campaigns on Brevo is just as easy and intuitive as with Constant Contact. You get email templates, a clear email builder, and useful content blocks.
Some templates that Brevo offers appear outdated, and very few occasion-ready templates exist. Brevo also offers fewer templates compared to Constant Contact.
You can easily set up your brand library and add items like brand images, style, etc. It’s also easy to personalize email subject lines and preheaders.
Regarding building an email campaign, Constant Contact seems more robust.
Marketing automation
Brevo does better than Constant Contact because it allows you to add SMS and web push messages to your email automation series.
Brevo also has a time optimization feature to automatically send emails at ideal times and transactional emails to give customers real-time transaction updates.
Forms and list management
Brevo signup forms and landing pages fall behind what you can find on Constant Contact. Mostly because of missing analytics.
However, Brevo offers unique features like multi-list subscriptions, blocklisting, and the ability to add a captcha to your forms. These features are missing in Constant Contact.
Compatibility with other marketing channels
Brevo offers an extensive list of integrations with other marketing channels, more channels than Constant Contact provides. The options include:
- SMS marketing
- Web push notifications
- Website live chat
- WhatsApp chat
- Facebook chat
- Instagram chat
- Facebook ads (available for Business and Enterprise plans).
Price
Brevo’s pricing is based on the emails you send each month, and you can keep an unlimited contact list. This is one of the biggest upsides that make the platform a suitable Constant Contact alternative.
The free plan is also pretty generous in terms of features.
Why choose Brevo instead of Constant Contact
You can choose Brevo over Constant Contact if you’re looking for a generous free plan with essential email marketing features. You can also choose it if you want more omnichannel marketing integrations like SMS and web push.
Why choose Constant Contact instead of Brevo
You can choose Constant Contact over Brevo for its numerous customer support options, ease of use, and social media marketing capabilities.
Constant Contact alternative to avoid: Drip
When looking for Constant Contact alternatives, some tools make for better options than others. Drip’s one of the most popular ecommerce email marketing tools that provide great automation and segmentation capabilities.
So why isn’t it an ideal Constant Contact alternative?
One, Drip’s pricing plans are pricey compared to most competitor tools. So, as far as pricing goes, you’d be better off with Constant Contact.
Also, If you’re looking for a Constant Contact alternative, you’d probably not want to give up its integrations with social media platforms. Drip doesn’t offer native integrations with any of these channels, making it less ideal.
Its email campaign builder is also less intuitive; it lacks a landing page builder and has limited customer support options.
Constant Contact alternatives: Summary
While looking for Constant Contact alternatives, it’s best to look at each feature keenly and compare those against your business needs.
If you’re looking for advanced alternatives, ActiveCampaign would be ideal. Mailchimp and Brevo are affordable alternatives offering a free plan in case you’re on a budget.
If none of the above tools are ideal and you want a more ecommerce-focused solution, try Omnisend.
Ultimately, the platform you choose will depend on what your business needs and your budget.
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Our team strives to be accurate and unbiased in reviewing email tools. However, we recognize that mistakes can happen, and it’s essential for us to stay up to date. If you come across any errors or things that need to be reviewed again, please let us know.
