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ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact: Which Email Features are Best?

Last Updated on September 5, 2022 by

In this post, we will compare side by side ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact. Find out which email marketing platform has the features you need for your business.

When it comes to reaching potential customers for your online business, the best and most effective method for doing so will involve the use of email marketing. It will allow you to efficiently market to your core target audience which can help you save money and further the overall progress of your business easily. There are several different things that you must consider when setting up an email marketing campaign such as how you will write the emails, at what frequency they will be sent out, to whom they will be sent, and much more. An important factor to consider when marketing using the email method is the deliverability rate of the messages that you send out. This is a measurement used to verify the number of times that an email message has been successfully delivered to the inbox of your newsletter subscribers.

There are several different web-based and software solutions out there for you to choose from all of which can help you create stunning e-mail marketing campaigns that will assist in helping your business succeed. Every business owner and online marketer has their own unique criteria and requirements in terms of how they want to approach their marketing strategy and all of the various email marketing solutions available can help you accomplish those tasks no matter what they are.

Why Go with ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign SCALES with best in class marketing automation features with many gradual pricing tiers. Whether you are running a store or blog, AC just WORKS! From basic automation triggers to advanced CRM-like functionality.

Try ActiveCampaign FREE
We earn a commission if you click this link and make a purchase at no additional cost to you.

Two of the most popular email marketing platforms out on the market today are ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact. Both of these platforms give you the ability to create high-quality email campaigns that you can use to promote special products, discounts, services, and offers to those visiting your website or interacting with your business.

While both marketing solutions have many of the same features, they do vary in terms of the overall user interface and the number of results that you can expect to see when using either platform. If you’re an individual who owns an online business or you create advertising campaigns for clients as part of your business, you’re probably looking for the right platform for you to further your efforts.

In this guide, we’re going to go over all of the most important features and capabilities that you’ll get access to when using either of these platforms for your email marketing needs. To begin, let’s take a look at exactly what ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact are so that you can get a clearer understanding as to how they can help you further your business success.

Main Differences Between ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact

The Main Differences Between ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact include:

  • ActiveCampaign split ad testing which allows you to optimize your overall marketing approach, whereas Constant Contact has lead scoring allows you to analyze the quality of the leads you’ve collected so far
  • ActiveCampaign has bulk social media marketing tools which allow you to target multiple social media channels at once, whereas Constant Contact has social media CRM management tools which allow you to easily handle relationships w/ customers
  • ActiveCampaign has lead scoring capabilities so that you can see the quality of those interacting with your marketing campaigns, whereas Constant Contact has event planning and management tools and sales report generation makes it easy for you to track revenue

These are some of the key differences that you can expect to see when using either platform as both of them are designed for particular marketing needs and campaign types in mind. You need to consider your needs on a personal basis so that you can analyze all of the features each platform comes with which will allow you to select the right option for your intended use.

Things such as your core audience, the size of your current business, the platforms in which customers interact with you and the type of marketing materials and avenues that you intend to use will all have an impact on your final decision when it comes to which platform will provide the most benefit to your efforts.

Now that we’ve gone over all of the main differences between both of these platforms, it’s time to take an in-depth look at what each platform does and their pricing plans.

ServicesAverage Investment Return Customer Support Plans
ActiveCampaign- It helps you with social media marketing.
- Offers CRM & Marketing Automation
- Collects you leads and has a great scoring system.
This program equips your website with automated features that help you increase your ROI. It uses intuitive customer outreach tools for your costumers.
You can access one-on-one trainings, videos, and guides.
- Lite: $9 per month
- Plus: $49 per month
- Professional: $129 per month
- Enterprise- $229 per month
Constant Contact- It gives you a report on your email status.
- You can easily integrate it with your social media accounts.
- Marketing automation.
The average ROI is $38 for every $1 spent.It offers a telephone number in case you need help, or a live chat option. From $20/month for 500 emails to $125/month for 10,000 emails

ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact: What are they?

In essence, both of these platforms are email marketing automation solutions that give you the ability to create, edit, publish, and track all of your email campaigns with ease. The options are nearly endless in terms of what you can achieve by using one of these platforms for your email advertising campaigns and other online marketing efforts. While both platforms have very similar features and capabilities, they do vary in some important areas which will impact how you use them and the results that you get.

To help you gain a clear picture of exactly what both of these online marketing solutions are, we’re going to give you a summary of each one below.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an all in one sales management and email marketing tool which allows you to manage your entire business effortlessly. It gives you the ability to automate many of the standard processes and techniques that you would otherwise have to implement into your marketing plan manually. It offers a powerful digital management campaign platform that you can use to target your core audience for increased engagement and interaction with your brand.

Ad testing, workflow automation, and CRM are just some of the main features that you’ll gain access to when using it. If you’re looking for a comprehensive marketing solution and platform, this has all of the capabilities that you could ask for.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is an email marketing tool which allows you to create and manage all of your various campaigns in one place. The platform gives you the ability to carry out a wide range of different essential tasks related to lead segmentation, invoice creation, lead scoring, and much more. It also has a lot of useful integration options and reporting tools that you can use to further the overall success of your business. The platform puts more of a focus on scoring and analyzing your existing campaign as opposed to helping you create new ones.

Now that we’ve gone over exactly what both of these email marketing platforms are, it’s time to look at some of the main differences that you’ll encounter when using either of them.

Pricing Options & Plans: ActiveCampaign vs. Constant Contact

Aside from the features and capabilities, one of the most important factors that will come into play when deciding on which email automation platform is right for you will be the monthly cost associated with the plan. Both of these platforms offer a wide range of plans and pricing options for you to choose from all of which will give you varying levels of access to the features included in their infrastructure. Depending on the size of your business and your preferred marketing style, you’ll need to choose a particular plan to ensure that you can use the features you need most.

In the following section, we’re going to go over some of the various plans and pricing options that you can choose from when using either of these email marketing solutions.

How much does ActiveCampaign cost?

ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of different pricing options and plans for you to choose from. All of them come with different capabilities and levels of access to the platform overall, below, we’re going to list all of the various pricing options and plans offered by the platform so that you can choose the right one for your needs.

Pricing Options

Lite- $9/mo.

  • Email marketing
  • Marketing automation
  • Unlimited sending
  • Send newsletters
  • Chat & Email Support
  • 3 Users

Plus- $49/mo.

  • Everything included in the lite plan
  • Unlimited sending
  • Lead & Contact Storing
  • CRM Sales Automation
  • Data Integrations
  • Custom user permissions
  • One on One Training
  • Custom branding
  • SMS marketing
  • 25 Users

Professional- $129/mo.

  • Attribution
  • 50 Users
  • Win Probability
  • Split Automations
  • Site Messaging
  • Unlimited sending
  • Everything included in the plus plan

Enterprise- $229/mo.

  • Everything included in the professional plan
  • Unlimited sending
  • Custom reporting
  • Custom domain
  • Custom mail server domain
  • Free design services
  • In-depth Onboarding
  • Dedicated account rep
  • Phone support
  • Free social data
  • Uptime SLA
  • Unlimited users
Why Go with ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign SCALES with best in class marketing automation features with many gradual pricing tiers. Whether you are running a store or blog, AC just WORKS! From basic automation triggers to advanced CRM-like functionality.

Try ActiveCampaign FREE
We earn a commission if you click this link and make a purchase at no additional cost to you.

What does Constant Contact cost?

Constant Contact has a lot of different plans and pricing options that you can choose from, each of these options give you access to different capabilities and functions. Below, we’re going to give you a detailed breakdown of all of the different plans you can choose from.

Pricing Options

Email

  • Unlimited emails
  • Branded or industry templates
  • Customizable templates
  • Ecommerce basic
  • Contact list import
  • Automated abandon cart
  • List building and welcome email tools
  • Pop-up forms
  • List segmentation
  • Facebook lead ads
  • Marketing calendar
  • Integrations and Apps
  • Image library
  • Reporting and Tracking
  • Mobile app
  • Learning Resources
  1. $20/mo.- 0-500 Emails
  2. $45/mo.- 502-2,500 Emails
  3. $65/mo.- 2,501-5,000 Emails
  4. $95/mo.- 5,001-10,000

Email Plus

  • Event marketing
  • Surveys
  • Polls
  • Coupons
  • Dynamic content
  • A/B ad testing
  • Automated email welcome series
  • Learning Resources
  • Automated email responder
  • Mobile app
  • Image library
  • Marketing calendar
  • Facebook lead ads
  • List segmentation
  • Customizable pop-up form creation
  • Contact list import
  • Ecommerce advanced
  • Customizable templates
  • Unlimited emails
  1. $45/mo.- 0-500 emails
  2. $70/mo.- 501-2,500 emails
  3. $95/mo.- 2,051-5,000
  4. $125/mo.- 5,001-10,000

All of these pricing options and plan give you access to different levels of access in terms of what you can do with the software and how you can use it to further your email marketing efforts. Before choosing a particular plan from either platform, consider your marketing needs and the type of features which will be most beneficial to your campaign. Both of these platforms offer intuitive capabilities and features which will allow you to further your overall marketing campaigns with ease.

Now that we’ve covered all of the various pricing options and plans that you can choose from when using either of these platforms, it’s time to look at the core mechanics behind both of them.

Core Mechanics: ActiveCampaign vs. Constant Contact

Both ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact have a lot of features that you can use to further the progress of your email marketing campaign however all of those capabilities vary depending on the platform that you decide to use. In the following section, we’re going to go over all of the different factors and capabilities that you’ll gain access to when using either of these platforms.

Make sure you read this entire section in full to ensure that you’re choosing the platform which will provide the most benefit to your marketing efforts. We’re going to cover all of the tools offered by both of these marketing solutions so that you will be able to make an educated decision about how you can use them to the advantage of your online business or services.

ActiveCampaign Core Mechanics

CRM & Marketing Automation

The platform gives you the ability to manage your customer relationships with ease using It’s intuitive customer outreach tools. You will be able to respond to customer questions, send out new promotions for your products and services, analyze ad performance, and much more. This will allow you to keep track of how customers are interacting with your brand and what they expect to see most. By having access to this kind of data about your target audience, you can optimize your marketing approach and techniques to bring greater results from your efforts.

The platform also gives you the ability to automate your marketing campaigns making it easier for you to spend more time doing valuable research instead of configuring your campaign rules manually for each new effort. You can set a schedule by which your emails will be sent out, who they will be sent to, and what channel you want to send them through. Both of these features make it really easy for you to begin taking control of your email campaigns in a way that is organized and effective.

Consistency is important when it comes to marketing of any kind which is why having the ability to automate the process is so valuable. This is one of the core capabilities of this platform which makes it such a highly sought-after solution for many serious online marketing experts. Understanding how your customers interact with your brand is also another really important factor when it comes to determining the overall success of your business. With the integrated CRM system, you can easily manage all of the key details you need to know about your customers to further optimize your efforts.

Lead Tracking & Scoring

Collecting leads is easy with ActiveCampaign thanks to its intuitive lead tracking to see ng and scoring system. The platform gives you the ability to see real-time analytics and statistics about your current leads and how they score in terms of overall quality so that you will be able to determine which leads you to need to target more. The way in which the leads are tracked and scored will vary depending on the marketing channel used to capture them. Gathering key details such as this can be very integral in advancing the overall success of your business.

The platform makes it easy for you to filter through captured leads so that you can find the ones in which serve the most potential benefits for the amount of effort that you put in.

Campaign Reporting

When you run an email marketing campaign, it’s important to know about how well it was received by those targeted so that you can optimize your efforts. This platform gives you access to auto-generated campaign reporting and analytics information that you can use to advance the progress of your marketing efforts easily. This is really useful for finding out which marketing strategy works best, how you can better optimize your campaigns for future implementations, and practically anything else you have in mind when it comes to your advertising efforts.

Integrations

If you already have existing social media accounts set-up, you can seamlessly integrate them into your dashboard with ease. It allows you to sync a wide range of different social media profiles from sites like Facebook, Twitter, and more. This can be used to implement cool additions into your existing marketing materials and it will also allow you to get a side by side comparison as to how your email marketing efforts are paying off when compared to the results you’re getting from social media.

You can use integrations how you want and it makes the entire process much easier in terms of managing bulk marketing campaigns.

Auto Responders

Responding to every single email that you get is nearly impossible especially if you have a rather large brand and following. With this platform, you can easily set-up custom response messages that will be sent to your leads based on specific actions that they take in relation to your content and other aspects of your marketing ads. You can set up multiple different auto-response messages that are all customized to meet the specific topic or promotion of your campaign at any given moment.

Constant Contact Core Mechanics

Contact Management

Constant Contact makes it easy for you to manage all of the leads you’ve captured through your marketing campaigns. You can easily sort through all of the newsletter subscribers that have interacted with your content, ignored your content, opened the emails, and much more. This is a great way for you to go through your contact list and perform quality control so that you can assure you’re only marketing to people who have a real interest in the services or products that you’re offering.

Each contact will be marked with a special indicator or marking which will alert you of their overall quality as a lead. This makes it even easier to identify those who are really valuable in terms of being a customer and those who you should delete from your list.

Deliverability Tracking

When using an automated email marketing platform, one of the most common issues that people run into is that of low deliverability rates. The deliverability rate is the rate by which your emails successfully make it into the inbox of those who you are marketing your content to. Many email service providers have integrated software into their programs which automatically detects potential emails as spam moving them into the trash box.

This platform tracks the number of emails that have been successfully received in a lead’s inbox so that you can adjust your template to see what may be causing issues.

List Building

Even if you own a very niche online business, it’s important to understand all of the different lead segments that are engaged with your brand or product to ensure maximum results from your efforts. With this platform you can easily build lists that include leads based on very specific parameters and characteristics, this will allow you to optimize the rate at which you create and send emails out to potential customers in a very targeted manner.

You can easily manage your lists and add or remove leads from it as you wish in addition to setting up special alerts which will tell you how lists are performing when compared to one another.

Reports & Tracking

You need to know how your campaign is performing so that you can optimize it for better results. With the tracking and reporting feature from Constant Contact, you can do just that with built-in tracking and analytics report generation tools that will give you insight into how your campaign is performing and how you can adjust it in certain areas to see better results. This is a very useful tool for any email marketer that is serious about gaining the most from their marketing efforts.

Now that we’ve gone over all of the core mechanics you’ll gain access to when using either of these platforms, it’s time to look at some of the pros and cons between the two so that you can decide on which solution is right for your needs.

Pros & Cons: ActiveCampaign vs. Constant Contact

Both of these platforms come with their own unique benefits and disadvantages in terms of the features and capabilities you get access to. In order for you to make the right decision, you need to know about all of these various aspects. Below, we’re going to go over some of the top pros and cons that you’ll encounter when using either of these platforms.

ActiveCampaign Pros

  • Drag and drop email designer tool which makes it easy for you to create high-quality email advertisements that encourage your leads to interact
  • Advanced targeting and audience segmentation makes it easy for you to hone in on specific sectors of your core leads
  • Auto-responder capabilities make it easy for you to maintain active interaction between your brand and leads
  • List reporting allows you to see which leads are interacting the most with your brand

ActiveCampaign Cons

  • No free plan option paid subscription required

Constant Contact Pros

  • Seamless social media integration makes it easy for you to manage all of your campaigns in one place
  • Marketing automation so that you can set your campaigns on auto-pilot and not have to worry about manually doing everything
  • Reporting and tracking capabilities let you stay on top of how your campaign is performing so that you can make adjustments if needed
  • Deliverability tracking allows you to see exactly how many emails have been successfully delivered to the inbox of your leads

Constant Contact Cons

  • Limited features and capabilities when compared to other solutions out there

Our Choice

When it comes to which email marketing automation solution we choose, it’s hands down ActiveCampaign and for several different reasons. One of the main ones being it’s robust functionality and feature set which allows you to handle all of your marketing needs in one place. It has an easy to use dashboard and overall interface that makes optimizing your campaign easy.

FAQs

How does the billing work for the subscription plans on these platforms?

Each platform has different plan options you can choose from ranging in the way in which they are billed

How do I get started using these platforms?

Once you sign up, you will be able to follow the instructions on the screen in order to complete the setup process

Is there a money-back guarantee if I’m not satisfied with the service?

Some of these platforms do offer a money-back guarantee however not all of them do so keep that in mind

Conclusion

We’ve discussed all of the most important details and information that you need to know when it comes to choosing which of these marketing automation solutions is right for you. Before signing up for either of these platforms, make sure you take your own needs into consideration related to how you plan on targeting your leads and your preferred method of marketing. This will allow you to make an educated decision about which platform will provide you with the most benefit in terms of optimizing your marketing campaign to see the results you expect.

Why Go with ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign SCALES with best in class marketing automation features with many gradual pricing tiers. Whether you are running a store or blog, AC just WORKS! From basic automation triggers to advanced CRM-like functionality.

Try ActiveCampaign FREE
We earn a commission if you click this link and make a purchase at no additional cost to you.

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Marketing Satchel Team

The Marketing Satchel team is a group of business and marketing professionals that came together to help others struggling with these topics. We're here to make sure that you understand all of the important parts of marketing.