We are great fans of Email marketing and use both Dotmailer and ConstantContact on behalf of clients and in-house. So we're in a fairly good position to compare these two email marketing tools.
The first thing to say is that both are very good and represent a great way to get into real Email marketing. If you are currently sending out emails to clients by using BCC fields then you need to understand that you are probably getting a lot of your emails stuck in unwanted email filters - and a proper email marketing system is worth the relatively small investment.
Dotmailer and ConstantContact both provide facilities as follows;
- Managing email contact lists - and import customer data from various sources. Comparison: DM 7/10 - CC 9/10. ConstantContact is the clear winner because of it's far better tools for adding contacts direct from Outlook and a more flexible and powerful CSV import function
- Create HTML emails from templates and from scratch. Comparison: DM 9/10 - CC 8/10. Both have great editing functions but with different strengths and weaknesses. DM doesn't work in Firefox which is a bit pathetic. But otherwise it's very easy to use. CC's edit function is even better however - and allows incredibly easy manipulation of templates. But is plagued by a over-rigid editing process which is always flashing up 'save' warnings and just has not been thought through fully.
- Personalise emails with information from your contact lists. Comparison Dotmailer 9/10 - ConstantContact 9.5/10. Very effective but CC still a smidge ahead because of a slightly easier edit function.
- Send emails - with a high degree of deliverability. Comparison: DM 10/10 - CC 10/10. Both excellent.
- Report on email campaigns. Comparison: DM 8/10 - CC 7/10. I don't really find the ConstantContact reporting function very intuitive. And the calculated percentages of click-through rates are just WRONG! Both need improvement though.
- Report on individual click-through behaviour and use it to modify your contact lists (essential for segmentation). Comparison: DM 5/10 (the basic version) CC 8.5/10. For me this is one of the most important functions and Dotmailer basic version just doesn't allow this. But if you upgrade to DM Pro or whatever its called, it does do it. CC's reporting for individual behaviour is good and its very easy to then create segmented contact lists - which is very important for when you start getting clever about email marketing.
- Allow customers to subscribe via a web page, unsubscribe, request HTML or plain formats. Comparison: DM 9/10 - CC 8/10.
Which gives us the totals: Dotmailer 57/70 - Constant Contact 60/70. Which is all very approximate but does just about reflect our opinion that ConstantContact is functionally stronger - but not by much. Whereas we actually prefer using the Dotmailer template editor (even though we have to use IE) because of it's better usability. And of course the Dotmailer Pro package is about 60/70 as well - making them very equal!
Pricing is an important difference. Dotmailer charge per email sent, whereas ConstantContact charge per Contact. So if you have large lists that you want to send to infrequently DM is cheaper, but if you want to send emails to your whole list every week or every day (please don't) then ConstantContact is cheapest. But you should get quotes because both have direct sales teams who will do deals if asked!
Customer service from boith companies is good but Dotmailer offer a much better service if you are based in the UK by virtue of being based there.
We hope that this comparison of email marketing tools is useful. As mentioned above, we use both tools very happily and it's our strong belief that you should be using one of them - or some other good alternative.
Whatever your preference, Chilli Digital can help you select a good email marketing platform, build your templates and get started with campaigns. Or if you want to go further, we can help you to use email marketing to completely re-engineer your whole customer experience and customer information strategy.
