The Email Marketing Face-Off

Email Marketing is a great way to reach a defined audience. With so many tools competing for your attention, how do you decide which product to use? Here’s a handy analysis of the most popular options.

Mail Chimp is the most robust, closely followed by Campaign Monitor. Both of these products have a diverse set of tools available to meet the client’s needs: templates with easy-to-edit content fields make using these systems friendly to even the most novice users. For the more savvy user or the client with a more specific branding need, html/css import options are available to deliver a completely branded email experience to the clients’ mail recipients. Testing in the most popular email clients ensures that all users receive the same experience, a nice feature.

Mail Chimp offers some super snazzy features like mobile management of your lists, reports and scheduling, as well as some interesting features like commenting and social media integrations. All the options within this tool are intuitive to implement making this solution a great one for a client-managed email newsletter solution.

Campaign Monitoroffers similar features, with the additional ability to manage multiple clients within the same dash, making CM a great solution for content and brand managers that are doing work for multiple clients or products.

Constant Contact, with its slick drag & drop content implementation system and website RSS feature is by far the most common tool I see being used. Its got a great reputation, but in terms of form and function, its the least robust of the tools I assessed for this blog. Constant Contact lacks lots of the the bells and whistles featured by the other two tools, but the ones that really ax it from the list, in my opinion, are, the inability to fully customize its templates and its lack of an online archive for past issues. These missing features make the similar price point unjustified.