Constant Contact vs. Insightly vs. Intuit Mailchimp

Constant Contact is an excellent tool for sending out flyers and newsletters. However, I feel the content's appearance is typically all the same. When I receive an email from Constant Contact, I can immediately identify it - the templates usually all look the same. When sending out communications with images, it is easy to use Constant Contact and link webpages. However, the email layout is always vertical and can get very lengthy. I prefer a more flip-book approach with options to flip the page.

Incentivized

There are a lot of things Insightly is great with for Career Services but much of my job is updating things manually because Insightly doesn't have a way to help me manage the database the way we need to. We have multiple academic records per students but needed to have fields that are multiselect on our contacts. These are all manually updated which are very tedious and not the best for what we need it to be able to do

Incentivized

For any E-commerce related needs, like you need to see a list of customers who have added products to cart but did not purchase, this can be done really easily, but if your e-commerce provider provides integration, then it is best suited. Most of the systems in the Market provide out-of-the-box integration. Their API is also very easy it can be integrated to any language. You can integrate it into your custom developed system and use the features, like adding customers to specific lists. Also, if your lists become really big, then their system can get a bit slow to respond via API, so you might need a strategy for how you are gonna fetch the data using API.

Incentivized

• Market segmentation is great: my main segmentation is by region because that's how our sales team is divided.
• Lists: making customized email lists is easy and intuitive; the custom fields allow some flexibility in case our fields don't exactly line up with Constant Contact's.
• Campaigns: creating campaigns is quick and simple. I especially appreciate the 'resend to non-openers' option. I am constantly using this feature.
• Subject line generator: I like using the recommended subject lines. I'm able to plug in their recommended ideas, or sometimes, this feature helps me generate my own ideas.

• The ability to set up filters to generate lists based on just the categories I am interested in.
• It's integration with our sales data so we can see customer spending trends across multiple years and seasons.
• The ability to circle back to previous email correspondence to refresh on past conversations with individual clients.

Incentivized

• Mailchimp allows you to manage your mailing list really well. You can subscribe people, unsubscribe people manage the mailing list directly into segments, and what not.
• Mailchimp has features where you can create campaigns based on your mailing lists and send out newsletters to your subscribers based on a multitude of parameters that you can setup. Such as send email daily, weekly, monthly and they also have event based mails that you can send out.
• Mailchimp also has a feature where you can design your emails. The look and aesthetics are very important when sending emails to your subscribers and all those needs are addressed here.

Incentivized

• It would be nice if we had more customizable options for emails - like moving around pictures and text boxes, rather than a set spot for everything to go.
• I would like it if multiple people could work on a document at one time. So if I'm in charge of graphics, I can get those updated while someone else is entering content, etc.

Incentivized

• Once you are immersed in the platform, for all of its integration kudos, the platform became "intuitive" if that is the right word for it. There was some push back from staff on deployment.
• The service and support team at Insightly was very responsive, but it seemed as if they had fielded similar complaints, and slower learning curves than we expected.
• Unfortunately, while all has worked out nicely now and we are very happy with the platform, we had to have additional instruction time for all the staff during onboarding as workflows, dashboards, and pipelines were more time intensive than expected on the demo.

Incentivized

• The pricing tiers do scale quickly so if you have a free newsletter it may get expensive
• The pricing is based on total emails so if you have users who you only email rarely it might not make sense to use Intuit Mailchimp
• Customer support can be a bit lacking at times and their docs aren't always the best

There is no doubt that we are going to renew Constant Contact. We have not just invested a lot of time in learning and creating a great looking product but we have developed a strong database of information that allows us to track how we are doing for each newsletter. This supports our goals of creating products that residents desire and are excited to receive.

Insightly offers a great product; it's the right fit for our company at this time. We were, however, considering moving to Contactually due to their cost effective automation features. However, they lacked the project management capabilities of Insightly. As our company grows, we would love to stay with Insightly - and if they can nail the automation and add the ability to customize a little bit more, it would be the perfect solution for us. For a larger company with a more involved sales team, you might find the metrics/reporting to be a bit basic. Insightly offers great customer service even to free customers

We've had Mailchimp for about ten years, I want to say. I started with the company about four years ago, and I don't see us ever diverting to another source. It's easy for us to use, and we have all our clients already built into the database. I imagine we'll use them for as long as we have the company.

Incentivized

There is always room for improvement. I don't know how they test their systems, but they should invite not-so computer savvy people to test it. If I, as an expert have problems, they need to think like the technophobe. Since I've used Constant Contact in the past as part of my former employment, I have not viewed any of the tutorials and just jumped in to work on my client's newsletter. With that said, I found some areas easy and some a bit cumbersome

Anyone with any experience with a working knowledge of Facebook or using a Windows computer will be able to quickly adapt to Insightly and use it to suit their needs. It can become more difficult to use as a company might have custom workflows or Insightly customer service might need to customize the program to better suit a company's need. A slow introduction to the system is better than having to learn the program quickly. Parts and knowledge build on each other so it hard to grasp all at once. The learning curve for Insightly is 2-3 weeks while mastery comes with time and exposure to the program

Incentivized

The interface is a bit complicated, and I need to spend some time to learn new functions and understanding how it works. I don't like working with email templates because of the limited customization options. However, functions like AI for generating emails, segmentation, and analytics still work well and are very useful.

Incentivized

No major problems in sending out the email campaigns and accessing the analytics

Incentivized

The provider is 100% available, with no downtime, maintenance, or unexpected outages. We have been able to perform solid continuous services for 12 months without any interruptions. We have backups as well, unlike the in-house backup that they keep on their end. I believe they have a very good redundancy and backup infrastructure in case they get any outages.

Incentivized

I have, in the 4+ years that I've used Mailchimp, never seen an issue that restricted the use of their software/tools. I don't know of a single time when they're system crashed or went down. I could be wrong, but I honestly haven't experienced any issues with outages, errors or unplanned downtime

Incentivized

The system seemed quite slow sometimes. Specifically, there was sometimes a delay in sends if it was during a high traffic period. There were time-outs when uploading new code for an email, and a lag in reporting analytics which was sometimes as long as 72 hours

Pages normally load quickly, but every now and then, as entering updates to fields, it take a while to update. Sometimes even after refreshing the screen, we have to exit and go back in to get the fields or queries to update.

Incentivized

I haven't noticed any slow speeds from Mailchimp or their tools. I think the landing pages load quickly and look nice. The email reports and editing operates smoothly and doesn't take time to load. Additionally, when I use Mailchimp in conjunction with Zapier + Hubspot I don't notice any drag between any of these tools

Incentivized

I think the overall support for Constant Contact has always been incredible; I have nothing negative to say. Our customer support representative was attentive, easy to understand, and very knowledgeable. I never felt like I wasn't a priority of his and my issues, while very small, were fixed in a very short time frame.

We have used Insightly for almost 2 years now. We have always been able to get in touch with support for a variety of reasons and they have never disappointed us. The support staff have always been very understanding. They have assisted with answers to our questions and have provided great tech support. We would highly recommend them.

Incentivized

Website tools were easy to use and understand so a novice can easily meet or exceed their client's expectations! Loved that we were able to totally customize so that the e-mail we created conveyed our client's overall messaging consistent with their branding! Client love that we can provide turnkey services to support their sales and marketing teams!

Incentivized

Well, we didn’t get the chance to do this in-person training but rather one-on-one online training with HR in-house. There were PowerPoints to discuss as well as video instructions on how to use the app, so it was okay. We were able to play around with it during the training or onboarding session.

Incentivized

I've used Insightly's online training &/ or learned as I went. I've found the blogs and online written material helpful. I've also attended a few webinars, which can be useful if you use a J-I-T approach so as not to overwhelm you (or your staff) with functionality that you are using just yet. The fact that it's all available on their website and you can learn at your own pace is invaluable

Incentivized

Implementation is very easy for someone who wants to send out the “batch and blast” type newsletters. If you want to use their templates with no customizations, the product works fine. However, the more customizations you get into involving link color, etc, that’s where things can get tricky for someone who may not be familiar with coding

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Incentivized

It's pretty easy to get up and running! There's a slight learning curve on a few things, but once you find where everything is located, you can import your list and send your first email. It really makes our clients feel great to see how quickly they can get that first email out.

Incentivized

Constant Contact is much more intuitive for people who are not tech-savvy. Also, while sendgrid offered more options in it's drag and drop interface, it displayed differently across different email clients, which made it very cumbersome to use. It also took much longer to upload contact lists and it was harder to manage existing contacts. Performance in sendgrid was much slower as well, and the Preview feature was quite buggy. Our team initially chose sendgrid because of the integration options that it's API offered, but we ultimately switched to Constant Contact because it was much easier to build campaigns and better suited our requirements.

Insightly is significantly better than Zendesk. It is easy to use, pleasant to look at, and makes sense. However, I don't think Insightly is fair now compared to Salesforce. Insightly can do many of the same things as Salesforce, but I've only started on some of these features. Insightly has excellent potential, and its support team drives me to make it what I believe it can be. For the price, I believe Insightly is worth it.

Incentivized

I don't think they are comparable; we use Google Ads to put our website at the top of the list when someone googles certain words. We use meta business to manage our social media. Google aims to gain customers, while Mailchimp is used to interact with both existing and new customers.

Incentivized

I don’t have the exact answers for this, but our accounting or finance department negotiates this. They always handle this kind of stuff and negotiate yearly licenses. Usually, they purchase 10 licenses in bulk and ask for a discount in bulk. Other than that, if there are any issues encountered on the app, they account for that. If it’s broken, that’s also taken into consideration when renewing the contract.

Incentivized

Very reliable in sending email campaigns and controlling the recipients so that no contact is sent the same email more than once, even if they are on a resent list

Incentivized

(+) Being able to download my LinkedIn connections was a huge benefit. (+) I use the task function to stay on top of my follow-up activity which is another positive feature. (+) The sorting capabilities also help me pinpoint the contacts that I need to stay on top of. (-) When I add a new lead from an existing organization, I would like the organization's information to automatically populate the fields like address, website, description. I enter all that information manually. (-) My mass mailing experience has been tedious due to the email function being interrupted and crashing due to bad email addresses in some of my records. (-) Many of my leads do not have current email addresses. I wish Insightly offered a tool to help find email addresses. I spend too much time researching to find email addresses.

Incentivized

Mailchimp over the years I've used it has grown in leaps and bounds. They have added so many additional features than were previously available. They are truly an all-in-one marketing platform now. If you're a small operation and just want to add email to your marketing efforts, they're there for you. If you're a larger operation and want to start sending postcard advertisements, they can do that. If you'd good with that and want to kick up your marketing by going social, you can do that on their platform. They are truly able to be as small as you need, but also get quite large in whatever it is you'd like to do through their system.

Incentivized

Our Customer Success Manager was great. A real professional and knowledgeable about the features and how they worked with our requirements

Incentivized

• I have had nothing but positive impacts from using Constant Contact.
• The church is large, and there are many subgroups and axillary groups within the church. Setting up specific groups based on responsibility, interest, member goals, and service needs allows me to send information quickly, saving valuable time for other tasks.
• Constant Contact allows leadership to stay personally engaged with the members I work with, without over-taxing my time. It feels so seamless.

Incentivized

• Positive Impact>Visibility is critical when it comes to taking proactive measures within the organization. The Insightly Tool has helped use with that which minimizes costs when it comes to rework. We can proactively plan for upcoming growth and identify areas of improvement.

Incentivized

• One of my retail web store clients was sending out email specials and notices about once a month. After clicking the send button, we would watch Google Analytics and the current site users would light up immediately. Often, the current site visitors would pop up to 20, 30 or more after the email was sent. On a normal day, seeing 1 or 2 online users would be OK.
• Pretty much in all cases, we could see an uptick in positive activity after sending out a Intuit Mailchimp email to a list.

Incentivized