Email marketing is alive and well, even if the layout code for email clients is a little dusty. Spam saturates in-boxes, well enough, but helpful, well written email newsletters are appreciated. For sending discounts, useful tips, interesting stories, and important updates; email is still one of the best options for online communications. Regularly communicating with your customers is important for your brand and mindshare. Simply reminding customers that they haven’t bought from you lately, with a fun or interesting email, can drive your sales even higher and reinforces the relationship of your company with your customers.

Having a plain text email is boring, though. Not only that, it’s a pain in the ass. It’s time consuming to compose, it doesn’t track user stats, it’s more difficult to gain and manage subscribers, and it looks unprofessional and dated.

Composing and managing your email marketing campaigns, with one of these sorts of services, looks good, makes life easier, and isn’t expensive. If one has heard of email marketing, one has likely heard of Constant Contact. There are plenty of different email marketing companies, yet MailChimp takes the cake for me.

1. MailChimp is less expensive. MailChimp is free for accounts, up to 2,000 subscribers. Constant Contact is $15 per month, for 500 or fewer subscribers. Image hosting on MailChimp is free, but it’s $5 extra per month for Constant Contact’s “MyLibrary Plus,” up to 250 MB. For more features, such as auto-responders, MailChimp’s next level starts at $10 per month, which is still less than the Constant Contact basic package.
2. MailChimp provides the same or better services. Both provide free templates, drag & drop editing, custom options for designers to use their code; analytics tracking and reports, customer support, integration options with social media, and user guides and materials.
3. MailChimp is more user-friendly, intuitive, and has cleaner aesthetics. This may be a bit subjective, though I’m sure we could spend some time picking it apart with trending design standards, if we really wanted to do so.

While both services are great, I recommend MailChimp to my clients. The only category, in which Constant Contact might take the lead, is brand name recognition. I suspect the underdog won’t be for long.