Mailchimp vs. Constant Contact in Politics: Which is Likely to Get You More Votes?
Email marketing has been prevalent since 1995 and is used by large organizations to attract and engage consumers. As it also yields positive results for politics, it is often used in political campaigns as well.
Two primarily used ways of email marketing tools include MailChimp and Constant Contact. Let's have a comparative analysis of how these tools can help politicians run their election campaigns.
Both MailChimp and Constant Contact can be used for political campaigns. However, some exclusive features of both of these products make them different from each other.
MailChimp vs. Constant Contact: A Comparative Analysis
Cost of Use
MailChimp provides a lot of free features to its users, which are often cited to be the reason behind the wide use of Mailchimp for political campaigns.
On the other hand, Constant Contact services are not free of cost. However, Constant Contact offers a free trial for thirty to sixty days at the beginning of the subscription.
Choosing either one of these services will largely depend on your campaign budget. If you have a low budget and cannot afford to spend much, Mailchimp is your good-to-go option.
Nevertheless, if budget is not an issue for you, acquiring both services would be an ideal choice since an all-inclusive strategy can do wonders for your campaign. Mailchimp offers both free and paid plans to the users.
While its free service has plenty of features that could help you in your political campaign, going paid is always beneficial.
Constant Contact's paid plan falls somewhere within a range of $20-$45 a month, depending on the features that you want to use.
Customer Support
MailChimp allows twelve hours of customer support service where Constant Contact provides its consumers with 24/7 service, so, in case of any emergency, you do not have to wait for office hours to resolve the issue.
Spam Folder
One of the important issues in email marketing is the spam folder. Most emails sent for marketing purposes may land in the receiver's spam folder, and the receiver may never see your message, let alone be compelled to vote for you.
Constant Contact does not allow any special features that could prevent your campaign emails from ending up in the spam folder of the receiver.
However, Mailchimp offers a special feature to its consumers that prevents your emails from ending up in the spam folder, thus increasing the possibility of potential voters to read the email and join your electoral campaign.
Email Design
Design is the king in email marketing, and both Mailchimp and Constant Contact provide a variety of them.
But, it is easy to customize and design your campaign emails with Constant Contact. Political campaigns need to be creative in design to attract a crowd, so having an easy way to customize email design is essential to attract potential voters.
Though Mailchimp also allows custom designing, it may not be a piece of cake for a newbie to use it.
Building an Email List
Your campaign emails are only as good as your list. So, Mailchimp and Constant Contact both provide you with signup forms that could be easily embedded in your campaign website.
However, MailChimp requires every new subscriber to do a double confirmation, immediately sending them an email for verification so that the spam entries could be averted.
Constant Contact signup forms automatically enroll the subscriber once signed up, making things less annoying and a lot easier.
The Verdict
Using MailChimp for political campaigns could get you the tools needed for easily designing actionable emails.
A Mailchimp political campaign offers you email templates through which you can get readily available emails to boost your campaign while also providing options to upload videos, images, and posters to make your emails more attractive.
Mailchimp is also the best option to use for surveys. As you may know, the bread and butter of a decent political campaign are political surveys.
Mailchimp has built-in tools that create rating scales using marketing automation features. Now, this feature makes Mailchimp a lot better than its competitor.
Using Mailchimp for political campaigns also allows social media interfaces that are smoother than the social media platform itself.
These interfaces allow advertising on social media platforms, which are the best places to interact and engage with potential voters.
On the other hand, the most renowned features of Constant Contact include auto-responders, triggered campaigns, and abandoned cart campaigns.
The price of Constant Contact is also nominal compared to others in the business. The auto-responder of Constant Contact allows you to automatically respond to any query that your audience may ask, and the triggered campaign allows you to send emails to a vast number of people with minimal effort.
Nevertheless, Constant Contact does suit small campaigns, even though it does not have the advanced features that you may get in Mailchimp political campaigns.
Lack of advanced marketing automation, fluid email templates, and spam testing make it difficult to recommend for large political campaigns.
