Constant Contact vs Mailchimp vs Benchmark Email: The Best Choice for Your Email Marketing Use Case in 2025

Constant Contact offers a simple and intuitive email builder with a drag-and-drop interface that’s very approachable for beginners. You can start from blank, convert from PDF, or build with HTML, but primarily, you work with templates. There are over 200 templates you can choose from to help you get started quickly. You won’t find many detailed styling options in the editor compared to competitors; however, this may actually be a benefit if you prefer a simpler, less overwhelming experience.

 

 

In addition to standard blocks for text, images, and videos, Constant Contact also offers advanced options like feedback and RSVP blocks to collect audience information, as well as a product block that connects directly to your online store for showcasing products. And when it comes to personalization, you can add dynamic text and images that change automatically for each individual recipient.

 

 

To ensure your email design looks great on all devices, you can preview emails in both desktop and mobile views, test them using a specific contact’s email address, and send test emails. Additionally, for your convenience, Constant Contact provides a Cross Device Email Editor, allowing you to edit emails directly in a mobile app. However, unlike the competitors, it doesn’t offer separate settings for customizing the mobile version of the emails you’re creating.

 

 

The unique Apps block lets you connect third-party apps and services to your email. For example, you can link to an Instagram account or even preview content from any web page directly in your email.

You can also add product recommendations or even sell products directly from any email, just as you can with Constant Contact.

Mailchimp offers plenty of templates—over 130—but these are available only on paid plans. With the free plan, you’re limited to basic layouts. When creating an email using the New Builder, you can choose from one of five template types:

• Fully designed templates — use a pre-built template or use the Creative Assistant to work with your brand assets,
• Basic layouts — use templates that allow you to easily manipulate content and quickly shape your message,
• Saved templates — use an email design that you previously saved as a template,
• Draft emails — use a design you’ve started work on, but haven’t sent,
• Code your own — use the import feature or paste in your custom coded design
• Recently sent emails — use one of your recently sent emails as inspiration for a new design.

Unlike Constant Contact, Mailchimp lets you style your email differently for desktop and mobile devices. However, it lacks the precise screen preview capabilities of Benchmark Email, offering only general desktop, mobile, and inbox previews without exact dimensions. You also can’t hide entire elements from mobile or desktop views as you can with Benchmark Email.

 

Compared to the other two, Benchmark Email’s email builder offers the most intuitive user experience.

That’s because Benchmark Email uses a proprietary editor designed around user feedback and recommendations. It eliminates unnecessary complexity, providing exactly what you need to create effective emails—nothing more, nothing less.

There are several ways to create emails in Benchmark Email:

 

• Templates — create emails using one of the customizable pre-built templates,
• Drafts — continue creating from where you left off,
• My Emails — repurpose previous emails in your new campaign,
• Layouts — start with a simple structure outline,

Start from scratch — create a new email from scratch using the drag-and-drop builder.

 

 

The core of Benchmark Email’s builder, like its competitors, is content blocks. Benchmark Email offers 11 essential blocks—everything you’ll actually use and nothing you won’t: columns, text, heading, image, button, divider, menu, HTML, video, social, and timer. Each block is fully editable with granular settings to match your design needs.

 

Benchmark Email allows you to use building blocks (not to be confused with content blocks) to organize the layout of your email. All sections, except for the footer, can be easily rearranged using intuitive drag-and-drop arrows. You can also customize individual sections or apply global settings such as text color, fonts, background color, and link styles.

Benchmark Email uses sections to organize your email content — all sections except the Header and Footer can be reorganized using intuitive Up/Down arrows. It lets you apply a global style to all sections or you can customize each section individually.

When styling your email, you can choose from 27 designed curated color schemes, or set a custom background color. As an alternative, Benchmark Email lets you set up a ‘Brand Kit’ to add logos and color schemes from your own website to the email builder in just a few clicks.

 

 

While Benchmark Email doesn’t offer direct product integration like some competitors, its image content block is well thought out for the same purpose. You can display products without any needed integrations and even create product carousels by adding multiple images in an image box.

When it comes to more advanced tools, Benchmark Email provides simple personalization using dynamic tags within text. It also includes a built-in image editor to enhance visuals with effects, stickers, text, and more.

 

 

The builder further offers AI assistance for enhancing content within text, heading, image, and button blocks. While the text assistant won’t fully write your content, it can help improve and refine it significantly. The image assistant, on the other hand, will generate complete images for you. In comparison, Mailchimp’s AI is still in beta and currently supports only image generation, while Constant Contact offers only basic tone adjustments with its AI.

 

 

To help you perfect your design across devices, Benchmark Email includes desktop, tablet, and mobile previews, along with exact screen width previews, dark mode vs. light mode views, and the option to send test emails to different inboxes. You can even hide elements on desktop or mobile, ensuring your design looks perfect everywhere. Benchmark Email also allows you to edit mobile and desktop versions separately, giving you complete control—something Constant Contact doesn’t offer, and Mailchimp only partially supports.

 

Finally, Benchmark Email includes the Email Audit feature, which scans your email and notifies you about missing key elements to ensure your campaign is optimized for successful delivery.

 

Mailchimp organizes your contact list under the Audience tab.

 

The Audience dashboard provides an overview of insights, while separate dashboards for Tags, Segments, Surveys, Subscriber Preferences, and Inbox allow for detailed contact management. These dashboards work similarly to Constant Contact, with the exception of the unique Inbox dashboard, which collects all 1-on-1 conversations with your audience.

 

When it comes to segmentation, Mailchimp lets you segment your contacts using straightforward logic by selecting from criteria such as tags, contact details, activity, and acquisition source. You can chain up to five conditions; however, you cannot mix AND and OR logic within the same segment—you must choose one or the other. Mailchimp also provides pre-built segments for added convenience.

Mailchimp’s segmentation, like Constant Contact’s, also works with eCommerce activity. By connecting your online store, you can filter contacts based on purchase behavior, store, product, amount spent, and other eCommerce data.

 

But that’s just the starting point.

 

The Advanced Segmentation feature offers complex and highly flexible audience filtering. It allows you to chain unlimited conditions using both AND and OR logic, and even nest conditions within each other. This enables you to create dynamic segments that group contacts meeting significantly different conditions into the same audience. The Advanced Segmentation feature is only available in the Standard and Premium plans, however.

 

Benchmark Email has a slightly different approach to contact management, and it’s the most straightforward of the three.

 

There’s a main Contacts dashboard that displays all contacts, with additional Lists and Tags dashboards for organizing segmented contacts.

 

In the Contacts dashboard, you can perform bulk actions such as send email, add contacts to a static list, remove contacts, add or remove tags, and delete contacts. You can also filter contacts using a wide range of criteria and create new custom lists directly from those filters.

 

Each contact also has a profile view, where you can see detailed activity for that individual.

 

 

You can use Lists much like segments in competing platforms. Lists can be created based on contact information, activity, tags, list membership, and email events. Similar to competitors, Benchmark Email allows you to apply multiple conditions within a single list, using both AND and OR logic to build highly targeted audience groups.

 

 

Constant Contact has an interactive dashboard for email campaigns.

Constant Contact’s reporting dashboard generates valuable metrics on your emails, contacts, and eCommerce performance.

The Emails dashboard provides an overview of all emails sent within a selected date range, with detailed metrics on sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, and conversions. You can also compare results to a previous period, year, or custom date range.

 

The Trends section shows your average open and click rates for the selected time frame, as well as comparisons to your industry averages (if set in account settings).

 

 

Constant Contact also includes a table view of all sent email campaigns. You can search for a specific campaign by name and sort all campaigns by send date or click rate. You can select up to five campaigns and compare their metrics on a graph—clicking a metric label allows you to hide it from the graph.

Selecting a specific campaign opens in-depth metrics about audience engagement, including:

• Sent — total contacts the email was sent to
• Delivered — successfully delivered emails
• Opened — contacts who opened the email
• Clicks — contacts who clicked links in the email
• Bounced — emails that bounced back
• Unsubscribed — contacts who opted out of future emails
• Conversions & Sales — (if eCommerce is connected) percentage of emails resulting in purchases and total revenue generated

The reporting also breaks down performance by device, showing the percentage of opens and clicks from mobile vs. desktop. Additionally, you can view your top and lowest performing campaigns and links based on open rate, click rate, or total clicks.

 

Mailchimp offers advanced analytics and many custom report types.

 

Mailchimp offers multiple ways to access campaign insights, starting with the Analytics dashboard and extending to fully customizable reports. The dashboard gives you a general overview and lets you filter by audience, message type (email or SMS), date range, and even exclude Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) opens for more accurate data.

Mailchimp’s reporting tracks more metrics than Constant Contact, covering standard stats like opens, clicks, and bounces, as well as additional insights including:

• forwarded emails
• forwarded opens
• abuse reports
• last opened
• social performance
• top geographic locations

 

Unlike Constant Contact, Mailchimp offers a dedicated tool for creating reports. One of these is a Click Summary report that displays individual link performance and provides a click map to visually highlight where contacts clicked within your email.

If you connect your online store to Mailchimp, you unlock detailed revenue tracking: view individual product sales, total campaign revenue, orders, and conversion funnels.

You can also integrate Google Analytics with Mailchimp to pass website visitor data back into your reports. This allows you to track visits to campaign pages, landing pages, and websites, and to add tracking to A/B test campaigns.

 

 

Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Advanced Features

Constant Contact’s reporting dashboard generates valuable metrics on your emails, contacts, and eCommerce performance.

Note: Benchmark Email was not included in this feature comparison section because it intentionally focuses on core essentials, catering to email marketing generalists rather than advanced power users.

 

 

Each automation path consists of a single trigger, one or more conditionals, and one or more executed actions. The time delay conditional waits until the set duration elapses before executing the action, while the conditional split branches into Yes/No paths depending on the criteria set for each contact.

When choosing an email to send using the automation path, Constant Contact lets you copy an existing email or create a new one from scratch. However, you must always create an SMS from scratch.

 

 

While Constant Contact offers a streamlined automation experience, Mailchimp takes automation to a more advanced level with its Customer Journeys.

Mailchimp offers Classic Automations that send a series of targeted emails triggered by specific dates, events, or contact activity. While this feature is still available to users who have created classic automations, it has long been discontinued in favor of the more powerful Customer Journeys.

On the surface, Customer Journeys look similar to Constant Contact’s automation paths, but they are much more powerful and customizable.

First off, each journey can have multiple starting points. You can also configure each starting point with filters that determine which contacts are eligible for the journey.

 

Lead Generation: Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp offer form and landing page builders, but Mailchimp also includes a full website builder.

Constant Contact offers basic testing on emails to help improve your open rates.

 

It provides a recommendation engine that generates two subject lines based on your email content, industry, and expert opinion. Then, it tests the subject lines on a portion of your contact list. Finally, the email with the winning subject line is automatically sent to the rest of your contact list.

 

While the test is active during the preset duration, Constant Contact provides real-time engagement metrics for each subject line. It also shows the overall performance of the winning subject line when the test is over.

Mailchimp offers more A/B testing variables than Constant Contact, such as subject line, sender name, email content, and send time. It also lets you test up to three variations of each variable, while Constant Contact only allows two variations.

 

Moreover, it allows you to choose which metric determines the winning combination. For example, you can let Mailchimp automatically choose a clear winner based on click rate, open rate, or total revenue, or you can manually select the winner after reviewing the metrics yourself.