Klaviyo vs Constant Contact: A Clear eCom Winner for Me

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Par Ewen Finser

Last Updated on octobre 22, 2024 by Ewen Finser

In this comparison I’ll break down exactly how I’d decide between Klaviyo vs Constant Contact.

I’ve been around the email marketing block a few times in the last 10 years. I’ve run multiple businesses across Ecom, Services, and Media.

I’ve experienced enough to know that there’s no simple “winner” between two venerable platforms like Constant Contact and Klaviyo. They both have thousands of happy customers.

In this case, it’s all about WHAT you are trying to accomplish and how each plateforme de marketing par courriel can help you get there.

My goal with this comparison is to expose and explore the use cases for each, so that you can self identify which platform is right for you.

With this in mind, let’s first explore the key DIFFERENCES between Klaviyo and Constant Contact to set some context.

The Main Differences Between Constant Contact and Klaviyo

  • Klaviyo is almost exclusively focused on the ecommerce market with its tools, templates and positioning, whereas Constant Contact has a more general email marketing automation orientation.
  • Constant Contact has a 3-tier pricing plan with more nuance, whereas Klaviyo focused on a straightforward 2-tier offer (Email or Email + SMS).
  • Klaviyo offers more advanced behavioral ecommerce insights and automations, whereas Constant Contact focuses on a more broad based standard automation stack.
  • Constant Contact has a more user friendly UX and orientation for non-specialized SMBs, whereas Klaviyo has more advanced (and a bit more technical) capabilities.
  • Klaviyo offers a completely free 500 sends per month plan, whereas Constant Contact doesn’t offer a functional free plan (only a free trial).

Stand Out Constant Contact Features

These are some of the marquee features of Constant Contact that stood out to me:

  • Excellent Survey Features: This might be a fairly nerdy fav, but one of the Constant Contact features I particularly like is their built-in survey features to get audience feedback. I’m surprised MORE platforms don’t have similar capabilities easily built-in.

  • Focus on Deliverability: Constant Contact puts an emphasis on email deliverability, and this is encouraging. They’ve even been benchmarked in the upper tier according to some independent studies. Interestingly, Klaviyo was not included in this study so it’s difficult to draw direct comparisons.
  • A bit of everything: Constant Contact doesn’t really pick a lane like Klaviyo does with ecommerce. As such, it’s a solid option for brands that have marketing objectives beyond just transactional commerce (perhaps a newsletter, engagement focus, nonprofit or services model).
  • Facile à utiliser : Constant Contact definitely makes things easier for non-specialized marketers or operators to get started with email marketing. Where Klaviyo might be hard to get fully leveraged without some investment in learning their system, Constant Contact is fairly easy to plug and play for SMBs.

Stand Out Klaviyo Features

Klaviyo contrasts with Constant Contact, mainly in terms of their ecommerce focus. Specifically, I preferred:

  • Widely Adopted: This may sound a bit odd, but there’s benefits to being the market leader for ecommerce sellers. Specifically, there’s a much broader bench of talent, agencies and third-party integrations. This also means that they ship updates frequently, have a mature support operation and generally stay sync’d with Shopify, Woo, BigCommerce and the other selling platforms.
  • Excellent Email + SMS Integration: Klaviyo is best known as an email marketing platform, but in recent years they’ve made exceptional strides to catch up with SMS capabilities. Where initially they lagged behind SMS first platforms, I’m fairly confident in my assessment that Klaviyo is now on par. Coupled with their best in class data analytics AND the ability to keep SMS + email integrated under one roof… Klaviyo clearly is the platform to beat for ecommerce.
  • Simple Two-tier Pricing: For as complex a platform as Klaviyo is, I love their fairly straightforward two-tier pricing model. It basically comes down to whether or not you want SMS capabilities or not. Plus, the free tier is a really nice benefit if you are just getting started (for some reason Klaviyo is still knocked for being “expensive”).
  • 100s of Useful Automation Presets & Templates: Klaviyo has a standout advantage with their templates and sequence presets. So much so that I even wrote an article just summarizing their best ones! This is a marquee advantage compared to Constant Contact. If you are an eCom business, you’ll likely see uplift on day one, just from implementing some of these tested automations.
  • Laser Focused on eCom: Klaviyo is virtually synonymous with Shopify (even though they integrate with others), but this specialization and time in market really shows in many obvious and some subtle ways. From the well thought out automations to the granular data collection and analytics, Klaviyo just works out of the box better than most email marketing platforms, specifically for ecommerce operators.

Comparaison des intégrations

Constant Contact has been around for quite some time and so they have a good deal of integrations to show for it. By my manual check they have 7,000+ listed in their internal directory:

This is a really healthy number for an email marketing platform and puts them in the top tier for best integrated systems.

But they do seem to lean a bit on Zapier integrations to get to this number:

I have no problem with Zapier (in fact I use them regularly), but a full on platform integration vs “zaps” are two different levels. Zapier is like (very effective) duct tape. Good to have, but not necessarily a full platform integration.

Klaviyo stands out with their integrations for a few reasons (at least for me). First, they have 1000s. All the way from the major players down to obscure names I’ve never heard of:

ALSO, they have a really neat partner network to find agencies and consultants to help with various support, dev, marketing, and customization objectives.

If you’ve ever had to search for a specialist on an obscure platform, you know the pain! And the value of having a well developed network like this.

My bottom line on platform integrations: Both platforms have plenty of integrations and are market leaders, respectively. For ecommerce businesses specifically, I prefer Klaviyo’s edge with relevant integrations AND their agency partner integrations.

Pricing Plan Distinctions

Constant Contact leverages a more traditional three-tier pricing scheme, with escalating options based on desired features:

At face value, Constant Contact does appeal more to the budget conscious marketer with both of their Lite and Standard plans seemingly more competitively priced than Klaviyo.

BUT, there’s some devils in the details. First, Constant Contact’s Lite plan is truly that, extremely lightweight specifically for ecommerce operators:

This might be fine for non-ecom, but if you are comparing against Klaviyo, you are probably selling things online!

Even then, the ability to run JUST one automation template doesn’t make Constant Contact feel like a marketing automation platform at all.

The SECOND issue I have with Constant Contact is their very, very fine print pricing tiers that quickly escalate beyond the big, bolded list pricing.

Specifically, let’s look at those entry level pricing tiers (I’ll come back to that with Klaviyo):

Now looking at Klaviyo (the supposedly “upmarket” specialist), let’s see how this shakes out for the various sizes of contact lists:

As you can see here, even Constant Contact’s MOST basic, underpowered Lite plan (missing many of the features Klaviyo comes standard with for ALL plans), comes in $5/month more expensive.

SMS is also a $10/month add-on (starting point) for just 0-500 sends/month. No matter how you slice it, Klaviyo is just a better value.

To cap it off, Constant Contact has no true free plan, only free trials. This sort of undercuts their “budget friendly” approach, as Klaviyo has a completely free tier for up to 500 sends per month.

My bottom line on their pricing tiers compared: Klaviyo is the clear winner here and it’s not particularly close.

The Competitive Landscape

I always like looking at the broader landscape to help put things in contrast. These are some similar (or slightly differently positioned) email marketing platforms I’ve considered:

  • Mailerlite: MailerLite is one of my favorite places to start an email list when I don’t exactly know where I’m going with it. Specifically, they have a great free tier up to 1,000 subs. After that, they aren’t super pricey and have all the basic automations you’d need & integrate with lots of third party platforms. I’d consider Mailerlite the “true” budget competitor to Klaviyo in lieu of Constant Contact.
  • Omnisend: Omnisend is probably the closest thing to Klaviyo in that it is similarly focused on the ecommerce space and mimics many of Klaviyo’s strong points. The only knock on them is that they are less established than Klaviyo (with all those benefits I mentioned). But, pricing can be competitive or slightly better in some situations. Voir comment Omnisend compares directly vs Klaviyo.
  • Sendlane: Sendlane is clearly trying to encroach on Klaviyo’s turf. Every time Klaviyo changes something, whether it’s pricing or has an outage, I see Sendlane flooding the zone with outreach. I’ve tested their platform and they have some nice features like A/B testing (and testing frameworks in general), but still playing in Klaviyo’s shadow.
  • ActiveCampaign: ActiveCampaign has long been one of my favorite and longest running platforms. They just have so many capabilities and collect so much data. In contrast to Klaviyo, their pricing plan is a fairly complex “choose your own adventure”, but this also tends to ensure you are rarely in an awkward pricing tier where you aren’t getting full value. AC can be a sales CRM if you want it, too. Voir comment ActiveCampaign compares to Klaviyo.
  • Attentive: For SMS heavy (or SMS exclusive) ecom marketing, Attentive is worth a look. A few years back they probably were further ahead of Klaviyo when it came to SMS marketing capabilities, but now I think it’s fairly competitive. Not a fan of their opaque “quote based” pricing (usually key for you’ll probably get taken advantage of, if possible), but that’s a personal nitpick. See how Attentive compares directly to Klaviyo.
  • Brevo (formerly Sendinblue): I like Brevo because they have an interesting pricing model that is based strictly on sends, not subs. This can be significant cost savings for brands that have highly seasonal promo schedules, or just don’t always send the same email or SMS volume each month. Brevo also has a transactional focus and some solid SMS capabilities like Klaviyo. Voir comment Brevo compares directly to Klaviyo.

Who Should Go with Constant Contact?

For ecommerce sellers, I see no reason to go with Constant Contact over Klaviyo, to be quite honest.

BUT, if you don’t do much volume via ecom, or have multi-modal marketing channels, Constant Contact may be worth a look. Especially if you aren’t on Shopify or WooCommerce.

Who Should Go with Klaviyo?

Judging by this comparison so far, you can probably guess that I’d recommend almost everyone in the ecommerce space stick to Klaviyo.

It’s clearly more specialized for ecommerce, has thousands of integrations, more talent networks and trusted agencies, better data collection & integration, better transactional SMS capabilities, and an unfair advantage with a large ready-to-implement library of automated sequences, templates and presets.

Ligne de fond: If you sell in the ecommerce space, Klaviyo is clearly the better choice and it’s not particularly close compared with Constant Contact.

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