When Act! Marketing Automation (AMA) was first introduced in 2018, Act! users compared the cost and value of it to its predecessors - Act! E-Marketing (AEM) and Swiftpage E-Marketing (SPEM). These comparisons certainly cast AMA in a favorable light since AEM & SPEM both had clunky editors, low send limits, and were billed on a per-user basis, despite being similarly priced.
Fast forward to today, and AEM & SPEM have been deprecated for years, and in their place are the two big third-party rivals - MailChimp and Constant Contant. To be clear, these options are considerably superior to the old Act! offerings, as they both have easy-to-use editors and top-tier delivery services. The problem is that they price their plans very differently than AMA, making it difficult to compare them. For instance, MailChimp and Constant Contact charge a low entry fee with reasonable monthly sends, but severely limits the size of your distribution list.
Or, to put it differently, they allow you to send many emails to a few contacts.
AMA pricing
AMA is priced very differently. AMA gives you generous monthly send limits of 25K, 50K, and 100K, depending on the tier you subscribe to, and places no practical limit on the number of contacts you can send to. For instance, a "Select" AMA account that costs only $79/month has a limit of 25,000 sends per month, and those can be distributed as one email to 25,000 contacts, two emails to 12,500 contacts, or some other variation. Act! doesn't care.
On the other hand, Constant Contact offers comparable sends for only $59/month, but if you needed to send one email to each of your 25,000 contacts, the cost would increase to over $350/month (see pricing chart to the right). That is a difference of $3,264 more per year. To flip it around and compare on price alone, Constant Contact's $91/month package includes a maximum contact total of 2500 contacts. AMA Select allows distribution to ten times the contacts for $13 less monthly. Yes, you read that right. AMA offers more for less.
If this sounds confusing, it's because it's meant to be. All three services charge approximately a quarter of a cent per send ($0.0002 - 0.0003), so their costs should be comparable, but they're not. Constant Contact & MailChimp severely suppress your distribution list, but allow you to send each contact up to 24 emails a month. This is how they confuse customers. On the surface, their monthly send limits seem generous with a low monthly rate, but they know users won't want to email each contact daily.
Apples to Apples
To compare apples-to-apples, let's consider a more realistic use case. Someone looking to send two emails a month to a distribution list of 25,000 would spend $199 with AMA, and approximately $350 with either Constant Contact or MailChimp. Users with the same needs but double the distribution list would pay $399 monthly with AMA, $550+ with Constant Contact, and a whopping $750 with MailChimp.
This is why the consensus is AMA is priced much more fairly since it's based on how people use it - actual sends with no practical contact limits.
Still not convinced? Consider the following AMA feature advantages:
- AMA is charged per account, not per user
- AMA has no limit on your distribution list; the others start at 500 contacts (compare that to Act!'s free AMA Basic at 2500 sends/month)
- AMA allows you to build response-driven nurture marketing campaigns; the other two don't.
- AMA allows you to sync your lists, so that future contacts you add to your database can be included in past campaigns (eg., a welcome email for new customers). Click HERE to view an AMA feature comparison chart.
- AMA writes the campaign results back to Act!; the other two don't
- AMA allows you to send one-off sales emails to contacts; the other two don't
- AMA has two upgrade tiers that will enable inbound CRM workflow; the other two don't
- AMA allows you to work with your groups in Act!; the other two require you to export your data from your CRM and then upload the list to their service
If you're lucky enough to be an Act! user, you have lots of choices. For single or multi-step drip emarketing, you can use AMA Basic with 2500 monthly sends for free, or upgrade up to 10,000 monthly sends for as little as $45/month. Suppose your business needs powerful marketing automation features. In that case, you can step up to the Select tier of AMA for as little as $79/month, and get landing pages, surveys, social sharing, real-time campaign metrics, and more.
Now is the time to Act!
The best part is that Act! now offers users 25% off to upgrade their AMA tier. Whether you're going from Basic to a paid tier, or from Select to Complete or Advanced, now is the time to upgrade your marketing game for less. Please contact
