When Act! Marketing Automation (AMA) debuted in 2018, it was immediately evaluated against its forerunners, Act! E-Marketing (AEM) and Swiftpage E-Marketing (SPEM), in terms of cost-effectiveness. AMA emerged as the more appealing option, given that AEM and SPEM were known for their cumbersome editing tools, restrictive sending caps, and per-user billing, despite similar pricing.

As time progressed, AEM and SPEM became obsolete, making way for prominent third-party alternatives like MailChimp and Constant Contact. These services offer significant improvements over the previous Act! solutions, boasting user-friendly editors and superior delivery mechanisms. However, their pricing structures differ markedly from AMA, complicating direct comparisons. For example, MailChimp and Constant Contact feature low initial fees and reasonable monthly sending allowances but impose strict limits on the number of contacts you can reach.

In simpler terms, they enable frequent emailing to a limited audience.

AMA’s Pricing Structure: AMA adopts a distinct pricing model, offering generous monthly sending caps of 25K, 50K, and 100K emails, depending on your subscription level, without imposing any substantial restrictions on the contact count. For example, the “Select” tier of AMA, priced at just $79/month, allows for 25,000 emails monthly, which could be one email to 25,000 contacts or any other combination. Act! remains indifferent to the distribution method.

Conversely, Constant Contact’s similar sending capacity is priced at $59/month, but sending a single email to 25,000 contacts would escalate the cost to over $350/month. Annually, this represents an additional expense of $3,264. To contrast based on price, Constant Contact’s $91/month plan limits you to 2,500 contacts, whereas AMA Select permits communications with ten times that number for $13 less each month. Indeed, AMA provides more value for a lower cost.

The pricing strategy may seem perplexing, and that’s intentional. All three services charge around a quarter of a cent per email ($0.0002 - $0.0003), suggesting similar costs, yet the reality is different. Constant Contact and MailChimp restrict your contact list size but allow up to 24 emails per contact monthly, leading to customer confusion. At first glance, their monthly sending limits appear generous for a modest fee, but in practice, daily emailing to each contact is impractical.

Direct Comparison: For a realistic scenario, consider sending two emails monthly to 25,000 contacts. With AMA, this would cost $199, compared to roughly $350 with Constant Contact or MailChimp. Doubling the contact list to 50,000, AMA charges $399 per month, while Constant Contact and MailChimp fees soar to $550+ and $750, respectively.

This pricing disparity underscores why AMA is widely regarded as the more equitable choice, aligning with actual usage patterns—substantial sends without arbitrary contact limitations.