I think that an auto responder tool is essential for every
marketer or business online, the 2 leading tools in the market are Aweber and GetResponse.
When you need to decide between the two there is much more
than the price to compare, yet if you are just starting to build a list and
have less than 1000 subscribers and a tight budget it’s a question you would
probably ask yourself.
As I have tried both tools in my lists I can tell you about
my experience using the products and in addition to add a general view of the
product from other reviews I read about the subject.
LETS START WITH WHAT THE
HECK IS AN AUTO RESPONDER
Aweber and Getresponse are both
auto-responders that are used by any business online and email marketers
to:
- Hosting and maintain your list of subscribers
- Create newsletters and broadcast to your lists of
subscribers in the schedule you define up to one year in advance.
- They give you an option of dividing the email marketing
campaigns for different niches, for new subscribers and for subscribers already
listed for a while.
- convert blog post to email
- split test
- track subscribers activity , how many subscribers opened
the email how many clicked the link and how many purchase the product.
- good support and large knowledge base - you can get in
touch by phone chat or email in case you need help.
- integration - good integration with 3rd party tools as
this is the leading product in the market for a reason.
PRICE COMPARISON
GetResponse
is cheaper than Aweber if you are
a newbie and your list of subscribers include less than 1000 people GetResponse lets you
start your marketing journey from $15.
Aweber will charge
you $19 for a 500 list of subscribers but $29: for 25,000 people.
For experience marketers with a large list of subscribers
the differences are small. As with both systems you get a discount if you
sign-up for a year
GetResponse
will usually be cheeper at least until you have 25k subscribers
- Aweber will also charge you for anybody who unsubscribes while GetResponse won’t.
TEMPLATES
Aweber’s templates
look a bit better than Getresponse
but as I don’t use the templates It’s very hard for me to be objective
Getresponse’s templates look fine and are easily to amend.
Aweber’s templates
are slightly more visually appealing but overall there is not much of a
difference in the complexity and the design.
KEY FEATURES
•Ability to capture data and host mailing lists (you get a
little bit of HTML code that you can insert on your site or social media
profiles to capture email addresses)
• A wide range of predesigned e-newsletter templates
• Autoresponder functionality which allows you to send
automated e-newsletters at pre-defined intervals to subscribers after they sign
up
• Statistics on the percentage of subscribers that are
opening your emails, clicking links or unsubscribing
• RSS to e-newsletter functionality (useful for
automatically sending your blog posts to subscribers on your mailing list)
• Easy-to-use message builders that allow you to create and
edit e-newsletters without coding
• Integration with various third-party sites/tools (for
example, online shopping services such as Amazon Payments, Paypal and
Google Checkout or CRM tools like Capsule and Salesforce) - this allows you to
add customers to mailing lists at the point of sale, for example, or use Aweber
and Getresponse to send e-newsletters to customers on your CRM system.
• Responsive email templates.
IMPORTING DATA
Both GetResponse
and Aweber allow this feature and I
couldn’t fault any of them for not doing the job properly.
INTEGRATION WITH OTHER
SYSTEMS
Aweber still
does better job than Getresponse
is in its integration with third party sites and tools, they both tools
offer good integrations with other sites and tools such as Paypal,
Amazon Payments , leadpages but many Getresponse integrations
involve setting up an additional adapter to complete the functions.
LANDING PAGE CREATION- Optin Pages.
Landing pages or 'squeeze pages' or sometimes called “optin
pages” are web pages designed to capture your name and email address.
They typically contain a form, some decent images and a
small amount of text spelling out the benefit of submitting your email address
- it's generally better to use landing pages for online ad campaigns over a
form that sits on your website, simply because they are optimized for capturing
data (as they contain less content to distract users).
Getresponse
gives you a landing page creator out of the box, that allows you to make
use of 100+ templates and a drag and drop editor to create a great landing
pages. To do similar things with Aweber,
you would need third party tools, or to hire a designer to code your landing
page – this is a tedious task.
.Free trials
The closest you get to a free trial in Aweber, is a $1 trial ,Getresponse, on the other
hand, give you a 30 day free trial and no credit card details are
required.
WHAT IS THE CONCLUSION?
Both Aweber and Getresponse are
great for marketing email campaigns and maintenance of your lists in some areas
one is better than the other but both came along way from the early days of
email marketing and indeed it is difficult to say which one is better. If you
are a new I would recommend to start with get response as you get 30 days trial
and the price is more competitive up to 1000 subscribers. If you are looking
for better integration I would go for Aweber
as it is currently the leading tool and therefore 3rd party integration is at a
click of a button.
