With thousands of people clicking onto your website each week, you’re going to need some help making those brand/consumer connections. That’s where email autoresponders come in.
Tools like Aweber and GetResponse give eCommerce entrepreneurs a place where they can manage their contact list, segment campaigns, and nurture leads.
However, just like any other tool in your business growth kit these days, it’s worth making sure you’re picking the right email marketing service for your needs.
So, how do you decide between Aweber vs GetResponse?
Well, that’s the tough part. Fortunately, we’re here to help.
What do Aweber and Getresponse do?
Aweber and Getresponse are tools for:
hosting your mailing list
creating attractive email templates
sending e-newsletters out to your subscribers.
They also allow you automate your communications to subscribers via ‘autoresponders’.
Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are automatically sent to your subscribers, according to rules that you define.
For example, immediately after they sign up, a subscriber might receive a simple autoresponder from your business welcoming them to your mailing list; a week later they could receive a discount voucher for some of your products; and three weeks later they could receive an encouragement to follow you on social media.
And so on.
Aweber Vs GetResponse: The Basics
Aweber and GetResponse are both email marketing service providers.
That doesn’t mean they take the same approach to delivering your results, however.
Aweber claims to “be” email marketing.
I’m not really sure what that means, but it’s a bold claim, so good for them:
With over 20 years of heritage behind them (launched in 1998), the Aweber team certainly helped to introduce email marketing to the world. Currently, there’s more than 100,000 small businesses and entrepreneurs using the tool each day.
GetResponse is the same age as Aweber, launched in 1998, which indicates that their “About” page is a bit outdated… Still, GetResponse has more than 350,000 customers spread across 183 countries – so the company must be doing something right.
They claim to be the world’s easiest email marketing tool – another bold claim:
At first glance, the two companies are pretty similar. Heck, they were even started in the same year. However, as you’ll see during this Aweber vs GetResponse review, there’s more to most email marketing tools than meets the eye.
Aweber Vs GetResponse: Pricing
Let’s start simple.
Ultimately, unless you’ve got oodles of cash to push into your marketing budget, then you’re going to need to take pricing pretty seriously.
After all, an email autoresponder is pretty great, but no-one wants to spend thousands of dollars on software when they could be using it for staff pizza parties and a new foosball table, right?
So let’s start by checking out GetResponse’s pricing structure.
First of all, you get a handy range of features to choose how many subscribers you have, and how often you want to pay your bill. If you pay 12 or 24 months at a time, you get a hefty discount.
One Pepperoni to go please!
Starting with the basic of 1,000 subscribers, there are 3 fundamental plans:
Basic: $15 per month for unlimited emails, landing pages, automation templates, surveys, forms, Facebook ads, and exit pop-ups.
Plus: $49 per month for everything in Basic, plus list-building funnels, sales funnels, webinars for 100 attendees, e-product sales, a simple CRM, and collaborative tools.
Professional: $99 per month for everything in Plus, as well as an automation builder, contact tagging and scoring, webinars, paid webinars, webinar funnels, and collaboration for up to 5 people.
Now here’s the thing I don’t get about GetResponse pricing.
You need to be on the high-tier pricing package to get (usually basic) functionality like contact scoring and tagging. Tagging your contacts is pretty much a must-have for any auto-responder.
Somehow, you can get seemingly more advanced features like a simple CRM solution, collaboration tools, and exit popups at a lower price tag. What’s that all about?
As you probably guessed, the more contacts you have, the more expensive your package becomes. Here’s what you’re looking at if you’re lucky enough to have up to 100,000 subscribers:
Got even more than 100,000 subscribers?
Then you’re going to need to upgrade to an enterprise offering.
That means tailor-made functionality for a custom (and probably pretty significant) price.
The good news?
If you’re a non-profit you can get up to 50% off with GetResponse for NonProfits – so that’s great news for charities that need extra help.
There’s also the option to sign up for a 30-day free trial with no credit card required. Now that’s something I love to see.
What’s more, with the free trial, you don’t just get a lame diluted version of GetResponse. You
can test out everything from advanced analytics, to automated tools.
Now enough about GetResponse, let’s check out Aweber’s pricing.
First things first, Aweber also gives you a free trial for 30 days – which is fantastic news.
You also get access to a bunch of great features, including access to Aweber’s handy email experts which are available to teach you how to get the most of your new tool. That’s a level of support that I’ve never seen from free trials with other tools.
You don’t get as many contacts on the free trial as you do with GetResponse. However, 500 subscribers is still enough to get a good test on the email marketing service.
Once your free trial has dried up, you’ve got a massive range of 5 basic plans to sign up to.
According to Aweber, you get access to every single feature in the toolkit from day one – so the only thing you’re paying extra for is the number of subscribers you have.
Honestly, I usually prefer this kind of pricing.
The packages include:
$19 per month for up to 500 subscribers
$29 per month for up to 2,500 subscribers
$49 per month for up to 5,000 subscribers
$69 per month for up to 10,000 subscribers
$149 per month for up to 25,000 subscribers
It means that you can start off with a basic package and ramp up as your business grows. In other words, your email marketing tool grows with your organization.
Like with GetResponse, if you need something bigger and more bespoke, then you’ll need to contact the Aweber team for an enterprise quote. There are no long-term contracts to worry about, so you can upgrade (or even downgrade) whenever you like.
Autoresponders
As discussed briefly above, autoresponders are emails that are sent automatically to your subscribers at intervals that you define – for example, you could create a programme of autoresponders so that…
10 minutes after somebody signs up to your list, they receive a welcome message
exactly one week later they receive a discount code
three weeks later they receive an email showcasing a particular product…
…and so on.
This type of email marketing is often referred to as a 'drip' campaign.
Both Aweber and Getresponse provide good basic autoresponder functionality, allowing you to automatically send particular e-newsletters based on time intervals (as in the example above) or trigger them based on user actions or data, i.e.,
joining a particular list
making a purchase
having a birthday.
For me, Getresponse's autoresponder functionality is considerably stronger, however. The range of actions you can use to trigger the sending of e-newsletters is more comprehensive, and it's easier to set up these action-based triggers in the first place.
As such Getresponse's autoresponder functionality now goes well beyond traditional 'drip' style campaigns and forms part of its 'marketing automation' feature.
Who wins?
When comparing Aweber vs Getresponse, the Getresponse 'Basic' plans are probably the ones to focus on as they are similar, feature wise, to all the Aweber plans.
At the starter end of things, Getresponse is definitely the more cost-effective solution: if you have a list with 500 to 1,000 subscribers on it, you're looking at a not-inconsiderable $14 per month ($168 per year) saving by using the Getresponse 'Email' plan instead of Aweber's equivalent.
For lists over 1,000 subscribers in size, each Getresponse 'Basic' plan effectively comes in $4 per month cheaper than the equivalent Aweber plan (an annual saving of $48).
Additionally, Getresponse offers sizeable discounts if you pay upfront for one or two years: 18% and 30% respectively. There’s also a 30% to 50% discount available to nonprofits (with the more generous discount being available if you display the Getresponse logo on your website and allow Getresponse to market you as a partner).
There is a discounted plan available with Aweber too, but it’s not quite as generous: if you pay annually, you save 14.9% on the regular plan. There’s no denying however that Aweber’s completely free plan makes the product very attractive to brand new businesses.
Overall, I'd say that Getresponse is the overall winner on pricing, but as we shall see below, this is definitely not the only thing you should base your decision on here.
Aweber vs Getresponse: summary
Both Aweber and Getresponse offer a good range of tools to help you create, maintain and communicate with an email database. Even if you’re not all that technically minded, you shouldn’t have too much difficulty using either to manage your e-communications and both products will let you do that well.
That said, Getresponse is the winner in this shootout — it's much more of an 'all-in-one' solution than Aweber, comes with significantly more advanced automation features, and is a bit cheaper too.
There are a couple of areas where Aweber has an edge over Getresponse: it supports AMP for email, integrates more easily with a wider range of third-party products, and comes with phone support. And its free plan is potentially very useful for brand new businesses without a mailing list.
Reasons to pick Getresponse over Aweber
Getresponse's 'Marketing Automation' features currently beat similar workflow-based automation tools offered by Aweber — hands down.
The product is more competitively priced (particularly if your subscriber list contains between 500 and 1000 records).
An 18% discount is available if you pay for the product on an annual rather than monthly basis, and a 30% discount is available if you pay for two years upfront. These discounts are more generous than the Aweber equivalents.
Getresponse’s built-in landing page creator is more sophisticated than Aweber’s.
Getresponse's 'send time optimization' feature has the potential to significantly improve your open and clickthrough rates — there's no equivalent functionality in Aweber.
The webinars functionality is superb and potentially fantastic for any business that uses webinars for lead generation.
You can sell products with Getresponse out of the box.
Its customer support comes in multiple languages; Aweber’s is restricted to English.
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