Aweber vs GetResponse: Which Is Better for Email Marketing?

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It is essential for businesses these days to make their presence felt to customers not just physically, but virtually as well. Mailing lists are a great way to serve as gentle reminders to customers about your business and its growth, as well as provide them with news, offers, and updates.

Given how far technology has progressed in the last decade, it’s no surprise that there exist tools to help you manage your mailing list. Imagine having to individually mail each customer on your list! Mailing list tools take care of this for you, helping you create attractive newsletters with many template options, and sending these newsletters out to all the people who subscribe to your mailing list at regular, automated intervals via “autoresponders”. Autoresponders send out mails to your mailing list at predefined intervals set by you, such as welcome messages, mails about offers, and so on.

Like we said, there exist a lot of tools to help you out with your mailing list and Aweber and GetResponse are two such tools. Today, we give you an in-depth comparison of both these tools and tell you which one may have a slight edge over the other.

Aweber and GetResponse: An Overview

Aweber is an email marketing platform that boasts of over 100,000 users, helping them create and send emails to their subscribers. Founded by Tom Kulzer in 1998, Aweber has been around for a while now, focusing on helping businesses of all scales keep in touch with their customers.

With a user base of over 350,000 customers in over 182 countries, GetResponse is also an email marketing platform that has been providing users with high-quality online marketing solutions that result in the growth of their business for over 15 years. With a focus on implementing effective and high-impact campaigns that result in great returns, GetResponse lets businesses of all scales build targeted subscriber lists and send out newsletters and campaigns. It also offers marketing automation, responsive email design, ready-to-use newsletter templates, landing page creators, and statistical analysis tools.

Aweber vs GetResponse: Features

In this section, we take a look at the features of both Aweber and GetResponse. Both tools have many features that we’ve segregated based on similarities and differences:

Similar Features between Aweber and GetResponse

  • Both Aweber and GetResponse capture data and manage your mailing lists.
  • Both tools offer a diverse range of e-newsletter templates that are predesigned, which saves a lot of time and effort.
  • Autoresponder function to send automated responses to subscribers at predefined intervals.
  • Both tools give you a statistical report of the number of subscribers who are actively checking your emails and opening any links you send through them, as well as those who are unsubscribing.
  • RSS web feed functionality that lets businesses automatically publish their online content (such as blogs) in emails they send to their subscribers.
  • Integration with third-party tools such as payment or shopping services.
  • Pre-designed email templates.
  • Both tools have message builders that let users create and edit their e-newsletters without having to use any coding.

Differences in Features between Aweber and GetResponse

Certain features that are available in GetResponse are not available in Aweber, such as webinars, certain CRM features, advanced marketing automation, and a landing page building tool.

In-Depth Comparison of the Features

Visual Aspects

With e-newsletters, it is highly important to have an attractive newsletter that is eye-catching yet effectively conveys all the information that you require it to convey. We take a look at two main factors that influence the visual aspects of e-newsletters:

  • Templates: Both tools have a great selection of templates to choose from. However, Aweber has around 700 templates as compared to only around 500 in GetResponse. Having said that, the latter’s templates are more easily editable despite being less aesthetically appealing than Aweber’s templates.
  • Responsive Templates: A responsive template is one that automatically adjusts itself to suit the device that it’s being viewed on, such as your smartphone screen or desktop. These templates automatically adjust the layout of the e-newsletter to be viewed without compromising any information or aesthetics despite the difference in the size of the viewing screen. GetResponse is slightly better when it comes to responsive templates as the tool lets you preview what your e-newsletter will look like on the smaller screen of a smartphone, as you create your newsletter. You can also flip the newsletter’s orientation to see how it looks in both landscape and portrait modes on the smartphone screen. These features are lacking in Aweber.

Autoresponder Functionality

Though both tools have very efficient autoresponder functionality, GetResponse is easier to setup and use, as well having a wider range of actions to trigger the sending of a newsletter, such as:

  • Email opening
  • Clicking of links
  • Purchasing products
  • Abandoning of shopping carts online
  • The URLs visited by the customers

Marketing Automation

A new feature introduced by GetResponse, marketing automation allows the creation of advanced automation workflows using drag-and-drop builders. These workflows inform GetResponse on the course of action to take when a user does a specific action. Though Aweber offers similar features with their “Campaigns” tool, it is not as advanced or efficient as the features provided by GetResponse as it only makes use of the history of links clicked by customers, as of now.

Third-Party Integration

Like we mentioned earlier, both tools allow integration with third-party applications and websites, such as Paypal or social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. However, Aweber has a slight edge by allowing integrations with 235 third parties, as opposed to 185 with GetResponse.

Split Testing Features

Split tests let you test out different email versions that you create and then send the one that performed best to your subscribers. GetResponse allows you to test 5 different versions of your emails against each other, whereas Aweber lets you test 4.

Creation of Landing Pages

Landing pages are the pages that your customers are directed to when they click on a link related to your business, such as advertisements or offers. These pages are generally set up to accomplish an aim, such as the subscription to your mailing list or downloading a brochure.

GetResponse has a great landing page creator with various templates and a drag-and-drop editor; the more you pay, the higher the functionality you get. With a basic “Email” account, you can only create one landing page that doesn’t allow split testing and only allows 1,000 views per month. With Aweber, you may have to make use of third-party tools to build landing pages or manually code your landing page and insert into your Aweber form. This may not always be financially viable and sustainable in the long run.

Additional Features

An area that GetResponse has a clear win over Aweber is the area of additional features. GetResponse has several new features it has added that are absent in Aweber, and even other major competitors, such as webinars, send time optimization, and advanced CRM features.

  • Webinars: You can run webinars directly from your GetResponse account, letting you host them with up to 100 participants (in the “Pro” plan) or 500 (in the “Max” plan). Running webinars with Aweber requires third-party tools, which can turn out to be pretty expensive.
  • Send Time Optimization: Send time optimization automatically sends your emails to your subscribers at the time that it is most likely to be opened by your subscribers (which it judges based email-checking habits). Aweber offers a feature called “send windows” that performs a similar function (it lets you limit your automated mailing to particular time slots). However, you’ll have to put in the effort to manually research and find out when the best approximate time is, to send emails to your subscribers.
  • CRM Features: GetResponse lets you create sales pipelines, add contacts to these pipelines and move them through it. Such features are generally unavailable with other software unless you’re using a third-party tool such as Infusionsoft.
  • Survey Creation: Currently, Aweber charges users around $200 a year to create unlimited surveys. GetResponse, on the other hand, charges you no additional amount for the unlimited surveys you create.
  • Mobile Application: Unlike Aweber, GetResponse has a mobile application that is compatible with both Android and iOS systems, letting you check and send emails and manage your e-communication from the palm of your hand.

Pricing

GetResponse Pricing Options

GetResponse offers three different plans: Email, Pro, and Max. The confusing thing is each of these three plans have sub-plans that are offered:

  • Up to 1,000 subscribers: $15 (‘Email’), $49 (‘Pro’), and $165 (‘Max’)
  • 1,001 to 2,500 subscribers: $25 (‘Email’), $49 (‘Pro’), and $165 (‘Max’)
  • 2,501 to 5,000 subscribers: $45 (‘Email’), $49 (‘Pro’), and $165 (‘Max’)
  • 5,001 to 10,000 subscribers: $65 (‘Email’), $75 (‘Pro’), and $ 165 (‘Max’)
  • 10,001 to 25,000 subscribers: $145 (‘Email’), $165 (‘Pro’), and $255 (‘Max’)
  • 25,001 to 50,000 subscribers: $250 (‘Email’), $280 (‘Pro’), and $370 (‘Max’)
  • 50,001 to 100,000 subscribers: $450 (‘Email’), $490 (‘Pro’), and $580 (‘Max’)

Anything more than 100,000 subscribers would require the use of an “Enterprise” plan that starts at $1,199 per month. GetResponse also offers separate pricing plans for not-for-profit organizations.

Aweber Pricing Options

Aweber is relatively simpler than GetResponse, with 5 plans that users can choose from:

  • Up to 500 subscribers: $19 per month
  • 501 to 2,500 subscribers: $29 per month
  • 2,501 to 5,000 subscribers: $49 per month
  • 5,001 to 10,000 subscribers: $69 per month
  • 10,001 to 25,000 subscribers: $149 per month

Excess of 25,000 subscribers would require a separate quote from Aweber and like GetResponse, Aweber also takes not-for-profit organizations into consideration by giving them discounts on their plans. It also offers discounts to students.

And the Winner Is!

Before we talk about who actually wins this battle, we give you reasons why one tool might be better than the other.

GetResponse over Aweber

  • Free trials without having to divulge credit card information
  • Better priced than Aweber
  • A discount of 18% for annual payment and a 30% discount for an upfront payment of 2 years, which is better than those offered by Aweber
  • Better split testing options
  • Built-in landing page creator, despite having to pay extra for it
  • Better marketing automation features than Aweber
  • Additional and better features such as send time optimization, webinar features, and CRM functionality
  • Lets you create surveys at no additional cost
  • Has a mobile application

Aweber over GetResponse

Based on this comparison, it would seem that GetResponse is a better option as it is more of an all-rounder than Aweber. For starters, it is better priced than Aweber and thus, more cost-effective. Apart from being cheaper, it also offers better discounts than Aweber, which is really a win-win situation for any user.

Additionally, GetResponse has more additional features than Aweber, and where it doesn’t, works to improve on already existing features. This continuous innovation and growth are what gives GetResponse an edge over Aweber. Having said that, Aweber offers better customer support in the fact that it offers phone support, which GetResponse, and even many other competitors, don’t offer. It also has live chat and email support channels and has won the “Stevie Award” in both 2016 and 2017 for its exceptional customer service. Also, though both Aweber and GetResponse offer free one-month trials, Aweber doesn’t limit the number of subscribers you can broadcast messages to, whereas GetResponse limits it to 1,000 subscribers only.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that GetResponse gives you more data importing options than Aweber. The former lets you import more types of files than the latter, as well as from more third-party services such as LinkedIn and G Suite.

In Conclusion

Though Aweber is awesome in its own sense, GetResponse is much more all-inclusive, reducing the need for third-party applications. It is functional, easy-to-use, and effective, relatively more than Aweber. With its time and action-based autoresponder functionality, responsive templates, landing pages and mobile application, has a definite edge over Aweber.

 

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