Table of Contents
- What do Aweber and GetResponse do?
- Core Features
- Price Comparison
- Deliverability Comparison
- What is Deliverability
- Analysis
- User Interface
- Email Templates
- Conclusion
What do Aweber and GetResponse do?
Aweber and GetReponse are both email marketing platforms that were founded in 1998. Being one of the oldest in the industry, they are among the extremely popular and well-known email bulk senders in the digital marketing space. According to their websites, GetResponse serves more than 350,000 customers spanning 183 countries while Aweber serves over 100,000.
These two online platforms compete in the space with almost the same services – but not quite! They are both email marketing and online campaign management platforms that help small and big entrepreneurs deliver newsletters and other high-impact online campaigns. They offer various email marketing automations, hundreds of ready-to-use email templates, and other useful applications and tools.
Overall, Aweber and GetResponse are tools for hosting your mailing list, creating attractive email templates and sending e-newsletters out to your subscribers. As mentioned by Nichepursuits, the main job of these services is to allow you to automatically subscribe people to your newsletters, manage them easily, send out thousands of emails to them with no issues and without landing in the spam folder, as well as using intelligent tools to effectively segment your emails and tailor your messages to people’s actions and interests, all done automatically.
Now that are primed as to what these online marketing services are about, let us focus on both of their features and our recommendations.
Core Features
We know that both Aweber and GetResponse are competitive in delivering the best and efficient email campaigns. Therefore, to cut everything short, here is a list of the core features that are available on both platforms.
- Sending to an unlimited number of leads from your mailing list.
- Performance reporting
- Responsive ready-to-use templates
- Mailing list management
- Hundreds of email templates
- Over a hundred third-party productivity applications and tools
- Capturing, storing and managing email addresses and subscriber lists.
- Automated email sequences with set time intervals using the autoresponder service functionality.
- Drag and drop editors without coding
- RSS to newsletter
Nevertheless, GetResponse has managed to expand their network of offerings in providing a suite of new functionalities and completely revamping their interface. Based from Nichepursuit, here are the offering that have been added to GetResponse’s marketing services.
- CRM Platform (Customer Relationship Management).
- Superior marketing automation.
- Webinar Hosting.
- A landing page creator (or builder) tool.
- E-commerce marketing automation.
This may also explain why the total number of customers of GetResponse has boomed more than Aweber’s.
Price Comparison
You may refer to the table below to give you an overview of both of Aweber and GetResponse’s plan offerings.
If you will look at the cheapest plans from both, GetResponse has an advantage offering up to 1,000 subscribers at $15 per month. While Aweber’s lowest tier plan starts at $19 while giving you only 500 subscribers. In conclusion, GetResponse is slightly less expensive from Aweber with their higher tier plans.
However, for plans above 25,000 subscribers, GetResponse has closed-deal price while Aweber’s pricing is up for negotiation as their plan says “Get a Quote”. Who knows, Aweber may have got a better pricing plan compared to GetResponse.
Our verdict? Aweber is slightly pricier than GetResponse by an average of $4. Yet, for bigger scale of subscribers, Aweber is definitely a good option as they can give a special quote for your brand’s specific scope of work needed.
Deliverability
As decribed by sNews, deliverability is crucial to relay messages to your subscribers. According to Stastica, 48.16 percent of all global emails are marked as junk. Spam filters are vigilant about marking spam emails. If your emails are being marked as spam, they won’t be read by your customers. The difference between delivered rate and deliverability is that delivered rate measures the number of emails that don’t receive a hard or soft bounce. It does not measure where the emails land.
Emails can have a 99% delivered rate. This means that 99% of the total emails did not bounce. However, some of those emails could be delivered to the spam folder. This means that they won’t even be seen.
While the delivered rate is important, do not assume that it will translate to inbox placement rate. It just means that it wasn’t rejected.
When it comes to deliverability, there are many factors that come into play. It will rely on your content, list quality, subscriber engagement, authentication and infrastructure, and spam filters.
Selecting the right email autoresponder can help to improve deliverability. This will increase the likelihood that your customers can read your emails.
Overall, The AWeber and GetResponse deliverability are closely matched. They rate the same in Return Path. They also take many of the same actions to prevent email rejection. Therefore, you may want to base your decision on other factors.
According to Marketing Automation Insider, Aweber tends to be better suited for small businesses and bloggers, while GetResponse is ideal for large and small business.
User Interface
To be honest, GetResponse has had a historically nasty interface and a weird naming convention such as calling newsletters “Campaigns”. The GetResponse interface wasn’t intuitive and felt grossly outdated.
The interface has substantially more options than Aweber, and that’s to be expected since GetResponse now provides a lot more than just email marketing. The challenge is to keep all those features/options organized in a clean way, and I think they’ve done a good job at that.
Aweber’s interface is straightforward enough. The homepage provides some aggregate stats about your subscribers and recent “broadcasts”. Broadcasts are Aweber’s term for newsletters. The upper menu is also organized into 6 sections: Home, Messages, Subscribers, Sign Up Forms and Reports.
Email Templates
Although most of the emails I send out are plain-text emails or minimal HTML ones (links and maybe images every now and then). The reason is simple, my own testing suggests that plain-text emails are not only opened more often but also bring more engagement.
Don’t take my word for it, though. The folks over at HubSpot have independently researched this and came to the same conclusion. I guess it’s because these emails are more similar to the regular emails you receive from normal people. After all, the emails you read and reply to every day are seldom fancy with vibrant colors and eye-catching graphics.
This section is not about getting you to abandon using email templates, though. But I do think that you should give plain-text emails a try if you haven’t yet. With that out of the way, let’s talk about how GetResponse and Aweber’s pre-designed email templates compare.
Both have over 500 templates to choose from, so that’s plenty. You can also easily customize those templates in both. Both allow you to create your own template from scratch as well if you don’t find inspiration in any of the available templates. Here’s a screenshot from Aweber’s website showing sample templates:
So who has better-looking templates? Like I said, I almost never use their pre-designed templates anyway but if I were to choose, I’d choose Aweber’s. This, of course, is highly subjective so if templates are a big thing for you, make sure to thoroughly review templates on both platforms before making your decision.
Conclusion
Let me address what’s probably on your head right now: why the bias? To tell you the truth, GetResponse and Aweber were very close competitors up until recently. They both felt like outdated “once upon a time dominant solutions”. felt pity for the both of them and really didn’t expect any of them to make a “comeback”.
Aweber did improve a lot over the years but not to the extent I can call a “comeback” in my book. GetResponse surprised me, though and since then, they’ve won me over (as evident from this post). It’s not all rainbows and butterflies though, there are a few hiccups with GetResponse.
Their support is slow in my experience and they don’t offer phone support as of writing this (while Aweber does). Their deliverability scores are not as spotless as Aweber. People have also experienced delayed delivery when they send emails out. Aweber delivers emails almost instantly.
I hope you’ve found this comparison helpful. Which solution do you currently use and do you like it? If you’re looking to switch, why? Please share your opinion in the comments section and let me know if you have any questions!
Source:
https://www.stylefactoryproductions.com/blog/aweber-vs-getresponse
https://www.aweber.com/aweber-vs-getresponse.htm
https://www.nichepursuits.com/aweber-vs-getresponse-comparison/
