For the longest time, I've always sung the praises of Aweber for my email marketing. This weekend I decided that it's no longer for me… Here's a quick comparison of Aweber vs GetResponse.
I made the switch from, arguably the most popular autoresponder among marketers, to another one that had much more features that I wanted.
I switched over to GetResponse. I feel a little bit bad about my decision. I've been with Aweber since about 2008 and I've always loved them and promoted them as an affiliate. We had a good run, I had a massive mailing list with them, we had good times together but it had to come to an end…
There's absolutely nothing wrong with Aweber at all. I still think they are a great company and I still wouldn't hesitate to give them a good recommendation if someone asked me about them. I'm just digging some of the features of GetResponse a bit more.
First off… A major key factor for me was that I needed a service that I could import existing lists to. I wanted to keep the lists that I built in Aweber and GetResponse allows you to import everything over without making people re-confirm their emails. Aweber doesn't offer this. If I wanted to import a list from another service in to Aweber, I would need to ask every single person on the list to confirm their email address again. This would inevitably shrink my list…
Sure, it could be argued that having people re-confirm would only make sure that my list is as responsive as possible. In my mind though, it's a nuisance to a lot of people on my list. They are receiving one extra email from me that I wouldn't otherwise have to send. Some people may not see the re-confirmation email because it went to spam or they overlooked it… People that would have wanted to keep receiving communications from me may have been cut off…
With GetResponse, this wasn't an issue. I was able to import everyone over with no problems.
Second… GetResponse has awesome automation tools. You can trigger emails to go out based on certain events.
You can send an email to people automatically on their birthday or if they opened a previous email or even if they reached a certain page on your website. It's pretty powerful. Aweber allows you to do some of this with broadcasts that you create manually but it's not available as an automated feature in your follow up sequence. This stuff is huge to keep your list engaged.
GetResponse also has built-in surveys… If you want to survey your list to get more information about demographics, you can easily set up the survey from right inside GetResponse… It's a simple, quick process and Aweber has nothing similar… You'd have to purchase a 3rd party survey system just to do this.
GetResponse is full of free stock images. If you want to use images in your emails or in your opt-in forms, GetResponse has a deal with iStockPhoto and they have a thousand stock images available for GetResponse users. Can't beat that!
GetResponse has much more intuitive reporting (in my opinion). I can much more easily analyze the stats of one of my lists or all of my lists at once. Aweber makes this really difficult. I like having an overview of the stats of my whole account, as opposed to just looking at the stats of just one list at a time.
GetResponse allows me to search criteria across all of my lists instead of just one at a time. This was a huge frustration for me with Aweber. If I was looking for subscribers that met a certain criteria, I had to look through each list individually to find what I was looking for. It was pretty frustrating.
Finally… One thing that I noticed after I made the switch… Deliverability went up! Emails in my followup sequence that, at one time, received a 15% open rate are now receiving a 30% open rate with GetResponse. Same exact list with a new autoresponder… This makes me think that emails from Aweber aren't getting in to the inbox as well as GetResponse emails are. I wasn't expecting this but it's definitely a HUGE bonus.
Overall, they are both great services and prices are pretty comparable. I think GetResponse is actually slightly cheaper per subscriber (but still pretty comparable). I don't have much bad to say about Aweber but I'm slowly becoming a raving fan of GetResponse.
Currently, GetResponse has a 30 day free trial. Give it a shot, import your existing list, and see what you think. My money is on people liking it better. Sorry Aweber. :-/
Check out this post I did about all the creative ways I used GetResponse to grow my list.
Here's some other great ideas around list building:
