Finding the perfect email marketing tool for your brand can be tricky especially when you’re just starting out. Like my friend Mike, it’s entirely possible you’re leaving tons of money on the table if you haven’t got a solid email marketing strategy.
However, if you’re up to spend a few minutes reading this content, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide to two popular options for email marketing and automation: two words that can completely transform your business fortunes.
Why should you care about email marketing in 2021?
With email audiences primed to hit 4.7 billion people in 2021, your target audience is most likely just a campaign away.
To this end, you can rest assured that this post will help you make the right decision as you work to pick the tool most likely to deliver the right business outcomes.
In the sections below, I’ll be explaining in detail what you need to know about Getresponse and Aweber.
Getresponse and Aweber – what are these?
All things considered, these two are email marketing solutions that enhance your business and allow you to communicate with your customers via creative emails.
In details, Getresponse and Aweber have a ton features which should interest you if you’re looking to:
- Create your mailing list
- Build customized and beautiful email template
- Design electronic newsletters that you can send to your subscribers
- Automate your messages via autoresponders.
As Mike’s business stumbled through the COVID-19 crisis, barely staying above water, the one tool he always relied on to mop up revenues from the valley of abandoned carts was his autoresponder. The next section covers what they are in some detail.
Autoresponders – how do they affect email marketing?
Autoresponders are electronic letters that your subscribers receive automatically after they execute specific actions on your website page including clicking a link or completing a survey.
In a nutshell, they let you interact with your customers at the point of action and hypothetically, if you get these micro-interactions right, you can accelerate the users path to the cart and get paid almost as soon as they land on your first page.
Some of the cool things you can do with an autoresponder include;
- Send and receive discount information
- Solicit social media likes, retweets and follows
- Collect feedback on website experience
- Book sales dates in advance etc.
Now you’re in the know, it’s time to go deep on these getresponse and Aweber and see what all the fuss is about;
Getresponse:
- FB Pixel
- Sign up forms
- Pop ups
- Webinars
- E-commerce tools etc.
- Tags and scores
- Abandoned cart emails
- Website visitor tracking
- Product recommendations etc.
Now you have a feel for what getresponse email marketing is all about, let’s check Aweber out and see.
Aweber:
With over 20 years of experience with customer service and email marketing, Aweber has developed email technology which is simple and effective if you’re looking to reap the benefits of email marketing.
Aweber combines an incredible customer service team with great tools for all the things you might need when you’re thinking about an email marketing service; great landing page builder, money back guarantees, push notifications etc.
Some of the key features you should expect to enjoy include;
- Extensive language support
- Email automation
- Customer action based segmentation
- Advanced analytics
- A/B testing capabilities etc.
While they both look good on face value, you’re probably wondering how they compare with one another and looking to make your call based on that. The section below will prove helpful to you.
Pricing – Getresponse
Getresponse offers four plans that are available for all its users depending on users’ number of subscribers. These four plans include Basic, Plus, Professional, and Max. The next section has all the information that you need:
Basic Plan
This plan enables you to send as many emails as you to 1,000 subscribers. For a start price of $15 per month, you gain access to features such as unlimited landing pages, autoresponder, unlimited lead funnels etc.
Plus Plan:
With this plan, you can generate leads, sell e-products, and as well send unlimited emails to about 1,000 subscribers.
The plus plan ramps up all the extra marketing stuff that you’ll need to make your website work perfectly. At $49/ month, you’ll be set with all the best things in the basic plan and tons more!
Professional Plan:
The professional plan lets you send unlimited emails to your subscribers for $99/ month. You’ve also got all the sales and marketing funnels in the plus plan including other things such as automation, contact tagging and paid webinars.
Max Plan:
The Max plan is a personalized and flexible plan that’s suited for enterprise teams and large organizations. To use the Max plan, you’ll need to negotiate with the Getresponse team for its activation.
Asides from the above-listed plans, Getresponse as well offers a freemium plan for new business owners. You can try out any of the Getresponse plans freely for 30 days without credit card requirement.
Pricing – Aweber
When it comes to pricing, Aweber is tiered and designed for simplicity into two key plans. With Aweber, there’s the free plan and the Pro plan and there’s nothing else.
Aweber free plan
Aweber’s free option simply means that you can try out all Aweber’s marketing tools without paying a dime!
The only limitation however, is that you can only go between a number of 0-500 subscribers and for every electronic newsletters you send to your subscribers, follows Aweber adverts.
If you’re a small business, this might be an ideal feature for you. When your subscriber list is at zero, all that’s needed is the “free” magnet that gets you in the door.
Other than a few aesthetic limitations, Aweber free is a great idea for new business owners that are yet to have a mailing list but want to get the ball rolling on all the creative ideas they’ve got bubbling.
Aweber Pro Plan
On the other hand, Aweber pro is structured into different tiers depending on the size of your audience and the volume of emails you’re looking to send out per month.
Aweber pro costs:
- $19 per month for 500 subscribers
- $29 per month for 501-2,500 subscribers
- $49 per month for 2,501-5,000 subscribers
- $69 per month for 5,001-10,000 subscribers
- $149 per month for 10,001-25,000 subscribers
If your list is larger than 25,000 customers, you’ll need to reach out to the Aweber team for dibs on a Max spot.
Aweber offers a great way to learn about email marketing and test things out before you’re really started but once things get serious, getresponse offers better economics with its $14 price plan compared to the $19 plan that Aweber offers for the same reach.
Newsletter templates
Getresponse and Aweber both come complete with a stack of attractive e-newsletter templates with getresponse having a total of 500 and Aweber, 700 templates.
Thankfully, these templates are highly responsive and fit beautifully on all your mobile device screens, seeing as 47% of users are accessing their emails from their phones.
However, the new getresponse email creator (which is available in BETA) has remarkably fewer templates than Aweber’s 100:700 ratio. Whether this will change remains to be seen.
Another variable to consider however is that GetResponse’s email templates have been designed with modern HTML standards and generally look better as a result.
In the end, it’s a trade off between volume and quality and depending on where your business is at the moment, you should opt for one or the other.
If you’re just geeking about and trying things, then Aweber should provide ample fodder for you but if you’ve got a brand to protect, you’ll want to opt for getresponse even though it’s a bit limited at the moment.
Web Fonts
Your fonts are most likely the first thing your leads will interact with when they land on your page. Combined with the images, they form the visual perception of your website and when they don’t work well, sales fail as well.
As a result, it’s important to opt for an email service provider that has a robust collection of fonts ready to go for you. To wit, web fonts allow you to build and design customized newsletters that match the branding used on corporate websites.
Aweber allows its users to make a limited number of Google fonts on its platform and on the other hand, getresponse’s BETA version offers an amazing selection of web fonts with over hundreds of Google fonts; groovy ones included.
If fonts are important to you (as they should be), getresponse is a better buy if not, then maybe it’s not.
AMP for Email
If you’ve ever had noodles without spice then you’ve probably got a sense for what email without AMP feels like.
Accelerated Mobile Pages a programmatic structure that allows for deep interactivity and greater control over the visual and textual variables inside each and every email you send.
If you’re looking for a feature rich inbox experience for your customers, then Aweber offers this in its bundle once you’re signed up. Web actions like booking an appointment and replying to event invitations are made possible once you’ve got AMP.
On the other hand, getresponse does not. In this sense Aweber provides more depth than getresponse when it comes to feature richness in the inbox.
However, the one drawback of AMP (Which Aweber offers and getresponse doesn’t) is that you need to have some technical knowledge to implement it properly or hire someone who does.
Conclusion
If you run a business in 2021, it’s likely that you’re thinking a lot about the internet and what it has to offer. If you are, then you’ll want to stay for the rest of this.
Email automation and email marketing in general form a key part of any commercial strategy that’s digitally driven and so, you’ll need an email service that’s suitable for your business outcomes.
As soon as you do, getresponse and Aweber are two options you’re likely to encounter and when you do, you’ll find that they both offer amazing options for different business needs.
From my experience, if you’re just starting out and looking to experiment with email, then Aweber works better but if you’ve got a list and need something that’s optimized to help you sell stuff, then getresponse is one you should definitely consider.
