Aweber vs GetResponse
By custodio
What makes an autoresponder service good?
Before I get into my Aweber vs GetResponse autoresponder comparison, I want to let you know about a limited time promotional code that lets you try out Aweber for only $1. You can get the promo code at the end of this review if you decide to opt for the Aweber autoresponder.
Want to know what is the most important factor in deciding which autoresponder service to use? The answer is: deliverability.
Its not the cost that is the most important factor, but the actual number of emails that escape spam filters and make their way into you the in-box.
What good is a service that charges $10 for 1000 emails vs a service that charges $15 for the same number of sent email, when the service that charges $10 only delivers half of the emails?
If it boiled down to cost, we would all be using a free service or a cheap autoresponder script.
We all get hundreds of emails a day that go right to our spam folders and are just deleted. Did you ever even notice who is sending you these emails? Probably not, but I can assure you its not Aweber or GetResponse.
Aweber vs GetResponse
Let me start of by saying that both Aweber and GetResponse are great services. You really cann´t go wrong if you opt for any one of the two. They both offer similar features and benefits:
- Set-up unlimted lists
- Set-up unlimited autoresponders
- Detailed Statistics
- Send unlimited emails to your subscribers
- Configure several types of sign-up and opt-in forms
Since both of these autoresponder services offer these key features, lets look at what separates both of the services.
GetResponse has best price
In the Aweber vs GetResponse battle, GetResponse wins on price. Their unlimited service costs $17.95 a month and you can get it for as low as $12.12 a month if you pay for a full year.
The Aweber service starts at $19 a month for up to 500 subscribers (total on all lists) and goes up from there. From 501 to 2500 subscribers the Aweber service costs $29 a month.
Aweber wins if you have a blog
If you have a blog, and plan on adding a newsletter (you really should!) than Aweber wins over GetResponse. Aweber provides three key features for bloggers:
- Blog broadcast - This is a great feature because it lets you send out an email to your list every time you post. But if sending out an email every time you write a new post is a little too much, you can set-up Aweber send out an email on a certain day of the month, or when you reach a certain number of posts (say for example after 10 new posts). With the last two options your email will include a summary of your posts instead of the actual full text with a link back to the actual post on your blog (great for driving traffic back to your site).
- Count email subscribers in your FeedBurner RSS count - Since Aweber reports to FeedBurner, if you opt to use the blog broadcast feature your email subscribers will be counted towards your total RSS subscribers. Having a high number of RSS readers is important in establishing social proof.
- Sign-up with Facebook integration - This is a recent Aweber feature but it is really cool and important. When someone visits your blog, and if they are logged in to Facebook, they will see a sign-up form that is already pre-populated with their name (real name!) and email address (one you know they check often). They will also be able to see which of their friends are already subscribed to your newsletter (more social proof). This is a feature I am liking a lot and has helped increase my email list..
Creating an email newsletter with Aweber
Delivery rates: Aweber wins
The email delivery rates of Aweber and GetResponse are very close, but this is also the most important factor in my opinion, and Aweber has a great delivery rate (99.34% delivery rate). Aweber has zero tolerance for spam and as such their emails make their way to your "in box".
A-List blogger endorsement
If you want to follow the lead of all the A-list bloggers, than Aweber wins. I Aweber is used by Darren Rowse, ShoeMoney, Yaro and John Chow, just to name a few of the top bloggers in the MMO niche (make money online).
All of these bloggers have, at one point or another, recommended the Aweber autoresponder. I personally also use Aweber for several years, so that should mean something.
Final choice: Pick Aweber over GetResponse
If you are looking for top notch delivery rates, easy integration with your blog, than Aweber should be your choice. That is my personal pick and recommendation.
You can also take advantage of a limited time $1 trial of Aweber for 30 days. Just follow my link and try Aweber for a full 30 days for one 1 buck!
Although I recommend Aweber, if you are more price sensitive, than you will also get a quality service from GetResponse.
Aweber vs GetResponse
Which of the two autoresponder services do you recommend?
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Comments
I just love getting along with GetResponse email marketing service. At least their affiliate program has an unlimited widened participation and productivity.
Also checkout FeedmailPro.com (cheaper and better alternative). They have an affiliate program also.
Thanks very much for your help. I was trying to find a great review of these two (they were my choices). Now for the final decision...
Aweber is not UTF-8 compliant...
(incredible in 2009, if you ask me)
If you try to use it for non-english emailing, your spam score go to the roof (bad encoding)
So, if you ever need to send emailings in Spanish, french, chinese, japanese.. forget Aweber. It's a small world, and they should wake up on that.
Get Response state that they support UTF-8 by default -- but I have not tested it yet.
By the way, Custodio, do you use Aweber in Portuguese?
Hi,
Yes, I use Aweber for my Portuguese sites. I just stay away from using "funny" characters in the subject line of the email. Have not had any issues with using them in the body of the email.
I just signed up with Aweber and had a live chat with one of their specialists about doing business internationally. I've run into multilingual character problems with Aweber from the get go so I thought it would be good to paste the conversation here.
Dan: I just signed up with you and embedded my templet into my website. As I was setting this all up beforehand, I notice that there was no way to change the emailed message asking the user to click in order to subscribe. I need to change this to Spanish because I am dealing with Spanish speakers only. Is this possible?rn
You are now speaking with Nick Moore of AWeber Customer Solutions.
Nick Moore: Welcome to Live Support.
Nick Moore: that is not possible at the moment, unfortuantely
Nick Moore: you can of course have the intro and subject in spanish in order to explain this
Dan: With the fact that 4.5 billion people don't speak English and you are the largest autoresponder out there, don't you think this would have been a priority to be solved at least 10 years ago?
Nick Moore: we are based in the US at the moment, and we have to be careful about US federal law as regards the sending of commercial email
Nick Moore: unfortunately, this makes multilanguage support a little difficult
Nick Moore: but i can definitely pass on your desire for a spanish version of that text
Dan: Before signing up with Aweber, I read a thread about Aweber not being UTF-8 compliant. The guy said that because of this, a lot of my foreign sent mails will go into people's spam boxes. First of all, I don't even know what UTF-8 compliance is. Can you validate what this guy said?
Nick Moore: we do not store text in UTF-8
Nick Moore: that is a way to store text characters
Nick Moore: we presently use US ASCII
Nick Moore: im not sure that would be a reason for the message to go to spam
Nick Moore: but it is true that this is part of the problem with providing multilanguage support, especially when the language uses special charracters
Dan: How do you define special characters?
Nick Moore: ones that are not in the standard english character set
Dan: Like this? ????2????
Nick Moore: um, yeah
Dan: Well this is what's happening with me and the future of my business. I have a product that will be translated to all of the major languages of the planet. Are you telling me that I can't send emails with Chinese and cyrilic characters?
Nick Moore: unfortunately, we are unable to support those characters in plain text format at the moment
Dan: I see there is an HTML option for each mail that I send. Will I be able to send characters of foreign languages using that?
Nick Moore: many of our customers do
Nick Moore: as HTML will often support those characters
Nick Moore: but that is something we cannot offer support on
Dan: If I go the HTML route, can I enter foreign characters in the subject lines?
Nick Moore: unfortunately, thats not something we can support at the moment
Dan: I see, you've been very helpful, but I need something that's geared to more of an international level
Dan: Thanks Nick
I have had troubles with putting affiliate links in my aweber - have you come across this? Is this a problem with get response?
Thank you for this Report i will use Aweber!!
Am a fan of aweber too. But have been trying to make it work in China... no luck! Suggestion from any one?
You can go see my website for an appreciation/evalution:-
I have been using AWeber since 2008 I am OK with the system however the affiliate program is terribly bad. They don’t pay the affiliates commissions. I don’t know if I am the only one that has this problem, but I haven’t been getting my commissions checks. They play games, they tell you that they have sent you the checks and they don’t. They were supposed to send me a check for $30 dollars on December 17 2009. I never got it. I called them and they said I had to wait 6 month for them to re-issue it, because it cost them money to re-issue a check before it expires! I waited 7 month, and they have been playing games. I have called so many times; sometimes they say they sent it, other times they say it will take 2 more weeks, other times they tell me to wait a couple more weeks, you name it, every time I call, they tell me something different. It is October 2010 already and they still have not sent my check. I did get one commission from another period, but I have never gotten the December 17th commission. After this happened I stopped promoting the program and I made all the affiliates that I had signed up cancel the program. I only have one left. I would have at least had 20 affiliates by now had I continue promoting it, but what would be the purpose if they don’t pay. I would have canceled the service already, but I was under the impression that the check was going to be sent to me. Now I am sure they will continue playing games and laying to me every time I call and they will not pay me. Unbelievable!
It is so hard for me to understand why a big company as AWeber would have such a big problem sending an affiliate check for $30 dollars. I have been living at the same address for 11 years and never ever had a lost check before. I have no problems with all my other affiliates programs. They all send the checks on time and never get lost.
They are now telling me they did send the check and that maybe it got lost again! “We have no control over the post office once we send the checks” They told me that the first time and now they are saying it again. What are the chances that a check gets lost twice? If they had sent it, I would have received it. I live in a very safe neighborhood and I never have had this problem with any checks being lost.
This people at AWeber don’t treat they affiliate with respect. They are very ungrateful; they are the lowest of the lowest. This is so hard to believe, but is true. Only $30 dollars!
They have to send me another commission now in October, we will see what happens.
I do not recommend the affiliate program of AWeber. If this happened to me, I am sure it must have happened to many others, but no one is saying it.
In addition, their customer service is very bad; people that answer the phone are not nice at all.
Just because of this problem, I will stop using them. They don’t deserve to get my $19 dollars a month. Even though $19 dollars may not mean much to AWeber (or maybe it does, they seem to have problems paying $30) I will get another autoresponder services. It will mean a lot of work to me since I have to set up all my campaigns again, but I don’t mind. It is not the $30 dollars I care about, it is the fact that they are not being honest.
I would like to know if anyone has had the same problem with AWeber not paying their commissions.
if your someone who's starting getresponse will be a better choice for your internet marketing campaign
I am still confused which of the two I'm gonna use for my blog. I have more than 1k subscribers in my feedburner account but if I'm gonna migrate to aweber or getresponse, I have to pay few dollars per month which I can also get free from feedburner. The problem is, I could not do in feedburner what I can do in aweber or getresponse.
I have no problem at all inserting affiliate links.
As far as their affiliate program, I get paid regularly by check, and I hope I am getting credit for everyone I sign-up.
I love your post. This is excellent content. I personally also prefers Aweber for its simple userability compared to GetResponse
Regards,
Dan
Thomas T 2 years ago
Excellent content here and a nice writing style too - keep up the great work!