As a small business owner, you may have already realized the importance of email marketing. After all, the larger businesses are capturing emails each and every day. With businesses like Payless Shoes and Toys R Us closing their doors, you may realize the importance of an online presence for your business. But, you may also be asking yourself, just what is the best email marketing software for a small business?
In this article we will discuss what we believe to be the top 2 email marketing service providers, give a brief description of each, and then reveal the best based on a feasible set of criteria. There are more email marketing providers to choose from, however, we chose the top two mainly because of email deliverability. These two email marketing company’s continue to provide the highest levels of email deliverability and is our opinion to use only one of these companies’s to ensure your emails are delivered to your potential customers email inbox.
So, who are the top two email marketing providers?
- GetResponse
- Aweber
And what are the feasible set of criteria that we used for these email marketing systems? I have taken the liberty to define them below:
- Email deliverability
- Ease of use
- quality of email templates
- quality of landing page creator
- intuitive marketing automation
- Overall price value
Taking the above criteria along with experience using the software, we have described the top three best email marketing software for a small business (or for any business for that matter).
GetResponse Email Marketing
GetResponse Email Marketing is a great all around email marketing tool. It has been around for a very long time and has a great track record for sure. They launched their first website back in 1998 and have certainly set the stage for email marketing. They have many types of customers that use their services, both in the online world and the offline world.
As far as the criteria ratings of GetResponse
we have found an overall rating of 97%
These data were derived from the following:
- Email deliverability : 99%
- Ease of use
- quality of email templates
- quality of landing page creator
- intuitive marketing automation
- overall price value
another great thing about GetResponse is their ability to continuously improve upon their platform without increasing their overall price structure. Just recently, the company introduced the GetResponse auto funnel. This is truly an automated funnel system that is so easy to use that anyone can set up a complete sales funnel within minutes and then test it out for free.
In fact, one of the surprising features about the GetResponse Autofunnel is that the company is allowing current customers who do not own it to try it out for free for 30 days. But, they don’t stop their. As a new customer to GetResponse, you can try out all the full functionality of GetResponse including the GetResponse Autofunnel free for 30 days as well. Plus, this can be accomplished without a credit card. I will get into more detail about GetResponse later on in this post.
In the meantime, if you would like all the details now, go to my GetResponse email marketing Review here.
Email Deliverability
Since GetResponse has been around for a long time and due to their diversity of the market share, their deliverability rates are an awesome 99%. What we mean by their diversity of the market share, is that many types of business use GetResponse. These businesses include, hotels, small offline businesses, online business, affiliate marketing business. They are not associated with just the internet/network marketing industries who tend to be more associated with SPAM.
The email providers recognize this and the size of their servers then to get these emails delivered to the inbox what they are more likely to be read.
Easy of Use
I have firsthand experience with the ease of use of setting up campaigns with GetResponse verses other email marketing platforms, and I can tell you, the set up is very intuitive and not cumbersome. It is basically a “what you see is what you get” type of system. Campaigns are easy to set up, emails are easy to set up and the use of their provided email templates makes it even easier, especially for the newbie.
This is also the case with their large selection of pre-made templates. Yes, they are pre-made, but they do allow for a huge amount of diversity, to make them not look like everyone else pages. This gives you the flexibility to use your own creativity, company logo, and any other unique to your business creative.
Quality of Email Templates
GetResponse has over 500 email or, what they call, newsletter templates. These templates allow your business to stand out. The internet is a crowded place and one has to stand out to be noticed. These newsletter templates really help you to stand out among the crowd in an easy to use platform. Check out the image below to see just a fraction of what GetResonse has to offer in the way of email/newsletter templates.
Quality of Landing Page Creator
This is an area that GetResponse has always led the industry on. Like the email templates, they have a very large inventory of landing page templates and a customizable landing page creator that a small business can use to gather contact information from potential customers. This Landing page creator is extremely simple to use since you can literally use any one of their highly responsive landing page templates, and there are hundreds of templates to choose from.
These templates are designed for high conversions with Opt-in pages, sales pages, promo pages or downloadable pages. You can choose the one that best fits your business needs and add your personal touch to them. This can be done in less than 30 minutes. Plus, they are mobile responsive as well. Believe it or not, many people are searching the internet on their hand held devices and you will want pages to look good on these devices.
intuitive marketing automation
So, you may be wondering what the heck intuitive marketing automation is. It sounds complicated, right? Well, it’s actually quite simple really, yet very powerful. It is also an area that is somewhat unique to GetResponse. It is essentially a tool that allows you to leverage your customers behavior. Not only that, but it actually allows you to determine your customers behavior so that you can leverage it.
It allows you to get a real time view of your customers behavior so that you can plan your marketing strategies accordingly. You essentially set up workflows so you can monitor this behavior. This also allows you to set up funnels based on this behavior, and the important this here is that GetResponse provides all the training so it becomes extremely easy to set up. You simply set the rules and the automation kicks in.
Overall price value
All of the features mentioned above provide value to you as a small business so that you can generate more customers and make more money. Which, I believe, is your ultimate goal as a small business. Since you are running a small business, you know that an email marketing service like GetResponse has costs associated with these services. What is really cool about GetResponse, is that you can try out ALL of their services and take them for a test drive free for the first 30 days. You don’t even need to give them your credit card.
I have included an image below that shows the GetResponse pricing structure based on your first 1000 subscribers to your email list. The prices do increase as your subscriber base increases. This is set as a sliding scale. In fact, when you go onto their website, you can adjust that sliding scale to see the price differences as you increase your subscriber database.
Aweber Email Marketing
Aweber communication has been around since August 24, 1998. So, it is definitely not new to the email marketing arena. It has been extremely popular amongst internet marketers who tend to use large email lists to promote their products and services. As you can see, they have been around as long as GetResponse.
They are well-known for their great email deliverability and many marketing stick with them because of that reason. One of their attributes is the use of their opt in pages within the website platform known as WordPress. They integrate quite nicely within that format, allowing the user to create great looking blog posts with great looking opt in forms embedded within the pages and posts. This is one of the best email marketing platforms for the WordPress user or blogger.
As far as the criteria ratings of Aweber
we have found an overall rating of 83%.
These data were derived from the following:
- Email deliverability : 99%
- Ease of use: 90%
- quality of email templates: 95%
- quality of landing page creator: 50%
- intuitive marketing automation: 85%
- Overall price value: 80%
Email deliverability
In the area of deliverability Aweber has always shown great marks. They consistently give great email deliverability. This means that emails do get to the potential customers email in box. Like GetResponse, Awebers market share is huge with a very diverse user base from both online and offline businesses using their platform. They have been in the industry a very long time and are a trusted email marketing platform just like GetResponse.
Email providers recognize the overall trust of Aweber, and therefore let a majority of their emails come through. Provided that the content is not rated as spam.
Ease of use
In general, Aweber is an easy platform to work within. However, it is a little more cumbersome than GetResponse. This is the reason for the slightly lower score in this category. Awebers Platform is mainly driven by HTML code and requires a little more of a learning curve to navigate within.
They do provide good training, so one should have no problem learning how to use the platform.
quality of email templates
Like GetResponse, Aweber has a huge selection of high quality email templates to choose from making it a great platform for creating high quality newsletters and email templates. This really allows the business to standout amongst the crowded internet so that their emails provide high quality and are read. The image below shows just a fraction of what Aweber has to offer within this category.
quality of landing page creator
Here lies the main differences between Aweber and GetResponse. The quality of the landing page creator. Why does Aweber have such a low score in this category? Well, mainly because Aweber really does not have a landing page creator nor do they have any actual landing page templates.
They have templates for sign up forms that you can publish on a landing page from your blog or from another landing page provider, but they do not have templates for a landing page. We feel that Aweber really falls short in this category. Granted, they do have awesome looking forms that you can place on your website, but they do not have actual landing page templates that even slightly compare to what GetResponse has to offer.
intuitive marketing automation
In the area of automation, Aweber is fairly limited in comparison to GetResponse email marketing. Aweber allows you to automate when email messages are sent based on audience behavior. So, the automation is limited to just emails themselves, whereas GetResponse automates other areas including their new auto funnel system. Aweber does not have a version of the automated funnel system that GetResponse has. This is a part of intuitive marketing automation that is exclusive to GetResponse.
Overall price value
Based on some limits of Aweber email marketing in the areas of building landing pages and the lack of an automated funnel system, the overall price value has a lower ranking than GetResponse. Plus, the overall cost of Aweber is higher, mainly because their prices are based on 500 subscribers rather than 1000 subscribers. If your list grows to the level you want, you will end up paying a lot more for Aweber in overall monthly fees.
I have provided the price schedule below.
So, What is the Best Email Marketing Software for a Small business?
Based on all the criteria we discussed and the overall price value, the answer to the question, what is the best email marketing software for a small business? is…..Yes, you guessed it:
GetResponse Email Marketing.
As mentioned there are other email marketing software company’s such as Constant Contact, Mail Chimp and Trafficwave, however, they do not come close to the overall quality that both GetResponse and Aweber share, especially in the area of email deliverability. Another contender would be The Conversion Pros. I would read about them at The Conversion Pros Review. I would not use any other company besides these two, and between these two, we recommend GetResponse based on overall comparisons and overall value.
So, if you want to incorporate email marketing into your small business marketing strategy, we recommend that you go with GetResponse Email Marketing:
Thanks for your detailed article about email marketing. I have used Get Response in the past but really to start off with, I wanted one that was free… so I chose mailchimp. I do not find it easy to use, it feels disjointed to me and the language used to describe some products doesn’t resonate with me. I think for someone who doesnt want to pay right now it is probably my only best option but i will certainly remember what I have learned here for the future.
Hi Quinn, if you are disappointed with Mailchimp and you only tried it because it was free, why not give GetResponse a try for free. As you mentioned, for someone who doesn’t want to pay right now, can try GetResponse free without even using a credit card. Thirty days should be sufficient to tell whether it has all of the features one would like to have in a good email marketing software.
This a highly detailed comparative review of two products.
In this head to head comparison along with the pricing between GetResponse and Aweber GetResponse stands out in email marketing. I agree with you. It makes even an easier decision with less money and 30-day free trial with no credit card.
I was wondering if someone has Aweber, how easy and is there any consequences to switching from Aweber to GetResponse?
Are these pricing monthly, yearly or for a lifetime? I am not sure if I read it or might have missed it.
Hi Anusuya, thanks for your feedback. To answer your first question, many people have switched from Aweber to Getresponse with much trouble. The only risk would be whether you have developed a large list in Aweber you may want to consider staying with them and continue providing good content and value to that list. It depends on your relationship with your list.
Getresponse does have a feature where you can upload a list from a CVS file you can create from Aweber if your Aweber list is relatively small. Hope that helps.
Hi Ralph,
Get Response definitely has the toolset to use, especially as your list grows and you generate the funds to cover 2-year subscriptions and the 500 Webinar recipient level. I am impressed by their quality as well. Cost wise they can be a little rough on those just getting started but as your list grows they are a good move up from MailChimp or RocketResponder.
Hi Ralph,
Thank you for such an in-depth look into those two email responding companies. I have a with ResponseMajic, and Chimpmail, neither one do I use. I don’t need to take on the expense since I am just about to hit day 60 with my sites.
I am a big visual person, so thank you for giving up top-notch graphs to look at while we read. When is the right time to set up an email responder company? I think I have had two hits on my sites and I think I am related to both of them.
Thanks again, Ralph!
Cheers, and take care of yourself!
John
Hi John, I think the best time to get into email marketing is when your sites are receiving over 200 visitors a month minimum. That way you can capitalize on the free organic traffic.
This is all fine and dandy, but what is exactly is the point of email marketing? How does it essentially work, and is it really that beneficial to a small business? Those may be dumb questions, but I’m awfully curious because I’m not even entirely sure how email marketing even works. A quick overview on it would be pretty nice, because GetResponse seems very tempting.
Hi Jose, thanks for visiting my site. To answer your question, let’s say you visited my website about cooking or healthy living habits. You read an article talking about the benefits of eating a vegetarian based diet because you searched in Google for information on that subject matter because you were interested in learning more about vegetarian diets. But, you were worried that you might only get exposed to tasteless vegetables and you don’t think you and your family would like it. While you were reading this article that came up in the search engines you came across a form on that same page that says something like “Get these awesome tasting, mouth watering recipes that are all vegetarian based and soooo easy to cook even your 12 year old son can make it”. You are interested.
So, you put your name and email into the form and directly to your email I send you a real awesome recipe that you simply love. You even tried it and absolutely loved it. Do you think you might open the next email I send you? Of course you would. Well, the next several email come in and they are more of the type of content that you were originally looking for. Then I send you another email one day talking about an awesome cookbook that you could purchase that would give you an huge number of mouth watering recipes that your and your family are sure to love.
In this scenario, you are getting content that you were looking for, and I as a business owner am making a commission on the cook book that you just purchased. That, my friend is essentially how email marketing works.
Hi
I have always used MailChimp. I was surprised that Mail-Chimp was not on your list. Maybe I am out of date and GetResponse and Aweber are better. A major problem I have with mail programs is that gmail, yahoo, outlook and others, quickly recognize bulk mail and mark email as spam or bulk mail. The mail servers recognize the MX record as being from a known ‘spammer’ or ‘bulk-mailer’ and tag emails as such. How does GetRespone and Aweber respond to being tagged as spam or bulk-mail?
Hi Aaron, being tagged as spam or bulk-email has more to do with the content that is being delivered in the email itself. Aweber and GetResponse have been around a long time and are used by many offline businesses as well as online businesses. So, they are less likely to contain “spammers” than some of the other responders that are more associated with Network Marketing and others marketers that tend to send out spam. So, it is really not the email provider as much as it’s the email writer that is recognized as spam. Much of the spam these days comes from subject lines that look too sales.like. If you are sending out good content through with your email marketing efforts, you will most likely find more of your content goes into prospects inbox rather than their spam folder.
Aweber and GetResponse have been around much longer than MailChimp and have a much better reputation and less association with spam type of marketing. If I share a blog post with my email subscribers that they have asked me to send them, then it is less likely to be rated as spam.
I recently created a website and I’ve heard that email marketing is quite possibly the #1 way to go to get conversions for your site. I’m not sure if that’s true but I certainly would like to try it out. I didn’t know where to look for this info so thank you for providing a point of reference, I think this might really help me out once I start driving traffic, thanks!
Your welcome Ibrahim, yes I agree. When I started to drive traffic to my sites I started to do email marketing. This way you take advantage of the organic traffic that comes in and capture their information so you can provide ongoing content to them over and over again. That is the awesome thing about email marketing is that you never lose touch with your visitors once you have their contact information.
Hello, Ralph Martin. Great timing as I was figuring out whether I’m ready to incorporate email marketing and what strategies to use I like the look of content strategies. I’ll need to use I’m still using and exploring this excellent resource as I’m hoping of joining Wealth Affiliate I’ve heard about so much.
Many Blessings
Hello Ralph, as usual I just learnt a couple of things from your in depth overview of the best email marketing software for small businesses. Email marketing is a very powerful tool that if well used would add a great deal of success to one’s business. This GetResponse email marketing would be a great tool to try out based on the juxtaposition done through this post and also based in your recommendations. Cheers
Rodger
Thanks RoDarrick, yes, having the ability to try it out for 30 days is a great benefit. One would easily see the advantages after setting up a campaign or two.
I’ve been in network marketing and affiliate marketing for 13 years and have used Aweber and GetResponse almost exclusively. The only time I have not use them is when the company I was working with used their own autoresponder system. They both have a free trial so you can get inside the dashboard and find which one is more comfortable for you and then go with that one. This is a good comparison of the two systems.
Thank you Mark, yes, I agree. I have used both systems myself and still use GetResponse today. I have a very responsive email list generated from them based on their awesome metrics.
Thanks for this great comparison, i’ve been digging around trying to figure what email marketing service to use. I do like these two but I definitely wish there was more than just a free trial. Are there any you would recommend that has something longer than just a free trial.
Hi Huy, there are a few free autoresponders on the market, but they really are not worth the time and effort you would have to put into them. The problem is email deliver-ability of these free email marketing software systems. There is no sense in sending emails in bulk when they do not reach the prospects in box. GetResponse has a full 30 day trial that allows you to get access to all of their features. It seems to me that 30 days would be long enough to see if you like the system or not. For a small business the cost of doing business would be a very small one compared to the return on investment for being able to have these prospects for life.