With RSS feeds, Twitter, and all sorts of other instant communication, email still tops the list of the best broad-contact method marketers use to get response from their base of customers or fans.  My journey through different autoresponders has often landed back to GetResponse vs. Aweber.

The money is in your list!  So, it’s fair to say that choosing an autoresponder to use for your home business, website, etc. is probably one of the most important choices you can make.  I’ll give you one man’s opinion on the 2 most popular services, as well as a couple others I’ve used along the way.

Aweber vs. GetResponse

We’ll start and end with the big boys.  Now, there are other autoresponders out there, and I’ll mention a few at the end, but most of the people looking to start with an autoresponder, or find the right email management system to move into, are going to end up trying to choose between these two companies: Aweber and GetResponse.

Several years ago, when I started a (fairly strong) email newsletter geared towards hip-hop music, I signed up with Aweber.  They seemed to be the leader at that time, the price was decent (I think it was still $20/mo back then too), and it did what I needed it to do – easily.  I had about 5,000 subscribers on that list and it didn’t cost me anything to send out as many emails as I felt was necessary.

Then along came a problem.  A few months ago, Aweber changed it’s subscriber policy.  Here’s how the old and new policies compare:

Old: $19.95/mo for 10,000 subscribers plus $9.95/mo per additional 10,000 subscribers.  NIce, right?  Well the new one is: $19.95/mo for 500 subscribers, $29.95 for up to 2500 subscribers, $49.95 for up to 5000 subscribers, and then it goes up from there.

My old list would’ve been costing me $49 per month to maintain – not that there’s anything wrong with that at all – but the difference in those two pricing structures is amazing.  For someone with a 10,000 person list, the old price would’ve been $20 and the new price is $69.  That’s quite the jump.

That brings us to GetResponse.  I had tried their trial program years back when comparing to Aweber, and there was a reason I didn’t choose them: their system seemed overly complicated even for someone like me who knew what they were doing.  I can say without doubt, they’ve remedied this.  Although their service is loaded with options, they’re relatively easy to figure out even if you’re new – and if you are new, they have some nice help videos to get you started.

Here’s the other thing with GetResponse — their autoresponder pricing structure is still comparable to the good ‘ole days: $17.95 per month for up to 10,000 subscribers plus $4.95 per month for each additional 10,000 subscribers.

But maybe I’m comparing apples to oranges?  Maybe GetResponse’s service just isn’t as good as Aweber’s?  I’ve heard compelling arguments regarding Aweber’s delivery rates – they’re supposedly over 99%, which is amazing.  I’ve also heard that GetResponse’s are around 98% – no too shabby either.  Feature-wise, both services offer almost everything you need to run multiple autoresponders from one account; easy templates, form creation, contact management, and much more.

A plus for Aweber is they have a really well-done system (email parsing) for integrating into different shopping carts.  For instance, you can usually set in shopping cart software the email addresses to notify of a sale… well, Aweber will give you an email address to forward sales to and it can parse out the user’s email address and name and add them to your list (for many services).

On the other side, GetResponse actually has a public API which allows developers to create integration with the GetResponse system very tightly.  I don’t know if this is new or what, as I’ve had a hard time finding anyone who has integrated with GetResponse yet, but this could be a huge thing for someone who wants to custom integrate their autoresponder with their shopping cart, membership system, blog member system, forum, and anything else you can think of that involves a name and email address.

In the end, I emailed Aweber and asked if I could move back to their old plan (I had previously left Aweber for ListMailPro, see below).  They declined, so I switched to GetResponse and I think I’ll be with them for the long-haul.

The GetResponse vs. Aweber Result

Based mainly on price per subscriber, I’ve chose to go with GetResponse.  All the other tools I need are there, and I really like the fact they have the developer API available to use when necessary.  I know that some readers may be die-hard Aweber fans, but it’s probably also true that those same readers have been grandfathered-in to the old pricing structure.  If those same people were about to sign up new, it would be a tough pill to swallow thinking about your list growing up into the thousands and then ten thousands.

Other Autoresponders I’ve Used:

iContact – This is a good autoresponder if you’re looking for the basics.  It’s clean and very easy to use, but didn’t have much of anything as far as integration into other software.
ListMailPro - This is a php script, and a very, very good one.  It’s loaded with features – almost any feature you could want. I used ListPro for about 4 years with no problems, but what I’ve determined is this:  I’d rather spend money every month on a company who manages white-listing, delivery, and email law for me — I don’t have the time or desire to do that.

As a side note, the music company I work for manages a 500,000+ email list using a $100,000+ server along with thousands in monthly maintenance and bandwidth costs.  I’ll stick with GetResponse for now. ;)

What autoresponder do you use?  Which have you tried? Which one are you leaning towards?

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