Email marketing is a way to promote products massively, easy and fast. There is a vast variety of Email promotion services and each one provides the users with unique features. Some features are better than others and some are not. In any case, there are so many option for one choose that things can sometime get a bit confusing. However, the top email promoting tools stand out and as you can imagine, those are not too many. So, the actual point is to decide which one is better for you from the elite of the top choices you have.
An interesting comparison is between the GetResponse and the MailChimp. Those are two of the best email promoting tools available at the time and that is for a reason. But still it is quite hard to decide which one is better or which is better for you at least. So let’s see some features from the both sides and then we shall conclude.
First, we should start with a brief review on each tool separately.
The GetResponse has a complete reporting with helpful graphs, allowing you to optimize campaigns. The contacts section provides you with many easy to use tools that allow you to add custom fields to your contact lists, copy contacts and conduct searches. If you have names or email addresses of people who do not want to receive your email campaigns or follow-ups, you can add them to the blacklist. This excludes them from receiving unwanted messages in the future. You can also create suppression lists, which enables you to keep some people in your contact pool from receiving a specific email from you. GetResponse also keeps track of the number of subscribers that open your emails, unsubscribe, complain and/or click on links you send them. Furthermore, this email marketing tool determines how many emails fail to arrive at a mailbox (for instance, if a mailbox is full or if the email address doesn’t exist) while at the same time it gives you the ability to find out why people unsubscribed. You can even see what time of day people are accessing your emails, as well as how many people go to your website via your email marketing campaign.
On top of all the above, there is the report section, which will surprise you with the tabs that allow you to look at several aspects. For instance, if you send out a survey, you can look at a summary of the results. You can also see each question that you asked and how each person responded – although you only see their responses as a number, not by name or email address. If you feel like something is missing and you’d like to try diving deeper to make sure surveys are not anonymous, all you need to do is simply access the Legacy editor, which is the service’s old editor. The statistics for this question are on the left of the screen in bar graphs or pie charts.
MailChimp, on the other hand, is unique in its own way. Given that a promotion of a product is based on the sentimental instinct to attract potential audience, this email promotion tool has the ability to combine email marketing with humour. You’ll find on almost every page a link to a funny YouTube video. You’ll also find that MailChimp has all the features you’ll need to create an effective email marketing campaign. And of course the unique features do not end there – if anything that’s only the beginning. Your subscribers will be able to easily connect to social networking pages in order to share your email marketing campaigns, while you’ll also be able to use social networking in conjunction with your email advertising. In one click, you’ll be able to send out an email campaign and update your social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Delicious, with your latest information on any campaign. And as if that is not enough, you can also see who has tweeted about your business, or liked it on Facebook. MailChimp collects and analyses your data and provides excellent visual representations of that data in several formats. Interactive graphs represent the customer interaction with the email campaigns you have sent out.
Now that we have narrowed down some of the basic features of both of those email promoting tools, let’s compare them to see which one tends to provide more to the user.
Starting with the price, the GetResponse gets a point here since it cheaper to use. For example, hosting 2500 subscribers using MailChimp, will cost you $30 whereas GetResponse will charge you $25.
However, Mailchimp offers narrower pricing bands than Getresponse. For example, hosting 5001 to 5200 subscribers using MailChimp costs $55, 5201 to 5400 costs $60 and so on, whereas Getresponse only offer a simple 5001 to 10000 subscriber plan (at $65). This all gets a bit confusing but basically means that depending on your list size – and so long as the size remains fairly static – you may find yourself able to avail of a cheaper deal with Mailchimp (for example, a list with 5001 subscribers on it will be $10 cheaper with Mailchimp than with Getresponse. But the above is only in cases of very specific list sizes so in general GetResponse is a slightly cheaper option.
Next we move to the Interface. The user interfaces offered by Getresponse and Mailchimp are quite different and quite hard to compare. MailChimp’s option could be considered more minimalistic whereas GetResponse offers a user interface that is based more around traditional drop-down menus. It is actually a matter of personal taste since both interface look good and yet different.
Then we have the Landing Page Creator. That is actually one strong feature in GetResponse which is not available in MailChimp. This feature allows you to make use of various templates and a drag and drop editor to create a ‘squeeze page’ which is optimised for capturing email addresses. As an answer to that though, MailChimp offers a translation feature, but unfortunately it relies on the language of the web browser being used to display content in a local language, rather than sending users to a particular URL based on the version of the website they are signing up on.
Last but not least, we need to compare mobile emails. That is not actually a feature, but it must be taken under consideration since smartphones are used for email promotion by both senders and receivers. With GetResponse, you see a preview of the smartphone version on the right hand side of the screen, as you create your email using the drag and drop editor. And of course you can also see a preview of smartphone email versions with Mailchimp too, but unfortunately that is not in real time.
To sum it up, they are both great email promotion tools, but GetResponse is our winner with a slight difference, because it comes with a landing page creator, it is a bit more flexible when it comes to create a design and depending on your list size GetResponse is usually cheaper.
Feel free to try them both and find out which one suits best your preferences!