GetResponse vs MailChimp: A Detailed Comparison Review

In this comparison, we look at the email marketing solutions, MailChimp and GetResponse, and see which comes out on top. While MailChimp seems to be the general fan favorite, with a good deal more users, I know a few very outspoken fans of GetReponse.

If you don’t know what an email marketing solution (also known as autoresponder) is, it’s basically a service that makes it easy for you to collect hundreds, or even thousands of email addresses, and then email these thousands of people. You can even automate whole email sequences to send automated daily/weekly courses or follow-up emails. They just make it easy to do market by email.

GetResponse vs MailChimp

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Pricing (winner: MailChimp)

Okay let’s start with the basics. What do each of the services cost?

Mailchimp has a free option with slightly reduced features where you can collect up to 2000 emails, more than enough space for someone who is starting out, but for someone with a large established audience or heavy traffic might find that they push through quite quickly.

This means that MailChimp is the best choice for those who want to either set everything up in advance, and not have to pay a monthly subscription fee, or those who simply want to run a weekly/monthly newsletter anyway, and have little interest in the extra features.

After that, you’ll have to pay.

Pricing Winner: MailChimp

The fact that GetResponse is $5 cheaper per month in the lower email counts is not what is likely to be the biggest saver here. Instead, it’s more likely that for most people, the money you will save during the time where you have less than 2000 subscribers (or not too much use for the full features either) will probably end up making MailChimp the more economical choice. With MailChimp, you also have smaller increments for price increase, for example going to 2500 to 2800, instead of directly to 5000.

However, if you’re a serious marketer/ business owner and you need the advanced features to make complex marketing and sales campaigns, and you have great faith in the future success, you can take advantage of GetResponse’s 18% discount for annual billing.

User Interface (winner: Draw)

To give you a sense of what the two solutions are like, I’m going to give you a visual and usability comparison of two important aspects; email design and form/landing page design.

First off, let’s take a look at GetResponse’s mail builder:

You start off by choosing a few different options, subject lines, ids and if you’d prefer to run an A/B test or not.

After that, you’re brought to choose from a multitude of templates, or start from scratch. These templates make it quick and easy for you to make enticing HTML emails for your audience.

After you pick a template, you’re brought to the visual email drag and drop builder. The builder itself is very intuitive, and I like that it automatically shows you how the email will look on a standard mobile screen. My only complaint, is that when I wanted to edit the style of a single line of text, it kept unselecting itself making me edit the style of nothing or all of the text. But this could be a problem unique to me and my computer.

I decided to do a news style feature on a fake story that a King Kong statue fell over in some town in China. Finding an appropriate template was easy.

I then went back and chose to use the builder from scratch as it was very easy to use. I could have easily improved on this result by spending a few more minutes tweaking the styles of text and perhaps adding a few more blocks.

If you chose to A/B test, you have quite a few different options, and it’s incredibly simple to set up. This was probably the area of GetResponse that stood out to me the most.

After you’ve finished setting up the A/B test of your choice (or none), you’re brought to choose the recipients of the email.

After that, you simply take a look at a summary of your email, along with the email’s spam score, and can then choose to send it to

Let’s compare it to MailChimp’s email builder:

With MailChimp, you start off by choosing the recipients. You can choose entire lists, segment a list based on things like where they signed up from, or you can manually segment a list by pasting emails. (You could use this function to select send an email only to confirmed customers for example.)

Then you type up a little information, like the subject line, your from name and email address, and choose from a multitude of tracking options.

After that, you’re brought to choose from different templates and themes. The themes are neatly arranged in useful categories that makes it easy to pick one that’s right for the purpose of a particular email.

Now that we’ve finally arrived, we can see that the interface is not that different, although there’s less hover options, you find pretty much the same options (along with image editing software) on the right hand side once you’ve selected an element to edit.

As far as user friendliness goes, there’s no clear winner here. They will feel more or less intuitive depending on what kind of interfaces you’re used to already.

Form/Landing Page Builders

The second part of the user interfaces we’re going to take a closer look at, is the form and landing page builders. Starting with…

GetResponse

The GetResponse form creator has a few underwhelming templates, and a less than stellar user interface, quite standard WYSIWIG editor that doesn’t seem to help you get good-looking results.

Where GetResponse stands out, in a very positive way, is it’s fully functional landing page builder. There are some very sleek templates, and it’s a lot easier to improve on something that already looks good and tweek it a little t fit your purposes, than try to make something completely from scratch.

MailChimp

While the user interface of the MailChimp basic form builder might look a little better, there’s no outstanding templates and nothing that really helps you create something good looking. Again it’s just a very basic WYSIWIG editor.

The upside for MailChimp users is that they have a popup form option, that makes it easy to make a simple offer, also offering the option to add a few seconds delay before it shows up for visitors.

The lack of focus on the web-forms from both solutions, may simply be a response to the abundance of plugins that are used across multiple CMS (although perhaps WordPress in particular), as well as sleek innate styling for forms and buttons in many themes.

User Interface Winner: Draw

Both user interfaces are clean and easy to use, the difference in interface design are small and will only make one more appealing than the other if you come into it with a particular preference.

Features (winner: GetResponse)

Both MailChimp and GetResponse offer a multitude of features that cover everything you’d expect from an email marketing solution.

• Email builders to quickly create well-designed emails.
• Extensive automation options. (For example, sending emails to people automatically if they don’t open the emails you send for a long time. Or sending special deals to 1 year members, or automatically moving people who purchased something to a list of confirmed customers.)
• A/B Testing (GetResponse offers the more extensive A/B testing options with 5 different testable areas).
• Segmentation of lists
• Support for multiple lists
• Detailed reports and stats on how campaigns go
• Only GetResponse sports a complete landing page builder.

Features Winner: GetResponse

The table says it all. While MailChimp certainly offers more than enough features for a regular user, if you’re a seasoned marketer or business owner and want the option for sophisticated a/b tests, GetResponse is the obvious choice.

Conclusion

Summary:

Just as the category summary shows, there’s no clear winner in this contest. If MailChimp’s free plan was full featured indefinitely until you reached 2000 emails, I would wholeheartedly recommend MailChimp as the undeniable best choice here, although I understand it’s a little too much to ask for for free.

But since it’s not (which again, I do understand MailChimp), it seems like it is with email marketing service providers, as with most other things in life; there’s no clear, universal better choice for everyone. Some people will prefer MailChimp, while other will undoubtedly like GetResponse more.

So Which Email Marketing Solution is Best?

MailChimp seems to be the best option for beginners. Sporting the unlimited free option with reduced features makes it ideal for someone wanting to create a simple newsletter, or a blogger that just wants a way to build a steady audience that comes back every week.

GetResponse on the other hand, sports the most features, the best split testing options, and even the possibility of adding on a state-of-the-art landing page builder (for 15$ a month) which makes it the ideal choice for a business owner or marketer with serious email marketing plans and needs.

But in the end it doesn’t matter what I think(at least not that much). The only person who can decide which option is better for you, is yourself. So the last step is, go the distance and actually test the two different services, or give the one you feel should be the better option for you a go.

GetResponse’s 30 day free trial offers full features, and doesn’t require credit card information to start.

And MailChimp’s unlimited free trial doesn’t require credit card information either.

Have you used either of these services before? Both? What have been your experience?