Email Marketing is probably at it’s peak right about now, it wasn’t here 10 years ago, and it won’t be here 10 years from now, but right now? It’s ruling.
And nothing else matters in this industry if not the ability to grab the opportunities and make them work when they work.
So well let me be straight, I’ve seen quite a lot of you not take action just because you’re confused which tool you should go with, and hence I planned to come up with this detailed comparison between the two leading Email Marketing platforms right now.
I’m not saying any tool is better than the other, because being honest they both do their job well, and they both have their pros and cons.
What makes one more approachable than the other for you is your own requirement, budget, goal and other aspects, so just read along and by the end you’ll get the tool of your choice.
GetResponse VS Constant Contact:-
Automate Your Marketing:-
It’s no use going with an E-mail marketing platform if it only offers you “list building’ kind of services, right? I mean that’s not something you or I would like to pay for.
While on the other hand if we talk about a complete automation to our business, yeah that’s what I’m looking for.
GetResponse: Now with GetResponse, the one totally advanced, automated, value for money feature I’ve seen is it’s Drag & Drop Work-Flow builder.
Basically what it does is, it let’s us create scenarios (with drag and drop! Yeah!)and their consequences which we can implement.
Didn’t get me? Ever seen those “Hey Mr X. We saw you added Product Y to your cart, checkout now for a special 10% discount” mails in your inboxes? And quite a number of time it even leads to me buying the product.
Those are automated mails, and they get triggered because I added something to cart but didn’t checkout. Now that’s something you can do with GetResponse.
See? Just set the scenarios and consequences.
Constant Contact:- Constant Contact has an “auto-responder” but I doubt anyone of you here would call it a “marketing automation solution”. So nope, it doesn’t have this feature.
Dynamic Segment Filtering:-
Most of us use GetResponse or Constant Contact only to manage lists and send bulk E-mails.
Although we miss the fact that there’s more, a lot more which can be achieved with the right utilization of the deeper features of these tools.
Now Dynamic Segment Filtering is one such feature, it lets you extremely filter out your list into different sections.
Like a group who attended a webinar from the others who didn’t. Or a group of people whom you mailed last week from a group of people to whom your last message was weeks ago.
Basically the filtration is unlimited and totally up to you, combining that with the Work-Flow builder you can achieve extraordinary results, ofcourse it’s not something everyone uses, but if you’ve got a big enough list and are serious enough about it, you’ll find this tool boosting your ROI thorugh the roofs.
Constant Contact:- Unfortunately, the filtration system on Constant Contact isn’t as advanced, it does offer you filtration based on Date of subscription and basic stuff like that, but that’s not something that I’d call “Dynamic” filteration.
Pre-Designed Email Templates:-
GetResponse: GetResponse offers you a hassle-free, pre-designed 100+ Email templates. Now these are one of the most important parts of any Email campaign, right? They need to look good, and professional.
Now I take it that not everyone of you is a designer by profession, so you might not get the best location to place the elements, the best headlines and the best colour combinations.
That’s where these pre-made templates come into action. With GetResponse, all you’ve got to do is, choose the template you want to work with, and edit the text and drag the elements, simple as that.
Constant Contact:- Constant Contact too offers you pre-designed templates, but the two aspects where GetResponse holds the upper hand is, the number of templates and the professionalism.
GetResponse clearly has a lot more pre-designed templates than Constant Contact. And additionally, the quality of the Constant Contact templates isn’t as professional or eye-catching as that of GetResponse’s.
Mobile Responsiveness:-
Mobile Responsiveness is a ranking factor which you probably already know, not that an E-mail is going to be ranked, but it does explain the importance of the factor, doesn’t it?
So well the E-mail templates with both GetResponse and Constant Contact are responsive on any kind of device, meaning they won’t mess up the elements on a PC, Cellphone or even a tablet, so mobile responsiveness isn’t a problem with either of the tools.
List Profiling:-
GetResponse:-I’ll keep it simple, with GetResponse, you can add custom fields to your Email list based on their work-flow behavior and automate for them.
Let’s say 10 people in your list are interested in new shipment of shoes, so well you can automate your Work-flow to send them an E-mail as soon as there’s a new shipment in.
Constant Contact:- You can add custom fields to your Constant Contact Email lists too ofcourse, but without the work-flow the automation isn’t as easy.
But do not misread the statement, as with little effort you can still automate the desired mails to them.
Drag & Drop Landing Pages:-
The reason I’ve increased the size of the font for this feature is, this is what makes GetResponse stand apart from the crowd.
Landing Pages are a crucial counter-part of any Email Marketing campaign, you can send E-mails with an Email marketing campaign, but you need to redirect that Email traffic to some place for sales and leads, right?
Normally what happens is you buy an Email marketing plan with a company, and then you have to go out and spend couple hundred extra dollars for a landing page builder.
Now with GetResponse, you get 50+ pre-designed, pre-categorized landing page templates, all you’ve to do is, drag and drop the elements and your landing page would be ready.
And the best news is, because it’s a landing page builder from GetResponse itself, the integration of the landing page to the Email autoresponders is extremely easy.
Not only it saves you big money, it also greatly reduces your time and energy needed to craft out a convetsion optimized landing page.
While with Constant Contact, there’s no landing page builder involved. So if and when you need a landing page builder, you’ll have to pay extra bucks to some other company for the tool, and then you might have a hard time integrating it with your constant contact account because they will be two different platforms.
Auto-Responders:-
Another feature GetResponse takes pride in is it’s autoresponders.
GetResponse lets you use Time based, and Action-based triggers for your E-mails. Meaning your subscribers get customziedmesseges on specific dates or when they perform a certain action like clicking on a link.
This is greatly beneficial for targeting people who might have checked your product out but didn’t add it to the cart, or people who added it to the cart but didn’t proceed to checkout.
Constant Contact:- Constant Contact too isn’t far off behind on the autoresponders, it also boasts of the “time-based” autoresponders, meaning those you can send on specific dates and times
Although it’s more of a “categorization” based autoresponder and not as sophisticated as GetResponse. But it still does it’s job and it does it good.
Final Verdict:-
So if you ask me which one you should go with, I’d say you should ask yourselves what you need to achieve.
For eg. if you need to sell an E-book or something more advanced like that, you’re going to need the Landing page and other unique feature GetResponse offers.
While if you need just an Email marketing tool without much of a hassle, you should try Constant Contact out.
