James Colin's BLOG MONEY WIKI

Autoresponders are those things happening in emails, it goes like this: you subscribe to a mailing list and you start receiving emails from the list owner. You can unsubscribe at any time. Those emails are often pre-written and ordered in sequence, this way you receive the emails in the order, maybe one every day or one every week. And sometimes you can receive an email which is broadcasted directly by the list owner in real time, for a current event. Often those are used to follow a X-days course so that information can be digested slowly, day after day. So you get the idea?

Well, AWeber and GetResponse are the only solutions you can choose if you want to be a list owner. Why? Because I've eliminated all the other solutions when I was doing some research into the topic:

• Self hosted solutions, there's only one it's infinite autoresponder, and phplist which doesn't do email sequences yet. The problem is you will end up managing the spamlist problem with different ISP including yours. I don't want to have to spend time on that when time is so limited! I much prefer to give money since I'm going to use the service to earn money, and if possible much more than whatever amount I'll pay for it.
• Free solutions but with ads. You have it: ads from someone else in your emails. Hmm.. I can't accept the idea, sorry. I don't know the quality of those services, and I know that GetResponse offers a free limited version of its service with ads, but I didn't even tried their free offer before buying a one year subscription!

So you're left with paid solutions and not something that you'll host yourself, so in the field, major players are AWeber and GetResponse. In the past GetResponse was the challenger, so AWeber was recommended and is still more recommended by the "gurus" or "old-timers" of mailing lists, but that's because they use it for years now, have affiliates interest and don't know GetResponse more than what it was in the past, they surely don't have an account at GetResponse.

Well in my case, since after research there was nothing left to differentiate the two services except the price, a bit cheaper for GetResponse, then I had another requirement it was support for french language. Not in the admin panel but for the subscriber, that I could change any standard text and could send emails with accents. I asked AWeber and they told me they can't give me guarantee about that and they have some standard text which cannot be modified, like unsubscribe at the bottom of each email. In GetResponse there was a question in the FAQ which solved my problem, they support many languages other than english. It's important to me because I have a french audience on some of my sites and will eventually start collecting emails and offering courses there too.

Oh, one advantage that is being used by AWeber is that their success in sending all emails without being caught by spam filters is higher than anyone else in the industry. Well, first this is an easy thing to say, and even so I don't buy it like that. There are some links to a third party measure, I went there and compared GetResponse and AWeber and there was no difference or if there was it was very little and not so clear!

So in the end I purchased a one year subscription to GetResponse and I'm using it now, as you can see on this blog, you can submit your name and email and you'll start receiving emails that I wrote last week :-)

If you want to evaluate both service, and you have some time to make your decision, here's a good idea:

They both offer an email course where they give tips on email marketing, so you can learn as you evaluate their professionalism, and at the very least you can see if one of them ends up in your spam box!

For AWeber:

For GetResponse:

I hope you can make up your mind, me I choose one over the other and I'm happy with it, but if I didn't have my french audience I could have chosen the other, pay a little more and wouldn't have seen any difference, I would have been as happy, maybe more knowing that most of the old-timers recommended the one I have. Well in my case I don't but I'm sure they're also here to stay!