What are GetResponse and MailChimp?
GetResponse is an internationally successful newsletter service. It offers a lot of professional features for quite competitive prices. It emphasizes ease of use, while also offering niche features like a landing page editor.
MailChimp is probably a service you’ve heard of before. While this is an email marketing heavyweight, it does offer a useful freemium plan that you can subscribe to when you’re just starting. This is a great way to try out most of their features and models without any risk.
Now we’re going to pit them against each other, across multiple categories, to see which one stands out.
Getresponse vs Mailchimp – What are they doing?
Getresponse and Mailchimp are email marketing tools that allow you to:
- create (or import) a mailing list and capture email addresses there
- design HTML electronic newsletters (emails containing graphics, photos, branding, etc.) that can be sent to your subscribers
- automate the sending of your emails to subscribers via “autoresponders”.
- monitor statistics related to your email marketing – open rates, clicks, transfers, and more.
Over the past two years, Getresponse has evolved into an “ all-in-one ” marketing solution and now has some features not found in Mailchimp.
Mailchimp also increasingly aims to be an all-in-one “ marketing platform ” that offers sales / CRM functionality and has changed its pricing model accordingly. It also has a site builder.
Getresponse vs MailChimp – Autoresponders
The autoresponders are emails sent to your subscribers at predefined intervals, whether as a result of a purchase, a subscription, a birthday, or a special event.
The idea is that a lot of your email marketing is automated – so once you’ve got things set up correctly, subscribers will automatically receive key messages from your business without you having to worry. emails manually (although you can still do this if needed).
Getresponse and Mailchimp both offer extensive autoresponder functionality, which is among the best in the industry.
They offer a similar set of autoresponder triggers for you to choose from – list subscription, opens, clicks, purchases made, URLs visited, and user data changes can all be used to initiate a cycle. of automatic responders.
For example, with both tools, you can trigger autoresponders by:
- the action of an e-newsletter – for example, when someone opens or clicks on a link in an e-mail you send, it may be automatically added to a particular set of autoresponders
- purchases – if someone purchases a product from your website, you can use this information to trigger an email delivery in Getresponse or Mailchimp
- page visits – if a subscriber visits a particular page on your site, you can email them a few seconds later
- data changes – for example, when a subscriber changes their contact details in your list.
- date and time – for example, you can automatically send messages x minutes or days after registration, or on birthdays.
In short, both products are really strong when it comes to auto responder functionality.
Getresponse lets you manage email automation through a ‘ flowchart ‘ type journey builder – it’s a very sophisticated tool, but it’s also fairly straightforward to implement.
Mailchimp recently added a “ journey builder ” tool that also lets you create similar subscriber journeys. This tool is broadly comparable in terms of functionality to the Getresponse Automation Tool, but I would say the Getresponse Tool offers a bit more functionality.
Overall, Getresponse’s journey builder tool performs a bit better in terms of functionality, but it’s worth noting that Mailchimp’s journey builder interface is a bit cleaner and visually beautiful.
Getresponse vs Mailchimp – Templates and Templates
GetResponse offers a wide choice of models. The majority of them are also “responsive”, which allows them to adapt to small devices. Some of their designs are a bit outdated though.
Models of emails to MailChimp are generally more modern and also offer a wide choice. So this is an advantage over GetResponse. They clearly distinguish between “drag & drop” models and classic models, only the former being responsive.
Getresponse vs Mailchimp – Interface and ease of use
The user interfaces offered by Getresponse and Mailchimp are quite different.
Mailchimp takes a very minimalist approach, with lots of large fonts (over large spaces) used to present menus, stats, and data. And icons, rather than text, are used in menus.
It’s quite distinctive and some users will probably like this approach.
Getresponse, on the other hand, offers a user interface that relies more on traditional drop-down menus.
Neither system is particularly difficult to use – personally, I much prefer Getresponse’s interface, as it doesn’t seem like you have to scroll or click so much to access particular functions or data.
Getresponse vs Mailchimp – Other features
Emails adapted to mobile format
Both Getresponse and Mailchimp allow you to create mobile-friendly versions of your HTML emails and preview the mobile version as you go.
The Getresponse email editor.
Drag and drop function
Both Getresponse and Mailchimp allow you to edit your templates using drag-and-drop editors.
These editors are quite similar in concept, in that they allow you to arrange images and text however you like best without resorting to any HTML coding.
However, I would say that as it is, Mailchimp’s email editor is slightly better than Getresponse’s.
It’s just a bit more “solid”, and it also lets you define global styles for your templates – you can define what H1, H2, body text should look like in a post style tab.
Split A / B tests
Split testing, or A / B testing, allows you to test a variety of headers and/or content on a sample of data before automatically sending the best-performing version to the rest of your list.
If you are using relatively small lists, this feature is not vital, because for statistical reasons split testing is only worth doing on relatively large lists.
Getresponse allows you to use either subject headers or newsletter content in split testing.
Mailchimp allows you to use variations of newsletter content, subject headers, different sender names, and send times in its split tests, as long as you have an “Essentials” plan or superior.
On its “Essentials” and “Standard” plans, Mailchimp allows you to split test 3 different versions of your email; Getresponse’s limit is 5 across the board.
It’s important to note that with both products, you can only use one variable at a time during split testing – for example, you can test two emails with different subject headers. relative to each other, but both versions of the email must have the same content.
If this type of split testing doesn’t meet your needs, you may want to consider Mailchimp’s ‘Premium’ plan, which allows you to test 8 variations of your email newsletters against each other, and mix the variables. . However, the cost of this plan is significant – a minimum of $ 299 per month.
Creating data segments in Getresponse and Mailchimp
Both Getresponse and Mailchimp allow you to create segments of data quite easily – you can use a variety of filters to identify subscribers based on particular criteria and save them.
However, Getresponse beats Mailchimp hands down when it comes to sending email newsletters to your segments.
This is because the basic version of Mailchimp only allows you to send e-newsletters to one segment at a time, while Getresponse allows you to send e-newsletters to as many segments as you want.
If you want more advanced segmentation options, you can get them in Mailchimp, but you’ll need to purchase an expensive ‘Premium’ plan.
Getresponse’s more flexible approach to segmentation and list management is, in my opinion, one of the strongest reasons to use it over Mailchimp – perhaps even the strongest.
Read more: Mailchimp vs Sendinblue: Which is the best newsletter service (2021)
Getresponse vs Mailchimp – Performance Report
The reports from Mailchimp and Getresponse are very comprehensive: you can track all the usual things like open rates, clicks, and unsubscribes, but you can also dig deep into the data.
All of this data is very useful for understanding your audience and guiding your future marketing strategy.
One of Mailchimp’s reporting features that I really like is its ‘engagement stats’ panel. As the name suggests, it shows you the percentages of your subscribers who often, occasionally, or rarely engage with your e-newsletters.
Getresponse’s reporting system has an excellent feature that is not present in Mailchimp: the automatic creation of “groups” that can be sent by email – based on a more precise user action – after the ‘sending an e-mail.
After an email broadcast, Getresponse will show you several segments of contacts who took specific actions – you’ll see groups of people who opened your email, didn’t open your email, click your email but didn’t. not reached a goal, etc… – and you can send them a new email very easily. This feature is extremely useful for sending quick reminders or follow-up offers to relevant contacts.
Mailchimp also lets you view this information, but to create segments from it you need to export and re-import the data, using new metric fields to manually create your segments.
Overall, however, the reporting functionality of Mailchimp and Getresponse is very comprehensive – either of these tools will give you a very comprehensive overview of how your email newsletters are performing.
Getresponse vs Mailchimp – Customer Support
When it comes to supporting, both have comprehensive knowledge bases.
The GetResponse one is harder to navigate, however, as it opens a lot of unnecessary tabs. They also both offer email and live chat, although chat is only available on MailChimp’s Premium plans.
Mailchimp also offers phone support on its most expensive offering (the “Premium” plan starting at $ 299).
Getresponse vs Mailchimp – Pricing
Mailchimp Price
Four plans are available for Mailchimp:
- Free – a scaled-down version of the product, with an advertisement for Mailchimp at the bottom of email newsletters.
- Essential – from $ 9.99 per month, to send emails to a list of up to 500 subscribers.
- Standard – starting at $ 14.99 per month for a list of up to 500 subscribers.
- Premium – starting at $ 299 per month for a list of up to 10,000 subscribers.
Getresponse Price
Getresponse also offers four plans:
- Basic – from $ 15 per month to send an unlimited number of emails to up to 1,000 subscribers.
- Plus – starting at $ 49 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers
- Professional: from $ 99 per month for a maximum of 1,000 subscribers.
- Max – custom price.
A free trial, lasting 30 days, is also available here.
Each plan offers different features and its price increases depending on the size of your list. I’ll tell you about these features in a moment, but before that, it’s helpful to quickly zoom in on a few key limitations that you should be aware of.
The pros and cons of Getresponse and Mailchimp
Reasons to use Getresponse over Mailchimp
- The entry-level “Basic” plan offers many more features than the Mailchimp equivalent (including full autoresponders, e-commerce functions, and the ability to code your own templates).
- You’re only billed for active subscribers on your list – Mailchimp charges you for hosting unregistered contacts.
- There are no sending limits to worry about in Getresponse.
- Sending emails and excluding multiple segments and multiple lists is very easy in Getresponse – but not possible in all versions of Mailchimp except the most expensive.
- You can organize webinars with Getresponse; with Mailchimp, you’ll need to use a different app.
- Getresponse landing pages make automatic A / B testing easy, which is not currently the case with Mailchimp.
- Hundreds of templates are available for Getresponse landing pages; Mailchimp only offers a few.
- Generous discounts are available for Getresponse if you prepay for one year or more service.
- The number of variations you can use in a split test is higher in Getresponse (you can test 5 emails against each other; Mailchimp’s limit is 3).
- Some users may find the built-in e-commerce / ‘converting’ functions useful.
Reasons to use Mailchimp instead of Getresponse
- Its free plan is generous, allowing you to access many key features (including autoresponders) and send 10,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 subscribers.
- Mailchimp arguably integrates better with a wider range of third-party tools and services (with the notable exception of Shopify).
- It offers translation functionality.
- If your list is very small (that is, has fewer than 500 records), you can start sending email newsletters cheaply with Mailchimp.
- Some users will appreciate the modern and minimal interface – it’s arguably a bit sleeker than Getresponse’s.
- Mailchimp allows you to use more variables when performing split testing.
- A basic web design tool is included in all Mailchimp plans.
Getresponse vs Mailchimp Reviews
Overall, I have to say Getresponse is the winner of this comparison – overall it’s cheaper to use and offers a lot more features. Unlike Mailchimp, there’s no sending limit, and unsubscribed contacts don’t count toward your list size. All of this makes Getresponse the more beneficial of the two products discussed here.
On top of that, the flexible approach to data segmentation makes Getresponse a much better tool for managing one or more email lists and using your data in creative or sophisticated ways.
There’s a strong case for using Mailchimp over Getresponse: its free plan, which is, admittedly, very generous for anyone with a small list and basic email marketing needs.
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