Email marketing is without a doubt one of the best ways to generate new leads and establish communication with potential customers. Thanks to the multitude of email marketing services available now, doing it is no longer as tedious and limited as it was in the past. You can easily find good web-based services to help you undertake massive email marketing campaigns involving tens of thousands of contacts or subscribers.

The question is: which specific email marketing service should you use? For this discussion, the focus will be on two of the most common services: GetResponse and ConstantContact. Which is better? What makes one more preferable than the other?

To make this comparison easier to digest, five factors will be taken into account. These are the range of features, user experience, price, deliverability rate, and security. These factors are arguably the first few things that potential users would be concerned about as they decide on which email marketing service to use.

Features

It can be said GetResponse and ConstantContact can go toe-to-toe against each other. They offer mostly comparable functions or features and are similarly commendable for having their own image hosting and galleries, integrating with social media, and providing detailed reports or tools for monitoring email marketing campaigns. Both offer an extensive variety of customizable templates although GetResponse has a slight edge in having thousands of stock images that can be readily used in creating more distinct looking marketing emails.

List of GetResponse Features:

Both services enable quick social media integration as well as integration with various web services including Formstack, Salesforce, and HootSuite. However, integration is a little faster with ConstantContact because it does not require a third party application to do it. Integration in this context, by the way, is an important factor because it is through the integration with other services that contact lists are grown or subscribers are invited. Both also come with QR code generators for subscriptions or list building.

GetResponse one-ups ConstantContact in having an autoresponder that does time-based and action-based email sending. ConstantContact offers automated email sending and the function for determining the best time to send emails but these are not enough to outdo the extensive autoresponder feature of GetResponse.

When it comes to campaign monitoring and reporting, these two are about the same. Reports re in real time. GetResponse has a slightly more refined reporting system as it supports various ways of viewing data to facilitate better decision making. GetResponse also comes with an email intelligence system designed to make campaign tracking, gauging, analysis, and comparisons faster. It is capable of showing hourly fluctuations and measuring site conversations with just one click.

ConstantContact Features:

Overall, when comparing the features, GetResponse emerges as the winner particularly because of two important features not found in ConstantContact: A/B testing and landing page creator. A/B testing helps in coming tweaking email campaigns to achieve the best possible results while the landing page creator enables the creation of high-converting sales, video, and squeeze pages.

User Experience

There should be no problems figuring out how to make either of these options work. They are both relatively easy to use unless you are completely clueless about email marketing. Their interfaces don’t look the same but they are both intuitive enough. They all have drag-and-drop editors that make the creation of custom emails a breeze. Some may complain, though, about GetResponse encountering hiccups while accessed through older or low-spec computers.

Prices and Refund Policies

GetResponse is doubtlessly the cheaper option. Its lowest plan, for 1,000 subscribers, is priced at only $15 per month or $5 lower than the lowest plan of ConstantContact for only 500 subscribers priced at $20. The rest of GetResponse’s prices are as follows: $25 for 2,500, $45 for 5,000, $65 for 10,000, $145 for 25,000, $250 for 50,000, and $450 for 100,000 subscribers. The corresponding prices of ConstantContact for these plans are from $10 to $20 more expensive. GetResponse also offers annual discounts that can lower the prices by 17% to 18%.
ConstantContact offers discounts but only for nonprofit customers.

GetResponse Prices:

ConstantContact Prices:

Both email marketing service providers offer free trial periods. ConstantContact, however, offers a significantly longer trial period of two months. Also, ConstantContact offers a 30-day money back guarantee or a refund system to ensure customer satisfaction. Nevertheless, both are expected to refund the fees paid if they unilaterally terminate accounts.

Deliverability

GetResponse claims to have an impressive deliverability rate of 99% while ConstantContact pegs theirs a bit lower at 98%. There have been no scientific studies to prove that these claims are indeed true but based on feedback from users and the informal studies conducted by bloggers or reviewers, these two email marketing services can be expected to have deliverability rates higher than 90%.

Pros and Cons

To summarize the reasons that make one more preferable than the other, here’s an enumeration of pros and cons for both email marketing systems.

For GetResponse, the most compelling attributes would be its intuitive email creator, a built-in function for quickly building up mailing lists, social media integration, a free survey feature, and robust email intelligence. Of course, GetResponse also has its drawbacks but these are rather minor like the limited options for those who prefer HTML emails, slightly limited list segmentation, and the lack of a free plan and out-of-the-box Google Analytics.

For ConstantContact, what users will most likely love about it is its event and survey features, minimalistic interface, money back guarantee, and built-in Google Analytics. However, some may be discouraged by its lack of a full-featured autoresponder, A/B testing, and landing page creator. Also, its prices are noticeably higher than those of GetResponse and the discounts are only intended for nonprofit users.

Conclusion

Taking everything into account, GetResponse would be the option that is easier to recommend. ConstantContact is not bad but when compared to the former, it just appears slightly less attractive.

Still, there should be nothing wrong in banking on the reliability and longevity of ConstantContact in the email marketing business. It has been in the business since 1996. It’s hard to question its dependability and the customer satisfaction that can be inferred from its longevity.