If your app or website sells products, collects sign-ups, generates leads, or has web users take action–optimizing your call-to-actions (CTAs) should be a top priority.

A call-to-action button, link, or banner convinces a user to click or take the desired action. Most web users likely don’t realize how many CTAs they click daily, from clicking the “Shop the collection now” button on an ecommerce site to “Order Now” on a food delivery app.

As one of the primary elements on web pages, CTAs mustn’t be an afterthought. They have a significant impact. When optimized correctly, a CTA button could mean the difference between customers taking action or not.

Whether you’re peppering them throughout your product, pricing, or landing page, a well-optimized CTA button describes what customers will get, ultimately boosting conversions. 

Why Are CTAs Important?

A strategic CTA can guide your web visitors through their purchase journey and boost conversion rates. An effective CTA captures web visitors’ attention, piquing their curiosity, and seamlessly guides them through the signup process. 

Most web users are already accustomed to the digital world and expect to see CTAs in a prominent position on your landing page or website. However, that doesn’t mean they’re ready to follow your instructions and take the desired action. 

Creating effective call-to-action buttons is an art, but you can quickly master it if you follow these proven practices. 

1. Leverage Customer-Centric Copy

According to Dale Carnegie, one’s name is the sweetest and most crucial sound in any language.

Well, he’s right.

However, it doesn’t stop with a potential customer’s own name though.

Consumers are just like the rest of humans: self-centered. 

They want to know what they stand to gain from your offer.

One effective way to capitalize on the self-centric nature of potential customers is to use the customer-focused copy in your CTAs.

Words such as “I,’ “my,” or “me” let a prospective know your offer is about them.

Also, it mimics the conversations in the customer’s head.

For example, Nerds Do It Better uses a CTA with customer-centric language.

The call-to-action in the above example is “Get My Free Consultation.”

You can use this best practice by using those verbs or words to let your prospects know your offer is about them and what they stand to gain from it. 

2. Focus on the Benefits

One of the fundamental concepts of effective marketing is to sell the benefits instead of the features.

A benefit is a goal a prospect wants to accomplish, but a feature is what your product or service does.

For instance, instead of saying, “Sign up for my 3-week course on Facebook marketing,” you can say something like, “Learn how to make six figures by selling on Facebook.”

The first example tells your target customers exactly what they’re signing up for, whereas the second clarifies what they’ll gain after signing up. 

Ultimately, both call-to-actions may steer readers to the same destination, but one is more intriguing than the other.

You can leverage this proven technique by:

• Establishing the benefit a target customer derives by clicking your CTA button.
• Creating compelling copy around the said benefit.

Click here to learn how you can use chatbots to improve buyer’s experience.

3. Make It Action-Oriented

You want to encourage your target customers to act–this isn’t the time to play coy!

Call-to-actions that use clear, powerful, and instructive verbs reduce decision fatigue. 

Thus, your CTA button should start with an action or command verb or what some call a trigger word, such as “Download” or “Get.” Here are other examples:

• Download my course now
• Get my free quote today
• Go to checkout
• Open my account today
• Swipe up
• Request a free demo now
• Claim your code
• Get exclusive access
• Sign up here

If you have trouble deciding what your CTA should say, ask yourself–what would my target audience say or think? Bonus tip: Ask your target customers what they think.

If you think they would say something like, “I want to go to checkout,” your call to action may look like, “Go to checkout!”

Action text and verbs will vary depending on your business and industry. So, the CTA copy of a non-profit or B2B organization will differ from that of a retailer. 

For example, this popup campaign uses this best practice:

You’ll notice the call-to-action is clear and tells the target customer precisely what to do: Join the webinar today!

Also, it leverages the action verb “Join” to inspire web visitors to signup.

If you’re struggling to come up with the right words for your call to action, use power words to elicit an emotional response and boost conversions. 

4. Create a Sense of Urgency

Creating a sense of urgency generates impressive results when incorporated into CTAs. This can apply to short-term promotions or limited-edition products.

That’s because there’s nothing more tempting than a limited-time offer to impulse shoppers. 

Lean on the Fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) and leverage words such as “this week only,” “today,” or “now” in your call to action to inspire customers to take the desired action immediately. 

The example above does a fantastic job of creating a sense of urgency. However, my problem is with the red X marks–they denote points of information, but to me, it seems like the tickets are sold out or canceled events. 

5. Address and Overcome Customer Objections

Objections are any ideas or thoughts that may prevent a target customer from clicking the CTA button.

Potential customers may have many objections.

Common objections include:

• Users are concerned that canceling their subscriptions will be a huge hassle.
• Customers don’t want to enter their credit card details.
• Customers are afraid you sell or misuse their information.
• Customers fear that they’ll receive constant emails or sales calls.

Objections are things you can’t just ignore and wish they would go away.

Try using your CTA buttons to address and overcome common objections.

For instance, Basecamp does a fantastic job with its CTA button. 

The CTA above addresses and overcomes two of the most common customer objections:

• I don’t want to enter my credit card details.
• Is it hard to cancel my subscription?

You can create a high-converting CTA button by determining what your target audience doesn’t want to happen and finding ways to assure them that those issues won’t happen. 

Click here to read more on digital marketing platforms that can help you scale your business.

6. Leverage Contrasting Colors

Website owners always look for the highest converting colors; however, no universal color is ideal for conversions. And what works for your competitors may yield different results for you and your business.

For every designer or marketer that claims that a bold, attention-grabbing blue is the best color for a CTA button, another swears that red is the best because it symbolizes “excitement” and “action.” Instead of searching for the magic combination, remember that customers are likely to notice and remember a CTA button that stands out from everything else around it.

Further, contrast isn’t all about picking complementary colors on the color wheel; it’s also about value. For example, a light blue CTA button won’t stand out against a light blue background like a dark blue button. Your CTA copy should stand out against the button. Finally, don’t forget that your target customers aren’t all alike, and some might have different accessibility needs–which should ultimately influence your color choices. 

Here’s a great example of contrasting colors:

Purple and green are great contrasting colors. 

If you’re still unsure what looks best for your brand, try the squint test and see what’s the most appealing. 

7. Make It Hard to Miss and Easy to Find

Even though you created a compelling CTA copy with contrasting background colors, it doesn’t matter if nobody sees it. So first, make sure your CTA button is hard to miss. It must be large enough to stand out on the landing page but not too large that it looks like spam or obnoxious. And, if your web visitor is ready to take the next step, they shouldn’t have to struggle to find your call-to-action button because they might get confused and abandon their search.

You should place a CTA button where your web users will look next. Ideally, place a CTA button in the upper area of a web page or above the fold. For instance, you can add the same CTA several times on a landing page or leverage a frozen navigation bar, especially for long pages with loads of information. Based on the natural flow, most apps and websites add a call-to-action button under the content web users are supposed to interact with.

Being careful about CTA placement is also crucial for mobile devices. If you’re using a mobile-friendly web page, which is a must in today’s digital era, ensure your call-to-action appears above the fold on mobile devices, too. Above the fold means where a web user first lands on a webpage without scrolling. 

8. Test & Iterate Your CTAs Regularly

It’s not enough to create a CTA button and trust your gut about designing it and writing its copy.

You require data to determine how your call to action is performing.

Many copywriters need help creating compelling copy for their call-to-action buttons. So don’t give up if it takes time to get it right. How do you know you have the right call to action, though?

The data will tell you.

You can do this by split testing. Experiment with button size, color, text links, CTA copy, form, placement, and page design. Start with design or copy and quickly create an A or B split test to determine what works best.

Split testing is a crucial part of creating a high-converting CTA. Start by split testing your new CTA versus the current CTA button. See which one boosts your conversions and what generates more conversions. 

Wrapping Up

Your Contact Us page, landing page, sales copy, promotional banners, and PPC ads will generate more leads and boost conversions when potential customers click on them.

A high click-through rate will increase conversions if all other elements are well-optimized for your target audience.

Whether you’re driving traffic to your site through social media referrals or from search engines, bear in mind that you have to focus on the benefits, create a sense of urgency, and test your CTA copy, design, and placement to create an effective CTA button.

However, there’s no single recipe for creating a compelling CTA. Only by testing various elements can you be sure of what works. 

Click here to read my latest article on web design mistakes to avoid.

Did you know that about 74% of US adults visit Facebook at least once a day? And over 2.6 billion people use Facebook every month?

With so many active users, Facebook ads are a must, especially if you’re looking to reach new audiences in places where people are already spending a lot of time on the site.

Facebook’s business platform has advanced over the years, offering advertisers more options to reach new customers and retarget previous customers. But with so many options available, it’s daunting to figure out which Facebook Ad type is best for your business and marketing objectives. However, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, check out the following five types of Facebook ads to see how you can leverage them to scale your business and generate more revenue.

1.   Facebook Lead Generation Ads

You can use lead ads for various customer acquisition needs – from newsletter subscriptions to event registration, to quote requests.

When one clicks on a lead generation ad, they’re presented with a context card, which offers additional information. Here you can tell prospects about your business, your offer, and you can explain why they should share their information with you.

The beauty of using lead generation ads is that Facebook auto-populates most of the fields a prospect would need to fill out manually. This reduces friction, encouraging your prospects to follow through.

So, if you’re want to grow your email list, then lead generation ads are perfect for you. By using Zapier, you can connect your lead ad with your email service provider and leverage automation. This way new contacts will be added to one of your lists and they’ll be entered into one of your automated workflows.

Facebook Lead Generation Ads Tips:

• Keep your copy short because long forms lead to low conversion rates.
• Avoid using open-ended questions. Open-ended questions are hard and they take long to answer increasing drop off. Instead, use multiple choice.
• Avoid offering too many choices. If you choose to use multiple-choice questions, offer three to four options only.
• Thank your prospects. Don’t forget to add a custom “thank you” to show your appreciation.

2.   Facebook Dynamic Ads

Facebook Dynamic Ads allow you to market products from any catalog to prospects who have shown interest on your website, in your app, or anywhere on the web. You can create dynamic ads in the image, carousel, or collection ad format.

The primary difference is that rather than creating individual ads for each product, dynamic ads enable you to create a template that automatically pulls information and images form your catalog.

So, if, for example, a visitor looked at a pair of jeans on your website, the dynamic ad will retarget them with the same information and you don’t have to re-upload images and copy.

Carousel ads or multi-product Facebook ads are forms of dynamic ads that promote a collection of multiple products from your online business. According to Facebook, marketers who use carousel ad type have a 30-50% decline in cost per acquisition and a 20-30% decline in cost per click.

For instance, here’s how Nuu-Muu leverages carousel ads to showcase a range of products:

Applying custom audiences to your carousel ads helps you to curate a more targeted collection of products based on who will see the ads. For example, if you have product categories on your website, create carousel ads for different product categories and show them to visitors who’ve visited pages within the corresponding category.

When creating dynamic ads, it’s brilliant to use the Product Catalog Sales ad objective. Here’s why:

More Personalized

When running dynamic ads, the copy is the same for everyone who sees them, but the creative is 100% unique and personalized based on the behaviors of your website visitors.

You Can Run Campaigns Indefinitely

As an advertiser who runs loads of ads, you know that refreshing the creative can be time-consuming. However, with the Facebook dynamic ads, you can set the creative and forget it. You just need to monitor performance!

Accomplish Multiple Objectives

Dynamic ads allow you to choose four different audiences to target:

• Those who viewed a product, but didn’t make a purchase
• Those who added a product, but didn’t make a purchase
• To upsell products
• To cross-sell products

Depending on your selected audience, the ad will automatically get optimized for each objective, which saves you time and generates better results.

Better Results

Most of Facebook’s largest marketing partners have had remarkable results, thanks to dynamic ads. For instance, Wayfair beat their customer acquisition target by over 20% thanks to dynamic ads.

The reason why dynamic ads guarantee high ROI is that they’re the most personalized, targeted, and relevant ads a business can run.

3.   Facebook Abandoned Cart Ads

According to the Baymard Institute, over 70% of shoppers abandon their carts.

So, how can you get these shoppers back to your website so they can complete their purchase? Thanks to retargeting, you can run highly personalized Facebook ads aimed at those individuals. Primarily, abandoned cart ads offer incentives, such as free shipping or 20% off, if the person returns to complete their purchase.

Using fun videos with these types of ads can deliver even more impressive results.

4.   Existing Customers New Products Ads

It’s easier to turn a first-time customer into a repeat buyer than it’s to turn a cold lead into a first-time buyer. In fact, it costs five times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.

According to Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by 5% can increase your profits by 25% to 95%. Even more impressive, you’re 60-70% more likely to sell to an existing customer. While the probability of selling to a new customer is 5-20%.

Based on the data about existing customers, it’s a no brainer that when you roll out a new product, you should run an announcement campaign targeting your existing customers.

5.   New Traffic Generation Ads

Retargeting is brilliant, but if you don’t drive high-quality traffic to your site, it won’t be effective. So, it’s great to have a Facebook campaign driving potential new customers to your site. This is a first touch point campaign because this is likely the first time a customer viewing the ad is hearing about your business.

For instance, this is how DreamCloud Sleep leveraged traffic generation ads to announce their brand and product to their audience.

Generally, this ad type generates a lower click-through rate and a higher cost per click than retargeting campaigns because you don’t know a lot about the prospects viewing your ads. However, the following tips can help you decrease the cost and improve the performance of your campaigns:

Create A Lookalike Audience

Do you have a prospect list? Then you can easily import that into the Ads Manager to create a new Custom Audience.

Next, use your custom audience to create a Lookalike Audience of 2-20M people. The lookalike audience comprises Facebook users who closely match your existing customers, which makes it easier to target them and generate impressive results.

A/B Test

A/B test your Facebook ads, regardless of the ad type you choose. Also, it’s essential to A/B test your new traffic generation ads. For a new campaign, create three copy options and another three variants. Test the variants on multiple audiences to see which one performs better. Then ramp up your revenue on your best-performing copy, creative, and audience.

However, if you’re to Facebook advertising, start small, experiment, analyze results, and iterate.

Do you want to boost your email open rate? Your email marketing campaign won’t be effective if your emails aren’t getting opened.

Typically, better emails translate to better open rates. It’s that simple!

However, every day billions of emails are sent.

So, if your emails are never opened and are lost in the sea of unread mail, you’re losing out on massive opportunities.

To get better click-through and conversions rates, you need people to open your emails.

But how do you get people to open your email?

Here are 7 easy ways that can help you improve your email open rate.

But first…

What Is Email Open Rate?

An email is counted as opened if the following happens:

1. The recipient enables images in your email to display in the preview pane or in the full view of the email.
2. The reader clicks on links in the email.

That’s easy enough. However, how do you calculate the email open rate?

Email Service providers (ESPs) calculate the open rate by dividing the number of people who open the email with the number of emails sent that didn’t bounce.

For example, if you send 200 emails, and 40 of those bounces; that means 160 emails are delivered. Of the 160 emails, let’s say 25 are opened. This means your email campaign open rate is 15.6% (25 emails opened from 160 delivered).

To determine if your open rate is “good,” compare your open rate to the open rate of the other businesses in your industry.

According to MailChimp, the average open rate across 45 industries is 21.33%.

7 Ways to Improve Email Open Rates

1.    Use Subject Lines that Stand Out

Your subject line is everything when it comes to email open rate. Thus, your job is to create subject lines that stand out and capture your subscribers’ attention.

One of the common mistakes most marketers make often is copying the same subject line formula. As a result, these common subject lines are filtered out as white noise. To stand out from the competition, get creative with your subject lines.

Here are some tips to create eye-catching subject lines:

• Evoke curiosity but don’t be too clever. The goal is to make your subscribers curious enough to open your emails without being too cryptic that the subscriber doesn’t have a clue what your message is about.

•  Use numbers. Numbers draw the eye.

• Use a conversational or fun tone.

• Use the language and style your subscribers use themselves, especially when they’re talking with their friends.

2.    Segment Your Email List

Relevancy is king when it comes to email. And segmented emails perform better than generic ones.

A study by the DMA shows that segmented and targeted emails drive 58% of all revenue. Thus, it’s time to segment your emails because the more relevant and targeted your emails are, the more likely subscribers will be to engage with them.

Segmenting your email campaigns doesn’t require much. Simple tweaks to generic emails could be all you need to improve the relevancy of your emails and boost open rates.

For instance, you can segment your emails by:

• Role or job title
• Stage in the sales journey
• Business size
• Average order value
• Time on the email list

Pomelo Travel, for example, leverages segmentation to send flight deals from subscribers’ home cities:

3.    Update Your Email List

Putting a ton of effort and energy into improving your open rates will amount to nothing if you’re mailing to outdated email addresses.

Every year, you probably lose about 20% of your email subscribers because people change jobs, unsubscribe, and switch to new email addresses. Thus, cleaning your email list can help you focus your marketing efforts on warm leads—people whom you can convert into subscribers. This might improve your open and click-through rates.

Also, cleaning your email list reduces bounces and spam complaints, which ultimately improves your sender reputation. This makes active subscribers—who are likely to purchase your products or services, see your emails.

So, if you haven’t cleaned your email list recently, now is the time. You should scrub your email list several times a year.

Here’s how to clean your email list and maintain a healthy list:

• Verify older email lists. Using third-party services, such as Briteverify and Kickbox, allows you to scrub out inactive or erroneous addresses before sending out your email campaigns. The cost of maintaining a healthy email list is preferable to damaging your sender’s reputation because it improves opens and clicks.

• Monitor hard and soft bounces. Hard bounces are emails that don’t get to your subscribers because of permanent reasons, such as invalid addresses or domain. Your ESP should remove hard bounces from your lists automatically so that you can maintain a healthy sender reputation. Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures that occur when a recipient’s mailbox if full or if the receiving server sees the email as too larger. Monitoring soft bounces protects your sender reputation with ISPs, which ultimately improves your open rates. So, you should make sure your bounce rate isn’t above the 2% industry standard.

• Don’t ignore new subscribers. Communicate with new subscribers the right way by sending out regular content to grow your list. Dormant lists experience declining returns in terms of engagement, which may reduce your opens to apathy.

4.    Optimize Your Email for Mobile

Optimizing your emails for mobile is a must because 46% of emails are opened on a mobile screen. Also, 35% of business professionals check emails on mobile devices. Apple phone accounts for 29% of all email opens on mobile devices.

However, I’m not talking about optimizing your email content because your subscribers won’t get to that part if they’re not opening your emails.

Instead, I’m talking about what your subscribers see before they open your email campaigns.

Start by optimizing your “from” name.

Regardless, if you use your name or your company’s name as your “from” name, you need to consider character length.

Next, you should pay attention to your pre-header text. This is one or two sentences email preview following your subject line—the perfect place to place a teaser.

Take advantage of this amazing lead-in by:

• Using a call to action
• Supporting your subject line—don’t reiterate it.
• Making sure your pre-header text is below 100 characters.
• Cutting to the chase.
• Testing different pre-header summaries to see what performs better.

Once you make these slight changes, you should see a noticeable boost in your open rates.

Final Thoughts

These four tips can help any email campaign get better open rates; however, don’t get discouraged if you don’t see an improvement right away. Email marketing is an art, so give yourself some wiggle room to experiment and find what works best for your subscribers and your business.

Are you satisfied with your email open rates? What tactics are using to boost your open rates? Let me know in the comments!

Do you know that for every $1 spent on email marketing, it brings $44 in return?  And on average, 320% more revenue is attributed to welcome emails on a per email basis than other promotional emails. Plus, consumers who receive email offers spend 138% more than those who don’t receive email offers. Thus, if you aren’t using email marketing yet in your business, you’re missing out on incredible opportunities to generate more revenue.

Email marketing is crucial to the long-term success of any online business. With email marketing, you can maintain a list of contacts and customers, which can help you build a relationship that enables your business to grow. Aweber and GetResponse are two of the best email marketing services out there. So, how do the two email services compare, and which one is best suited for your business?

Aweber vs GetResponse: Pricing

Both Aweber and GetResponse charge recurring fees, so overall cost could largely influence your decision. They base the pricing structure son the number of subscribers you gain. However, as your list grows your business will generate more revenue, which means the extra costs will be absorbed.

Aweber Pricing

Aweber has 5 pricing plans to choose from. The plans are based on the size of your email list, and the following pricing structures apply:

• Up to 500 subscribers $19 per month
• For 501 to 2,500 subscribers, you’ll pay $29 per month
• For 2,501 to 5,000 subscribers, you’ll pay $49 per month
• For 5,001 to 10,000 subscribers, you’ll pay $69 per month
• For 10,0001 to 25,000 subscribers, you’ll pay $149 per month

However, if your email list is larger than 25,000 subscribers, you’ll have to get a quote from Aweber to determine your monthly costs.

Apart from the limits on the number of subscribers you can host, there’s no difference in features between Aweber plans: The functionality of each plan is the same.

Also, Aweber offers discounts for bundled payments, which you can make quarterly or annually. The quarterly payments will give you a 14% discount, while annual payments offer you a 14.9% discount.

If this is you first purchasing an Aweber plan they offer the lowest first-time payments on their quarterly and annual plans.

For example, for the cheapest plan, the initial quarterly payment would be $32.67, and every quarter afterward the cost would be $49. Similarly, the annual plan would be $177.65 for the first year and $194 for every year after that.

GetResponse Pricing

The GetResponse pricing structure enables you to customize many aspects along the way.

For instance, you can choose the number of subscribers you have and how often you want to make your payments. If you can afford to make multiple year’s payments at once, the discounts will be worth it.  A 12-month payment nets an 18% discount, which is almost a fifth of the total cost. And if you can afford to make a two-year’s payment upfront, you’ll get an impressive 30% discount.

GetResponse has 4 plans, namely:

• Basic – this plan starts at $15 per month, and it allows you to send an unlimited number of emails to up to 1,000 subscribers.

• Plus—this starts at $49 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers.

• Professional—this starts at $99 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers.

• Enterprise—this starts at $1,199 per month for email lists with over 100,000 subscribers.

There are separate pricing plans available for non-profit organizations; however, you’ll have to contact GetResponse directly about those.

The major difference between the GetResponse plans is the addition of landing pages, webinars, CRM, and e-commerce. And the more you pay, the more functionality you’ll get.

Aweber Vs GetResponse Pricing: Who Is The Winner?

In terms of pricing, there’s no clear winner in the batter of Aweber vs GetResponse. Also, both email services allow a one-month, most-access included free trial to try out their services.

On average, GetResponse is $4 per month cheaper than Aweber. Also, GetResponse offers larger discounts at 18% and 30% than offer Aweber, which offers 14% and 14.9% discounts.

Aweber Vs GetResponse: Deliverability

Deliverability is one of the most crucial factors of your email autoresponder. Because there’s no point in paying for all that technology if your emails don’t reach your subscribers.

However, this doesn’t mean your emails don’t end up in the mailboxes. No, it means that your emails are marked as spam and so your subscribers don’t view them.

This results in cold leads and wasted money.

While deliverability is the sender’s responsibility, there are some marketing aspects, which are out of your control. For example, some internet service providers (ISPs) will flag certain autoresponder sites more than others.

ISPs are likely to block your autoresponder-sent emails if they meet certain criteria of suspicion. For instance, having your emails constantly marked as spam, delivering to “invalid” email addresses, and the credibility of your autoresponder with ISP.

This means besides deliverability; you must consider an autoresponder’s relationship with ISPs. The best place to start is by tracking GetResponse and Aweber’s deliverability.

GetResponse Deliverability

Because of two decades of building relationships with the major ISPS across the world, GetResponse has 99% email deliverability.

Key features, such as strict import and spam policies, list management tools, delivery tracking, and enforcing the best practices have improved GetResponse’s deliverability.

Also, GetResponse automatically removes subscribers from your email list if they mark your emails as spam. This prevents ISPs from flagging your emails as spam in the future.

Aweber Deliverability

Aweber has a 99% deliverability score because they consistently monitor their system for email bounce-back, email abuse, time management metrics, such as clicks and opens, low-quality emails, and suspicious sending patterns.

Because Aweber owns its infrastructure top to bottom; this allows them to keep a close look at their business.

Aweber also has a delivery help page that explains how and what they monitor throughout its system.

Aweber Vs GetResponse Deliverability: Who Is the Winner?

In terms of deliverability, there’s no clear winner between Aweber and GetResponse. Because both companies maintain a deliverability score of 99% or higher.

Both organizations offer various resources to assist you to raise your deliverability rate. This includes links to deliverability trackers as well as tips to make your email marketing campaigns more effective.

Aweber Vs GetResponse: Functionality

Aweber has built a great reputation for the simplicity and usability of its email service. They continually look for ways to make things easier for their customers, while adding to their graphics and templates collection.

Aweber offers you the benefit to make things as simple or as complex as you want. If, for instance, you’re looking for a “set it and forget it” email service, you can easily use their drag-and-drop system to load a series of emails.

Aweber also offers a vast collection of templates and email opt-in forms, which are slick and professional.

You can use their HTML editor to build emails that meet your specifications and send them at specific times of the day for optimum results.

On the other hand, GetResponse has had a reputation for being less user friendly and offering limited options in terms of opt-in forms and templates. However, recently they have introduced the ‘Autoresponders 2.0’ which is a great upgrade.

Using their calendar system, you can easily schedule your emails. This calendar system is easy-to-use and intuitive for users of all levels.

Both Aweber and GetResponse offer plenty of beautiful templates and graphics to suit different markets and for generic use.

In terms of functionality, GetResponse is your best option because it allows you to get as simple or as complex as you want.

Aweber Vs GetResponse: List Automation

Auto-response systems are crucial in running successful mass email campaigns, so the capabilities of your email service are essential. However, your needs may warrant the need for a simpler approach.

GetResponse List Automation

GetResponse offers an advanced list automation process, which allows you to build a complicated network of list automation. Each successive step in list automation allows or disallows further or follow-up emails based on certain triggers.

While GetResponse’s process for setting up the lists is more time-consuming than Aweber’s drag-and-drop option, it gives room for more variability. GetResponse has two options to filter contacts.

The first option is to sort contacts into selected lists. And the second option is to check if your contacts are already subscribed to lists, and which lists they’re subscribed to.

Also, GetResponse allows you to use the “Copy to list” action when moving contacts from one list to another. However, it’s crucial to note that if you duplicate recipients, both duplications will reflect in the subscribers count.

Once you have built your lists, the actual autoresponder system enables you to build auto-funnels. These are drip campaigns and lists that enable additional customization about which subscribers will receive what emails and when.

You can sort and activate the drip lists based on several triggers, such as how subscribers interact with your emails.

And based on the trigger, the automated system can respond with one or several actions. These actions include moving subscribers to additional lists, sending messages, or removing subscribers from your lists.

Aweber List Automation

According to Aweber, its email automation is as easy as ‘Drag, drop, and send.’ This means you can automate your email sequence using a drag-and-drop builder.

Aweber’s list automation allows you to add triggers to your automation, which allows subscribers to receive new emails after taking certain actions (or no action at all).

Aweber allows you to select from three rules when automating your lists. This makes it easy to manage your recipients.

• Rule 1: subscribe-on-subscribe. This allows, for instance, those who subscribe on list A to subscribe to list B.

• Rule 2: unsubscribe-on-subscribe. This rule allows those who sign up, for instance, to list A to unsubscribe from list B.

• Rule 3: unsubscribe-on-unsubscribe. This means those who unsubscribe from list A can get unsubscribed from list B.

With Aweber, it’s easy to set up list automation, and once you’re done, it’s done.

However, you can only choose one rule at a time. This means if you have four lists, A, B, C, and D the above examples would exclude all subscribers subscribed to lists C and D.

So, you have to set up multiple campaigns at a time to serve your audience better. For instance, if you have occasional visitors and in-depth readers for your blog, you want to send thorough resources to your in-depth readers who care about more information.

Aweber Vs GetResponse List Automation: Who Is the Winner?

When it comes to list automation, GetResponse has an all-around more inclusive setup. This is because GetResponse offers massive funneling and automation capabilities.

Aweber is perfect for your business, especially if you’re looking for simplicity and one-and-done marketing. It’s easy and quick to set up and it’s good for nurturing relationships. But this is only suitable for blanket emails and partnerships.

However, if you want more customization and engagement instead of reminders: GetResponse is your best bet. While their system can be initially complex, it allows for a more specific action.

Aweber Vs GetResponse: Split Testing

Do you know your target audience?

While you may think you know your audience really well; however, it’s essential to split test to figure out what speaks to your customers.

A/B testing can help you know what email marketing strategy is working and what’s not working.

GetResponse Split Testing

With GetResponse, you can test up to 5 variants of each email campaign.

Also, you can change your subject line, content, and delivery time to make sure you get the target response from your audience.

After choosing what you want to test, you can be able to track the performance of up to 5 messages at a once. Also, you can track the performance of your campaigns on your user interface (UI).

Aweber Split Testing

Aweber lets you test up to 3 variants of your emails against each other. This is tremendous for a basic email marketing service—but it’s not as impressive as GetResponse.

However, the good thing with Aweber is that you get to choose the number of subscribers that’ll get exposed to each email variant. This means you can test out a new, radical campaign on only a few of your subscribers.

With Aweber, it’s quite easy to track your split tests because all the details appear on your UI homepage.

While Aweber allows you to test 3 emails against each other at any given instant, you can still test a range of features, such as body copy, call-to-action placement, pre-header text, and the time you send the message. Thus, Aweber lets you look at many things, even though it gives you fewer test options.

Aweber Vs GetResponse Split Testing: Who Is the Winner?

GetResponse wins because it allows you to test more emails at once; however, Aweber offers more functionality because it enables you to explore the impact of your CTA button, images, subject line, body copy, and more. Because of that, Aweber is the winner here.

Aweber Vs GetResponse: Analytics

To create effective email marketing campaigns, you need to know what’s working and what’s not working. This is where email analytics comes in handy.

Both Aweber and GetResponse offer solid reporting metrics, including click rates, open rates, unsubscribe rates, and more.

GetResponse Email Analytics

GetResponse offers the ability to navigate your analytics and reports easily. You can easily look at everything from your marketing automation to your auto-responder and get the individual insights for every campaign.

GetResponse makes it easy to track open rates, goals reached, click-through rate, and much more. In fact, you can even check the type of device your customers are using to open your emails, so you can decide whether to put more effort into mobile marketing.

Also, GetResponse supports your conversion efforts by providing tracking codes so you can track the number of sign-ups, sales, and visits that come from links in your email campaigns.

Once you’ve collected your data, GetResponse allows you to organize it the way you want—into both charts and tables.

Aweber Email Analytics

Aweber offers a comprehensive selection of reports to browse through.

Here are some of the reports you browse through:

One thing that Aweber doesn’t offer that GetResponse offers is Google Analytics integration. This means if you opt for Aweber, you won’t be able to combine your SEO reports with your email marketing efforts.

However, Aweber still makes analytics simple and intuitive.

Aweber allows you to track how many people click on links in your email campaigns. Also, Aweber helps you track who your most valuable subscribers are, and which emails fetch more revenue.

Aweber Vs GetResponse Email Analytics: Who Is the Winner?

When it comes to email analytics, GetResponse is ahead because its reporting dashboard is quite intuitive and you can easily integrate with Google Analytics. However, Aweber isn’t far behind.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to choosing between Aweber and GetResponse, your decision should mainly depend on your needs. While both email services offer the tools needed to create emails, campaigns, and nurture subscribers, they each take a different approach.

Choose GetResponse if you:

• Are looking for a cheaper price.
• Want annual, quarterly, or non-profit discounts.
• Want an easy-to-use intuitive system
• Are looking for a comprehensive way of managing your email segments
• Need professional and easy-to-use:
  • Customizable templates
  • Marketing autoresponders
  • Email campaign automation

On the other hand, Aweber may be your best bet if you:

• Want all the key features at every price point
• Have an extensive email list or you’re planning to grow
• Have a small email list with a need for add-ons
• Are looking for a drag-and-drop automation
• Are looking for comprehensive split testing and analytics

However, remember that both email services come with a free trial, so you can test out both GetResponse and Aweber and decide which one is best suited for your business.

In fact—I’d recommend you test out both of them before making the final decision.