Email Marketing and Auto-Responders - What's New and Who's Best?

Email Marketing is an established category that has been around for a long time (over a decade). Having been around for that long, a fairly stable set of features has emerged over time and deliverability which used to be all over the place, has stabilized. The pricing has come down to affordable levels and market leadership has been established (arguably) with Constant Contact going public.

Some of the new directions, however, that email marketing has been evolving includes segmentation, surveying, multi-step auto-responders, and A/B split testing. Of these segmentation in general (and conditional or auto-segmentation in particular) is probably the feature that has the most potential to change the email marketing landscape. Sending the right email piece at the right time based on what a prospect clicked on or opened in the past is a powerful concept and can easily mean a difference between another email that I don't open and something that triggers my attention.

Below is a brief summary of the email marketing players and their strength and weaknesses. Please let me know if you disagree on any of it, and feel free to use it to help you make your decisions!

	Constant Contact	iContact	Aweber	GetResponse
Email Limits	excellent	excellent	excellent	excellent
Deliverability	excellent	excellent	excellent	excellent
Segmentation	weak	fair	good	excellent
Follow-up Sophistication	weak	fair	good	fair
Signup form flexibility	fair	good	good	fair
Surveys	good	good	none	good
Split Testing	weak	none	good	excellent
Templates	fair	fair	fair	good
WYSIWIG editor	weak	excellent	fair	good
Pricing	fair	good	fair	excellent
Special Features				email-2-speech