Flex your muscles. Mailchimp vs. Aweber

It seems that 2010 is the year where “content is king” for more businesses than I can shake a stick at.  More clients are asking for newsletters to be set up and we’ve had our own reasons to have start looking at different services that offer autoresponders.

Currently, I use and recommend Mailchimp to everyone I see.  I love the service.  Their graphics knock me out. Their price for businesses building their list is the free-est I’ve ever seen.  But.  Their autoresponder leaves something to be desired and I need that autoresponder to sweet-talk the pants off a rockstar.

Last week I did a run down on Mailchimp vs. Aweber for a client and came to a dismal conclusion.  I’m going to have to give up my illustrious Mailchimp for Aweber.

Here’s why.

Price.  When you sign up with Mailchimp, your free account supports a whopping 500 subscribers and you can send a total of 3000 emails between those subscribers.  Aweber doesn’t have a free account and their price starts at $19 per month and covers your first 500 subscribers.  They don’t limit the number of emails you can send out.  Once you pass the 500 subscriber mark, the prices are relatively the same.

Lists. Both Aweber and Mailchimp have the ability to create a number of lists.  Lists can be used if you have several clients that you manage from one account or if you want to send out content to various audiences.  I have multiple lists including my main content list, a soon-to-be affiliate list, and one for contractors.  Mailchimp has a great ability to have one master list that has segments.  For instance, when people sign up to our main list, they have the option to receive information on different segments including our blog posts and contractor calls.

Perk up.  Here’s the determination factor of which service you should use.

While both services make it easy to send out your newsletters, the autoresponder in Mailchimp does not work well at all when you want to send to segments of your list.  There’s an easy way around this and that is to create a new list.

Let’s say, like me, you have a master list, a contractor list and an affiliate list.  When people sign up for each list I want to have an autoresponder fire based on their sign up date to provide information for the following month.

Here’s the problem.

Sally joins your affiliate list but no other list.  When it comes to your monthly fee, Mailchimp will consider her one subscriber.  But what if Sally is interested in receiving information from all your lists?  Well, Sally is now considered 3 subscribers.

Ouch.