ActiveCampaign vs. GetResponse: Which One is Best for Affiliate Marketing?

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote affiliate offers. But, there are plenty of email marketing platforms to choose from. And when it comes to affiliate marketing, some tools are just better than others.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably narrowed your choices down to ActiveCampaign and GetResponse but aren’t sure which one is better. In this post, we’ll look at their features, pros, and cons to help you pick the right one for your affiliate business.

Let’s dive in.

Factors to Consider when Choosing an Email Marketing Service for Affiliate Marketing

Before getting into the comparison review, let’s quickly look at the most important qualities you should be mindful of.  

With all that out of the way, it’s time we talked about what the two email marketing tools have to offer. 

ActiveCampaign vs. GetResponse: Which one is Best for Affiliate Marketing?

Before we take a look at their specific features and attributes to see how they stack up against each other, let us first have an overview on what ActiveCampaign and GetResponse truly is.

About ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign has been around for around two decades, which makes it one of the pioneers of the industry. Although it’s considered to be more targeted toward e-commerce businesses, ActiveCampaign has got everything you need for affiliate marketing. But, whether or not it’s better than GetResponse still remains to be seen. (Related: ActiveCampaign vs. ConvertKit For Selling Digital Products)

About GetResponse

Founded in 1998, GetResponse offers everything from a powerful CRM (Customer relationship management) to landing pages.

With that being said, let's take a look and dive into ActiveCampaign's features.

ActiveCampaign Features

Here we go...

Interface and Ease of use

As soon as you sign up for an ActiveCampaign account, you’ll see everything at a glance on your dashboard.

And as you can see, the interface is user-friendly and easy on the eyes. The left sidebar is where all the email marketing magic happens. You might need to explore the sidebar for a while to get used to the software though.

List Management & Segmentation

Having powerful list management features can help you serve the right kind of content to the right people. ActiveCampaign has a simple yet effective list management dashboard. The “Contacts” tab of the software showcases everything related to your contacts in one place.

There are several filters at the top to help you find different segments of your audience with ease.

And at the top right, there are options to “Export”, “import”, and “Add a contact”. The left sidebar is where you can access different list management features.

The segmentation features can be accessed by going to “Advanced search”.

You can then create smaller, more targeted segments of your audience by applying different conditions.

Another cool list management feature ActiveCampaign offers is “Lead scoring”. What this does is it puts your best leads in a separate segment automatically. The segmentation is based on actions, which means whenever someone takes a particular action, they’re tagged as a top lead.

Automation

Email marketing automation is inarguably the most important feature you need as an affiliate. Why is it so important? Because email marketing is all about nurturing your audience.

And only effective automation workflows can help you convert strangers into leads and leads into repeat customers. Plus, you eventually want to automate your affiliate business as much as possible. Thankfully, ActiveCampaign has all the bells and whistles you need in this department.

The software offers more than 270 pre-built automation workflows to help you serve the right kind of content to your audience at the right time. These workflows are further categorized so that you can easily pick the ones that suit your marketing needs.

For instance, as an affiliate, you’re most likely going to use content marketing to promote relevant offers. In that case, you can explore all the workflows under the “Blogger/Author” category. And, let’s say you want to retarget your most engaged audience. You could use the “Engagement Tagging” workflow.

Here’s what this particular automation workflow looks like:

Now, you need to add a trigger to start the automation workflow. Here’s a list of triggers you get on ActiveCampaign:

For instance, let’s say you want to use the “Submits a form” trigger. So, anytime someone submits a form, they’ll be added to this workflow.

Next, you can add a variety of actions within this workflow. Clicking on the “+” icon will open up a pop-up window with all the options.

You can also add these actions to your workflow from the right sidebar.

Just click the action you want to include and drag it onto the workflow.

Forms and Landing Pages

Lead generation is the core part of any email marketing strategy. And if you want to grow as an affiliate, you need to build a list of engaged email subscribers. Subscribers that you can always rely on as a high-quality traffic source for your affiliate offers. And to capture leads, you need forms and landing pages.

Thankfully, ActiveCampaign helps you generate leads with beautiful forms and converting landing pages. You’ll need to go to “Site” to create a form or a landing page.

Here’s what the inline form looks like:

The right sidebar is where you’ll find any additional elements to add to your form. ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder is easy-to-use, allowing non-designers to build converting landing pages for their campaigns.

The good thing is although you can create one from scratch, there are plenty of pre-built landing pages to give you a head start.

For instance, here’s one of the “Thank You” page templates:

Marketing Insights

Now, the “Reports” section is where ActiveCampaign really stands out from the competition. There are few email platforms that offer such in-depth marketing analytics. Here’s what the “Reports” tab on your dashboard will look like:

There’s more. You can even create custom reports to make sure you don’t miss out on any important piece of data.

A/B Testing (Email Campaigns)

A/B testing helps you test different parts of the same email to identify the best-performing variation.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’ve got two great subject lines but aren’t sure which one can get more clicks on your affiliate emails. With A/B testing, you can send out both subject lines and the software will tell you which one performed better. 

ActiveCampaign lets you split-test your campaigns easily.

As soon as you select “Split Testing” as your campaign type, you’ll be able to select the split test type.

Then, you can design and send your campaign.

Pricing

Unfortunately, ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free plan, so you’d have to invest in the “Lite” plan to test the tool out. Although it’s just $9/month, the number of contacts you get on it is far from enough.

GetResponse Features

Here we go...

Interface and Ease of use

GetResponse’s dashboard is simple-looking. There’s a “Quick actions” widget that has links to different tools within the platform. You can customize the dashboard by removing and adding widgets.

You can even make changes to the “Quick action” widget. 

Moreover, at the top left, you can find all the tools the platform has to offer.

List Management

GetResponse lets you organize and manage your contacts in one place.

As you can see, there are a lot of filters and options to help you keep your audience organized. For instance, “List hygiene” is a handy little feature that lets you:

In addition, the “Statistics” tab gives you a downloadable report containing important information about your contacts.

Automation (Email Marketing)

GetResponse offers one of the most advanced automation features. The “Automated messages” feature lets you create great-looking emails in no time.

Designing a “Message” in GetResponse is easy. The software has several great pre-designed emails that you can customize easily. 

Once you select a template, you’ll be taken to GetResponse’s email editor. The editor is super user-friendly, and you can add several additional elements to the template to make it look better or add more information.

Moreover, the automation builder of GetResponse offers an intuitive interface. The cool thing is there are plenty of automation templates to choose from.

And here’s what the platform’s workflow designer looks like:

Forms and Landing Pages

Like any good email marketing software, GetResponse lets you create converting landing pages, pop-ups, and forms.

And there are pre-designed templates for forms as well.  

Here’s the form editor:

After you’re done designing your pop-up form, you can select:

On the next page, you’ll have the option to show the pop-up on the whole website or a specific page.

Lastly, you’ll have to install the code on your website. Any new changes to your pop-up form will be reflected on your landing page or website.

So, what about landing pages? ActiveCampaign gives you more than enough landing page templates to choose from.

But, if you don’t like any of them, you can always build one from the ground up. Here’s what one of these templates looks like:

As you can see, the landing page builder is no different than any other good editor on the market. However, note that you can’t see the names of the blocks or elements you can add to your page. There are icons that you can drag and drop onto the interface. The nice thing is you can see how your landing page would look on a mobile device.

Since a majority of your prospects will be accessing your landing pages on mobile, it’s a handy feature to have. GetResponse even lets you take control of your landing page’s SEO settings.

All in all, GetResponse lets you craft beautiful and effective forms and landing pages easily.  

Marketing Insights

When it comes to basic marketing analytics, GetResponse doesn’t disappoint. You get reports that include:

You can even compare different campaigns against each other. However, it does lack a bit in the advanced reporting department.

Pricing

As you can see, the basic plan of GetResponse is free. So, if you want to try out the tool, there’s nothing that should prevent you from doing that. The good thing is that even when you take a look at the paid plans, they’re not as expensive as ActiveCampaign.

Verdict

As an affiliate marketer, you need your email marketing tool to:

Both ActiveCampaign and GetResponse have these qualities, although to varying degrees. So, it’s really a question of which one looks more cost-effective to you. If you’re still not sure...

Choose ActiveCampaign if you:

Choose GetResponse if you: