GetResponse Autoresponder Review
GetResponse Review - All-in-One Solution
GetResponse claims to be the easiest newsletter tool available, with a tonne of pro features. This is a big claim, especially as their prices are so competitive. The Autoresponder company’s global reach extends to 182 countries, and claim to engage over 1 billion subscribers every month! That’s a lot of emails.
Feature-wise, they do boast a lot more than most other email marketing services. From simple A/B testing to custom landing pages; comprehensive design testing to video email marketing.
The landing pages are especially interesting as they are part of Conversion Funnel, a new feature that takes care of traffic generation and can even act as an online store including payment processing. Another feature that’s worth mentioning is their automation, allowing for advanced automated campaigns based on triggers/conditions such as sales or even location. Other tools offer automation, but most are not as powerful or user-friendly.
On higher-tier plans, you also get access to their webinar feature, as well as an inbuilt CRM - extras you don’t commonly see in email marketing platforms. It was certainly enough to capture our interest - and, eventually, our business (we now use GetResponse for many of our automated campaigns). So let’s take a deeper dive into this tool.
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Getresponse pricing
There are four Getresponse plans:
Basic — starting at $15 per month to send an unlimited number of emails to up to 1,000 subscribers
Plus — starting at $49 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers
Professional — starting at $99 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers
Max — negotiable.
As you add more subscribers to your list, the costs increase. At the top end of the scale, you can expect to pay $450, $499, or $580 per month to use Getresponse with a list containing 100,000 subscribers on the ‘Basic’, ‘Plus’ and ‘Professional’ plans (respectively).
With regard to the "Max" plan, exact pricing depends on requirements and list size — if you're interested in this plan, you'll need to contact Getresponse to schedule a demo, discuss your needs and negotiate to price.
Significant discounts are available if you pay upfront for 12 or 24 months of service (18% and 30% respectively).
In addition to the paid plans, a 30-day free trial is also available, which you can access via this link.
CLICK HERE To Get A Free 30 Day Trial Of Getresponse Now
Key differences between plans
All the Getresponse plans cover the email marketing basics you might expect — core features include:
the ability to import, grow and host a subscriber list
a selection of themes to use for your e-newsletters
autoresponder functionality
responsive email designs
split testing
landing pages
in-depth reporting
RSS / blog to-email functionality
comprehensive segmentation options
social sharing tools
There are a number of differences between the 'Basic', 'Plus'' and 'Professional' plans, but for me, the key ones are below:
Automation builder — arguably Getresponse’s standout feature, the automation builder (which allows you to build complex autoresponder sequences based on user behavior) is available on the ‘Plus’ plan or higher (you can create 5 automation on the plus plan; or an unlimited number on the other plans).
Conversion funnels — you get access to more automated sales funnels as you go up the pricing ladder.
Webinars — this functionality is not available at all on the 'Basic' plan and the number of webinar attendees is capped for the 'Plus', 'Professional' and 'Enterprise' plans at 100, 300, and 500 respectively.
Team management — you can only have one user account on the 'Basic' plan; by contrast, you get 3 on 'Plus', 5 on 'Professional', and 10 on 'Enterprise.’
E-commerce - the abandoned order recovery feature is only available on the ‘Plus’ plan or higher.
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Is GetResponse the right newsletter service for you?
Recommended if:
You want to capture customer leads:
GetResponse is one of the few newsletter tools we’ve tested that’s truly built for inbound. It offers flexible forms, a landing page editor, Google Analytics integration, and sophisticated automation for segmentation and emails, allowing you to both capture and nurture new leads. On top of that, it’s even possible to host live and on-demand webinars with them.
Their new Conversion Funnel feature allows you to do all of this in an organized manner and easily track where’s converting best.
You’re an eCommerce:
If you’re an online store owner, GetResponse is packed with features to help you drive more sales – integrations with platforms like Magento and Shopify, abandoned cart campaigns, dynamic email content (e.g. based on purchases), and sales tracking. These are available from the PROFESSIONAL plan and upwards.
If you opt for the cheaper ESSENTIAL plan, as an eCommerce, you’ll benefit from GetResponse’s Autofunnel feature. Here you can set up or connect your eCommerce site and start building your sales funnel with landing and thank you pages, social media campaigns, and much more. Autofunnel is ideal for small businesses selling products and services online.
You need sophisticated automation:
We were impressed with GetResponse’s workflow builder, which enables you to set up automation for a whole range of actions, including sending emails, assigning lead scores, contact tagging, segmentation, and data updates. (Available on higher-tier plans only.)
Not recommended if:
You need solid deliverability rates:
Deliverability should be an important consideration for any email marketer. GetResponse had some room for improvement in our deliverability tests. Of course, deliverability rates can always change, so we’re hoping this will improve in the future.
You’re after a free plan:
GetResponse doesn’t offer a free (or even freemium) plan – just a free trial of 30 days. If you want a free newsletter service, check out these providers instead.
CLICK HERE To Get A Free 30 Day Trial Of Getresponse Now
Rating details
Ease of Use
Mostly easy to navigate. The design is clean and intuitive and there is a handy Quick actions section that lists the most commonly performed tasks. Widgets can be added to or removed from the dashboard, giving you full control to manage your dashboard views. One small thing they could improve is to make it a little easier to navigate out of the email editor.
Newsletter Creation
The drag and drop editor is user-friendly, allowing for a wide range of email types. In fact, the editor is perhaps more flexible than most other tools – the range of options for editing might take a bit of practice though. Bonus points for including undo/redo buttons and revision history. Our main gripe is the lack of a central style editor. It would be handy to set fonts and colors for the entire newsletter.
Personalization
You can personalize subject lines and email text using contact field data (and specify fallbacks if this data doesn’t exist for a particular contact), but it requires a tiny bit of if/then/else coding.
Email types
Classic newsletters, autoresponders, RSS to newsletter, easy A/B testing, also surveys. A good range.
Choice and Flexibility of Template Designs
There are a lot of choices and all of the designs are responsive. It’s easy to use and edit the templates. We couldn’t find an easy way to add columns to templates, though.
Email Automation
With GetResponse’s powerful and flexible workflow editor, you can build some pretty complex automated sequences. Unfortunately, you’ll need at least an expensive Professional plan to use this feature. Aside from being able to send a series of emails based on specified conditions and triggers, there are also rules to move subscribers from one list to another. Automations for lead scoring abandoned cart campaigns, and web event tracking is also available. More on email automation.
List Management
GetResponse’s list of management capabilities is superb. You can use custom filters to save segments of contacts with similar characteristics (e.g. based on contact field data, email engagement, or lead scores). Through automation, you’ve got the ability to add tags, and even automate list management rules. There’s also a section dedicated to listing hygiene, allowing you to create rules for deleting and blacklisting contacts.
Registration Forms/ Opt-in & Opt-out- Process
Fairly easy to use, with many templates available, or the ability to create your own. There are several types of integration available: you can embed it on your site or host the form on GetResponse. Options to edit thank you pages and the backend (e.g. which lists to add subscribers too) are a little hidden, though.
Deliverability
GetResponse’s deliverability leaves room for improvement. If you are looking for a solid tool and a better performer, ActiveCampaign would be a better choice.
Reports and Analysis
Thorough reports, with geo-tracking available and desktop vs. mobile. You can also see which clients were used, as well as when people clicked and opened emails in a chart view. You can get all the details of the openers and clickers, as well as Google Analytics integration, and conversion/eCommerce tracking. There’s even an option to compare the performance of different campaigns; however, there is no heatmap available.
Languages
Available in up to 25 languages.
Overall rating
GetResponse is a very powerful, versatile, and user-friendly newsletter tool. It’s also a good value for the number of features available. Deliverability could be better, though.
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Conclusion
GetResponse really came through with the goods, managing to provide both the features and ease-of-use that most other newsletter tools fall short of. We also noted the great automation mechanisms for list management, as well as its flexible and intuitive automation workflows.
While the editor can be a little fiddly when performing certain tasks, their templates are responsive and good enough to create something useful. There’s even an app for iOS and Android that allows you not only to track but also to send newsletters on the go.
With its long list of powerful features like landing pages and even webinars, and now with their new Autofunnel feature, GetResponse is certainly doing quite a few things right. While it would be great to see an uplift in deliverability rates, GetResponse scores extremely well in most other areas. As an email marketing tool, it’s definitely versatile enough to perform almost everything you’d need. We certainly found this to be true in our case for EmailToolTester’s own email campaigns, and it’s a tool we’d have few reservations about recommending to others.
CLICK HERE To Get A Free 30 Day Trial Of Getresponse Now
Pros and cons of Getresponse
Pros of using Getresponse
It’s pretty user friendly.
So long as you are happy to use a 'Basic' plan, Getresponse is cheaper than many of its key competitors (in certain cases, significantly so) whilst offering just as much, if not more functionality as them.
The discounts you receive when paying upfront for one or two years of service are extremely generous — you'll be hard-pressed to find similar discounts from key competitors.
You get really advanced features when it comes to marketing automation.
Its flexible approach to data segmentation makes list management really straightforward — it outshines many competing products on this front.
Getresponse’s webinar functionality is great, and a genuine USP — I haven’t come across this functionality on similar products.
Its ‘Conversion Funnel’ feature is potentially useful for small businesses who want to manage all aspects of their social media ads, sales funnels, and e-commerce activity under one roof.
Its reporting features are comprehensive.
Getresponse is transparent about deliverability rates, publishing figures on its website, and providing deliverability statistics for the e-newsletters you send.
All Getresponse plans come with a useful (if fiddly) landing page creator that facilitates A/B testing — something that could potentially save you a lot of money.
Custom DKIM is provided on all plans.
Support is provided in a wide variety of languages.
It integrates nicely with Google Analytics and other metrics tools.
With the exception of adequate cookie consent features on its landing pages, it’s pretty good when it comes to meeting GDPR requirements.
You can try out all the Getresponse features free for 30 days without the need to enter credit card details.
Cons of using Getresponse
The drag and drop interfaces for creating landing pages and forms are a bit fiddly and need improvement.
Although you can use the Facebook pixel with Getresponse’s landing page feature, you can’t do so in a GDPR compliant way.
Improvements could be made to how data capture forms work so that users have the option to switch them on or off on mobile devices.
There’s no 2-factor authentication at login.
There’s a hard limit of 500 webinar attendees.
No phone support is provided (unless you’re on a “Max” plan).
Quite a lot of the integrations for Getresponse involve a third-party syncing tool like Zapier.
CLICK HERE To Get A Free 30 Day Trial Of Getresponse Now
