The Best Email Automater- GetResponse Review

In this in-depth Getresponse review, I take a look at a leading email marketing solution and drill down into its pros and cons. Is it right for your business?

You’re probably here because you’re wondering:

• What is Getresponse?

• Does it have all the features I need for my email marketing?

• What’s the pricing like?

• How does it compare with other leading email marketing solutions, like Aweber and Mailchimp?

• What’s the new ‘Conversion Funnel’ feature like?

• Is Getresponse easy to use?

Read on to find out the answers to these questions, along with a summary of all the pros and cons of Getresponse — by the end of this review, you’ll have a much clearer idea about whether it’s right for your project.

Let’s dive right in with a basic overview of the product.

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What is Getresponse?

Getresponse is an email marketing app that allows you to:

• create a mailing list and capture data onto it

• create newsletters that can be sent to the subscribers on your mailing list

• automate your emails to subscribers via use of ‘autoresponders’

• view and analyse statistics related to your email marketing campaigns – open rate, click through, forwards etc.

Recently however, Getresponse has shifted its emphasis considerably: the product now aims be more of an 'all-in-one' marketing solution rather than just an email marketing tool.

Accordingly, in addition to email marketing, Getresponse now also provides e-commerce features, webinar hosting, landing pages and automated sales funnels.

Getresponse has recently introduced new features, including webinar hosting, that aim to make it more of an ‘all in one’ marketing platform

Getresponse has been in business since 1998 and, according to the company, over 350,000 individuals and businesses now use the platform for their email marketing. Whilst this userbase is not as big as those for some other email marketing tools (notably Mailchimp), it is large enough to provide confidence that the company is well-established and is not likely to disappear any time soon.

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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 respectively to host a list with 100,000 subscribers in it on the ‘Basic’, ‘Plus’ and ‘Professional’ plans.

Getresponse pricing

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 pricing.

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.

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 mailing list

• a selection of themes to use for your e-newsletters

• autoresponder functionality

• responsive email designs

• split testing

• 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 behaviour) is available on the ‘Plus’ plan or higher (you can create 5 automations on the plus plan; or an unlimited number on the other plans).

• Conversion funnels — Getresponse’s full set of tools and templates for building automated sales funnels become available on the ‘Plus’ plan (limited to 5 funnels).

• 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.

I’ll discuss all these features in more depth as I progress through the review.

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How does Getresponse pricing compare to that of its competitors?

So long as you are happy to use one of the entry-level 'Basic' plans, the pay-per-month Getresponse plans are on the whole cheaper than those provided by many of its key competitors, particularly if you have a reasonably large number of email addresses on your database.

At the smaller database end of things, Getresponse's pricing is fairly competitive — you can host a database containing up to 1,000 email addresses for $15 a month with Getresponse, compared to $29 per month on Aweber and Campaign Monitor.

The pricing for Mailchimp’s broadly comparable ‘Standard’ plan is $14.99 per month, which puts it in the same ballpark as Getresponse.

As you go up the pricing ladder, Getresponse remains competitively priced. If you have a mailing list containing between 9,000 and 10,000 records that you wish to send an unlimited number of emails per month to, you'll find that hosting it on the ‘Basic’ Getresponse plan costs $65 per month.

This works out:

• $4 per month cheaper than Aweber

• $24 per month cheaper than Campaign Monitor

• $34 per month cheaper than Mailchimp (Standard Plan)

The above figures are based on entry level plans for the purposes of the comparison).

The only well-known service I can think of that comes in significantly cheaper is Mad Mimi, which charges $42 per month to host up to 10,000 email addresses. However, Mad Mimi is a pretty basic tool, and the functionality provided by this solution is nowhere near as comprehensive as that provided by Getresponse or the other platforms mentioned above.

Some other things to be aware of on the competitor pricing front:

• Some competing providers — notably Mailchimp and Aweber — offer free accounts for users with a small number of records (but these do not offer the full range of features that you get on a paid plan).

• Some solutions (Mailchimp again being a prime example) charge you to host both subscribed and unsubscribed contacts, which can become a significant hidden cost. Getresponse only charges you for your active subscribers.

• If you are prepared to pay upfront for 1 or 2 years, you can avail of substantial discounts with Getresponse that other competitors don't yet provide.

So the bottom line is that Getresponse is pretty competitive in the pricing department.

But what about features?

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Key Getresponse features

By comparison with other email marketing tools, Getresponse's feature set is one of the most comprehensive available.

Not only does Getresponse provide all the key stuff you'd expect from an email marketing platform — list hosting, templates, autoresponders, analytics and so on, but as mentioned above, it's recently been expanding its feature set to the point where has morphed into an all-in-one marketing and e-commerce solution.

The question is whether all this makes the product a jack of all trades and master of none.

Let's drill down into its key features to find out.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your subscribers at intervals of your choosing.

For example, you can set them up so that immediately after somebody signs up to your mailing list, they receive a welcome message from your business; a week later they could receive a discount offer for some of your products or services; three weeks later they could receive an encouragement to follow you on social media. And so on.

Getresponse's autoresponder functionality is a key selling point — the product provides some of the most comprehensive autoresponder functionality available.

You can send either time-based or action-based messages; time-based options include cycles such as the example above, and action-based messages can be triggered by user actions or information, for example:

• opens

• clicks

• subscriptions to particular lists

• changes in contact preferences

• completed transactions / goals

• birthdays

• changes in user data

Marketing automation

Recently Getresponse launched a new version of their new autoresponder functionality, called 'Marketing Automation.'

This allows you to create automation workflows using a drag and drop builder — you basically set up an 'automation flowchart' that instructs Getresponse what to do if a user opens a particular offer, clicks on a certain link etc.

This kind of functionality goes far beyond what's traditionally been on offer from autoresponders, and allows you to create a user journey that can be customised to the nth degree.

For a quick overview I'd suggest taking a look at Getresponse's video overview for Marketing Automation, below.

This functionality is available on the 'Plus' plan or higher.

Getresponse e-newsletter templates

The situation with regard to templates in Getresponse is a little bit in flux.

This is because a new version of the Getresponse email creator is currently being rolled out, and accordingly, there are two sets of templates available — one for the old email creator, and one for the new, ‘BETA’ version.

In terms of quality, the new templates are much better than the old ones. There are 220 available — less than some competing email marketing solutions (notably Aweber, which offers around 700) — but they are varied in nature and the designs are very contemporary. The templates are grouped into a few categories focussed around core goals (promoting, educating, selling etc.).

As for the ‘old’ templates, there is a bigger range of them available — over 500 — and they are presented in industry-based categories — but to be honest, unless you need to use one of them as part of an automated marketing campaign, I’d probably avoid them. This is chiefly because they’re prone to appearing incorrectly in the latest version of Gmail for mobile devices.

If you do end up using an older template, make sure you test it extensively on Gmail for mobile devices before using it on a campaign.

One of the new Getresponse templates

Responsive email designs

Both the new and old Getresponse templates are responsive, meaning they adjust themselves automatically to suit the device that an e-newsletter is being viewed on — mobile, tablet, desktop computer etc.. A preview function is available to see how your newsletter will appear on each.

However as discussed above, the older templates are a bit glitchy in this regard on the Gmail mobile app.

Analytics

Getresponse offers a good range of analytics and reporting options. You get all the basics of course — open rate, click-through, unsubscribe rates and so on — but in addition to that, there are some very nifty reporting features that are worth a particular mention, namely:

• 'one-click segmentation': the option to identify people who did not engage with an e-newsletter you sent and put them in a segment of subscribers which you can then email again with a different version of the e-newsletter

• 'metrics over time': you can find out exactly when most of your subscribers take action on your emails, and time your future mailouts based on this information

• 'email ROI': by adding some tracking code to your post-sales page on your site, you can find out how effectively (or not!) your email campaigns are driving sales, and work out your return on investment in email marketing.

• per-user information — you can click on one of your subscribers and see where they signed up from, where they're located and which emails they've opened in the past.

• e-newsletter performance comparison — you can compare the performance of two e-newsletters side-by-side really easily.

Mailchimp and Aweber offer some similar reporting functionality — particularly around sales tracking — but Getresponse's reporting tool is definitely one of most fully-featured out there.

Getresponse's analytics section

Web fonts in Getresponse

As things stand, only the usual 'web safe fonts'  (Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, Trebuchet etc.) can be used in Getresponse’s ‘old’ templates. This leads to emails displaying more consistently across email programs — but can result in e-newsletters looking a bit more boring than they otherwise could.

The good news is that the new Getresponse email creator allows you to make extensive use of web fonts — a really wide selection of Google Fonts can be used in your e-newsletters: more than any competing tool that I’ve tested to date.

This wide selection of web fonts is great, because — given the prevalence of Google fonts in corporate branding these days — it will allow many users to create newsletters which match their brand very closely.

It’s important to remember that not all email programs support use of web fonts — you can specify a ‘fallback font’ in Getresponse to accommodate those — but in the ones that do, emails created via the new Getresponse email creator have the potential to look great.

A really wide range of web fonts is available in Getresponse’s new email creator

Split testing

Split testing involves sending variants of your e-newsletters to some of the people on your mailing list, monitoring the performance of each, and sending the 'best' version to the remainder of your list.

Traditionally, Getresponse’s functionality in this area has been much better than that provided by several competitors, because it allows you to split test up to five different messages against each other (using subject header, from field, content and send time as variables). Its key competitors typically let you work with 2 or 3 variants.

Unfortunately, this split testing feature has currently been reduced in functionality on the new Getresponse templates — you can still test up to 5 variants of your messages against each other, but only using different subject headers.

I’ve asked Getresponse’s support team about whether or not this situation is likely to change and it seems that a decision on this will be based on whether enough users request the re-introduction of this feature.

Landing page creator

Online advertising campaigns that make use of landing pages will usually generate far more leads if, rather than simply directing people to an information-packed website, they point users to attractive 'squeeze pages' containing clear information and a clean, well-designed data capture form.

Getresponse offers something very useful in this regard that many of its competitors don't: a landing page creator (and one that's mobile-friendly too).

Not only can it be used to build squeeze pages, but you can test the conversion rate of these pages against each other in real time, and roll out the best performing one.

Similar products often require you to make use of a third-party landing page creating tool like Unbounce or Instapage to attain this sort of functionality. (Mailchimp recently introduced some landing page functionality, but it is yet to become as sophisticated at Getresponse's).

Getresponse's Landing Page Creator is useful, but to get the fully-featured version of it you need to be on one of the more expensive plans.

Crucially, Getresponse’s landing functionality is available on all plans. Given that leading landing page tools Unbounce and Instapage cost a minimum of $99 and $199 per month respectively, there are considerable savings to be made here.

There are a couple of problems with the landing page creator however that need to be flagged up.

First, the interface is not particularly intuitive — in fact, it’s pretty clunky.

Second, you’ll usually need to create separate versions of your landing pages for desktop and mobile. In some ways, this is a good thing, as it lets you hide bits of your landing page that you don’t want mobile users to see. But doing so involves a rather fiddly process.

And finally, although you can use Facebook cookies on your Getresponse landing page, via the Facebook pixel, it’s impossible to do so in a GDPR-compliant way. In order to meet the EU’s GDPR requirements on cookies (and some US data protection laws), you need to give users a clear mechanism to opt in or out of cookie use. So in essence, many Getresponse users (especially EU ones) will end up breaking the law if they add their Facebook pixel to a Getresponse landing page. This is far from ideal and it’s a situation that Getresponse should address urgently.

So the landing page is potentially great feature — but it is let down by the interface and particularly the lack of a cookie consent banner.

Webinars

Getresponse recently introduced the ability to host webinars on the platform.

Given that webinars are generally used as a lead-generation tactic, the idea of having your email database and your webinar tool under the same roof is appealing.

The pricing is also very competitive too by comparison to established webinar solutions. For example, one of the leading webinar services, Gotowebinar, charges $59 per month to host webinars with up to 100 participants. You can actually do the same — and a lot more — with Getresponse for $49 per month.

With regard to attendee limits, the Getresponse 'Plus' plan allows you to host a webinar with up to 100 participants; the 'Professional' plan's cap is 300; and the ‘Enterprise’ plan’s cap is 500.

You can also buy webinars functionality as an add-on for the ‘Basic’ plan: $40 per month buys you a 100 attendees limit, $99 per month buys you a 500 attendees limit. Rather vaguely, however, Getresponse say that if you live in the North Americas, these add-ons ‘may not’ be available (so if you’re a ‘Basic’ plan user in North America, you’ll have to upgrade your whole account to avail of this functionality).

A couple of Getresponse webinar features worth flagging up as being particularly useful are:

• the fact that your attendees don't need to install any software to attend the webinars

• one-click record of your webinars

• screensharing functionality

• free online storage for playback files.

On the downside,

• you can only run paid webinars (i.e., where viewers have to pay for access) on the ‘Professional’ plan or higher.

• the 500 attendee limit is the absolute max — you can’t pay for an add-on to increase this limit.

• the file storage limits for your recorded webinars aren’t madly generous — you get 3 hours storage on the ‘Plus’ plan, 6 on ‘Professional’ and 10 on the ‘Enterprise’ plan. As is the case with the attendee cap, it seems as though there’s no way to increase this limit.

Despite these limits, webinar functionality is potentially a very useful feature to have sitting in your e-marketing arsenal and its inclusion as a feature gives Getresponse a very significant edge over its key competitors. The fact that your email list is fully integrated with your webinar broadcasting tool shouldn’t be sniffed at.

Let’s look at another feature now that is also pretty unique to Getresponse: “conversion funnels.”

Conversion funnels

Getresponse recently introduced a new ‘conversion funnel’ feature, and it represents quite a departure for the product. This is because — to a degree — it turns Getresponse from being an email marketing platform into something that you can use to run an e-commerce business.

The idea behind this feature is that you can do the following things without ever leaving the Getresponse environment:

• Create a product catalogue

• Create and run Facebook ad campaigns

• Create landing pages

• Add subscribers to an autoresponder cycle

• Drive users to sales pages (also created in Getresponse)

• Take payment for products

• Send abandoned cart emails if necessary

In other words — and as the feature name suggests — Getresponse aims to provide you with an easy means to create sales funnels without the need for any other apps at all being necessary. A wide range of templates is provided to help you with this.

You can access this feature on all plans - although the version available on the ‘Basic’ plan only allows you to create one funnel, and doesn’t permit you to make use of the abandoned cart recovery feature (which automatically emails people who added an item to their cart only to not complete their purchase).

If you like you can involve third party platforms with this feature — Shopify, Bigcommerce and Etsy can all be integrated.

As things stand, this feature is probably best suited towards ‘solopreneurs’ who want an all-in-one option for creating all the assets they need to create a sales funnel, right up to converting subscribers into customers.

Merchants with large product catalogues extensive e-commerce requirements will still probably be better off using a dedicated e-commerce platform like Bigcommerce or Shopify for the actual selling part of the mix, however.

What's the best value Getresponse plan?

Of the plans under discussion, the 'Plus' plan probably represents the sweet spot. This is because it unlocks the bulk of Getresponse's feature set whilst remaining competitively priced. Two key features included on this plan, automation building and webinars, make the upgrade from 'Basic' particularly worthwhile.