In this comprehensive review of GetResponse, I delve deep into an established email marketing solution, examining all of its major advantages and disadvantages. Is it the ideal choice for your business, or should you explore alternative options?
What is GetResponse?
GetResponse is an email marketing application that offers a range of functionalities:
- Building and managing mailing lists, as well as capturing data.
- Sending e-newsletters to your subscribers.
- Automating email marketing through the use of ‘autoresponders.'
- Tracking and analyzing email campaign statistics, including open rates, click-through rates, and forwards.
Established in Poland in 1998, the company initially focused on simplifying the process of sending e-newsletters. However, in recent years, GetResponse has significantly expanded its scope. It now aims to be an all-encompassing e-commerce and online marketing solution, going beyond traditional email marketing.
In addition to its email marketing features, GetResponse offers a website builder, chat capabilities, e-commerce tools, webinar hosting, landing page creation, and automated sales funnels as part of its comprehensive package.
GetResponse has recently introduced new features, including conversion funnels and webinar hosting, that aim to make it more of an ‘all in one’ marketing platform.
GetResponse pricing
There are six pricing GetResponse pricing plans available:
GetResponse offers several pricing tiers to cater to various needs:
- GetResponse Free: This plan allows you to use a limited version of GetResponse indefinitely, as long as your list contains fewer than 500 records.
- Email Marketing: Starting at $19 per month, this plan enables you to send an unlimited number of emails to up to 1,000 subscribers.
- Marketing Automation: This plan begins at $59 per month and supports up to 1,000 subscribers.
- Ecommerce Marketing: Starting at $119 per month, this plan is designed for up to 1,000 subscribers.
- Max: Custom pricing is available for this plan.
- Max2: Custom pricing is also available for this plan.
Each plan is tailored to different user requirements and audience sizes, allowing flexibility in choosing the right fit for your business.
As your subscriber list grows, your expenses will rise accordingly. For instance, when managing a list of 100,000 subscribers, you can anticipate monthly costs of $539 for the ‘Email Marketing' plan, $599 for the ‘Marketing Automation' plan, and $699 for the ‘Ecommerce Marketing' plan on GetResponse.
GetResponse pricing (2023)
With regard to the ‘Max’ and ‘Max2‘ plans, these are more ‘enterprise level’ offerings that provide advanced features (more on these in a moment). Pricing for these plans starts at $749 per month, with exact pricing depending on requirements and list size — If you’re interested in using either of them, you’ll need to contact GetResponse to schedule a demo, discuss your needs, and negotiate pricing.
Decent discounts are available if you pay upfront for 1 or 2 years of service —18% and 30% respectively.
You can try the paid-for plans out for 30 days for free, via a trial that you can access here.
Key differences between plans
The essential features that are consistent across all paid GetResponse plans include:
- The ability to import and host a subscriber list.
- A variety of e-newsletter templates.
- Autoresponder functionality.
- A landing page builder.
- Leads funnels.
- Facebook and Google Ad management tools.
- A website builder tool.
However, there are notable distinctions among the ‘Email Marketing,' ‘Marketing Automation,' and ‘E-commerce Marketing' plans, with key differences being:
- Automation Builder: The comprehensive automation builder, allowing complex autoresponder sequences based on user behavior, is fully accessible only in the ‘Marketing Automation' plan and higher.
- Conversion Funnels: Access to more automated sales funnels becomes available as you move up the pricing tiers.
- Live Webinars: Live webinar functionality is absent in the ‘Email Marketing' plan, and the number of attendees is capped in the ‘Marketing Automation,' ‘Ecommerce Marketing,' ‘Max,' and ‘Max2' plans, with limits of 100, 300, 500, and 1,000 attendees, respectively.
- Paid Webinars: The ability to charge for webinar access is exclusive to the ‘E-commerce Marketing' plan and higher.
- On-Demand Webinars: Providing access to pre-recorded content is restricted to the ‘E-commerce Marketing' plan and above.
- Team Management: The number of user accounts varies across plans, with one user allowed in the ‘Email Marketing' plan, three in ‘Marketing Automation,' five in ‘Ecommerce Marketing,' ten in ‘Max,' and 500 in ‘Max2.'
- Transactional Emails: Features like abandoned order recovery and order confirmation emails are only available in the ‘E-commerce Marketing' plan and above.
- SMS Marketing: The option to send marketing text messages is exclusive to the ‘Max' plans.
- Support: Phone support is offered solely in the ‘Max2' plan, which also provides a dedicated account manager, referred to as a ‘Customer Experience Manager' in GetResponse terminology.
These distinctions will be further elaborated upon as we progress through the review.
The new ‘GetResponse Free’ plan
In the past, GetResponse stood apart from certain competitors, such as Mailchimp and Aweber, by not providing a completely free plan.
However, this landscape has evolved with the introduction of GetResponse's new ‘free-forever' plan, known as GetResponse Free. This change means you now have the opportunity to utilize the platform at no cost indefinitely.
The new ‘GetResponse Free’ plan
The GetResponse Free version offers several noteworthy features. This plan grants access to essential email marketing functions, a complete range of templates, a website builder, and a landing page builder.
However, there are certain limitations to consider. To utilize this plan, your subscriber list must not exceed 500 records, and your newsletters will display GetResponse branding. Importantly, no autoresponders or automation features are available with this plan.
Nevertheless, the free plan serves as a valuable way to test the product and commence your email marketing efforts, particularly if you manage a small list and only need to occasionally send newsletters to your subscribers.
How does GetResponse's pricing compare to that of its competitors?
If you opt for GetResponse's entry-level ‘Email Marketing' plan, you'll discover that it generally offers more cost-effective pricing compared to many of its primary competitors, especially when dealing with a large email database.
GetResponse starts with competitive pricing. You can manage a database of up to 1,000 email addresses for just $19 per month, whereas AWeber charges $25 per month, and Campaign Monitor costs $39 per month for the same contact count. In comparison, Mailchimp's ‘Standard' plan is priced at $60 per month for 1,000 contacts.
As you progress to higher pricing tiers, GetResponse often remains more budget-friendly than these competing products.
It's also important to note a couple of other pricing considerations:
- Some solutions, like Mailchimp, impose charges for both subscribed and unsubscribed contacts, potentially resulting in significant hidden costs. GetResponse only bills you for your active subscribers.
- If you're willing to commit to 1 or 2 years upfront, GetResponse offers substantial discounts (18% and 30%, respectively). These discounts are more generous compared to what key competitors provide.
In summary, GetResponse stands out favorably in terms of pricing when pitted against competitors in the field.
Key GetResponse features
Compared to other email marketing tools, GetResponse offers an unusually extensive range of features, even within its entry-level plan.
While the platform provides all the standard features you'd expect from an email marketing platform, such as list hosting, templates, autoresponders, and analytics, it has recently expanded its feature set to become an all-in-one marketing and e-commerce solution.
The question is whether this breadth of features makes it a versatile but potentially master of none.
Let's delve into its features to gain a deeper understanding.
Autoresponders
Autoresponders are essentially automated e-newsletters that are dispatched to your subscribers at intervals you specify.
What is an autoresponder?
For instance, you have the flexibility to configure autoresponders in a way that:
- Immediate Welcome Message: As soon as someone joins your contact list, they receive a welcoming message from your business.
- Weekly Discount Offers: A week later, they automatically receive a discount offer for select products or services.
- Social Media Engagement Prompt: Three weeks later, they are sent an encouragement to connect with you on social media.
GetResponse's autoresponder capabilities stand out as a significant selling feature. When you are subscribed to one of its paid plans, the product offers one of the most extensive sets of autoresponder functionalities in the market.
Example of a typical Getresponse autoresponder sequence
With GetResponse's autoresponders, you have the flexibility to send messages based on two main criteria: time-based or action-based. Time-based options include cycles similar to the example mentioned earlier. On the other hand, action-based messages can be triggered by user interactions or specific information, such as:
-
opens
-
clicks
-
subscriptions to particular lists
-
changes in contact preferences
-
completed transactions/goals
-
birthdays
-
changes in user data
Marketing automation tools
In addition to the standard ‘drip' style autoresponders mentioned previously, GetResponse offers a more advanced approach to automating email sequences.
This advanced feature is known as ‘Marketing Automation' and is exclusively available in ‘Marketing Automation' plans or higher.
With ‘Marketing Automation,' you can design automated workflows using a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor. Essentially, you construct an ‘automation flowchart' that provides instructions to GetResponse based on user interactions, such as opening specific offers or clicking on particular links.
GetResponse’s marketing automation tool — you can use a drag and drop editor to build extremely sophisticated user journeys.
The capabilities provided by ‘Marketing Automation' extend significantly beyond the scope of traditional autoresponders. They empower you to craft highly customizable user journeys.
To gain a rapid visual understanding of how this works, you can explore GetResponse's video demonstration of its marketing automation features.
Getresponse email templates
GetResponse offers a selection of 202 templates, which is fewer than what some competing email marketing platforms provide (for example, AWeber offers over 600 templates). However, GetResponse's templates are diverse, feature modern designs, and can be easily customized to suit your needs.
Some examples of GetResponse templates
The email templates are organized into categories that align with key objectives, such as promotion, education, and sales. Overall, the quality of these templates is consistently high.
(You can explore all the available templates here).
However, it's important to note one missing feature — the ability to establish ‘global' styles for headings and text.
Currently, the template editor doesn't allow you to create consistent heading and paragraph styles that can be applied universally within an email. This results in more manual formatting of text while composing emails, which can be somewhat cumbersome.
On a positive note, the GetResponse email editor offers extensive support for web fonts. It provides access to a vast array of Google Fonts, surpassing the font selection available in any other competing tool I've personally tested.
This diverse range of web fonts is highly beneficial because, considering the prevalence of Google fonts in modern corporate branding, it allows many users to craft email campaigns that align closely with their brand identity.
It's important to bear in mind that not all email clients support the use of web fonts. To address this, GetResponse enables you to designate a ‘fallback font.' Nonetheless, for those email clients that do support web fonts, emails created using GetResponse have the potential to appear exceptionally well-designed.
A really wide range of web fonts is available in GetResponse’s new email creator.
In conclusion, it's worth noting that all GetResponse templates are designed to be responsive. This means they automatically adapt to the device on which an e-newsletter is being viewed, whether it's a mobile device, tablet, or desktop computer.
GetResponse provides a preview function that allows you to assess how your newsletter will appear on both desktop and mobile screens.
Analytics
GetResponse provides a comprehensive set of analytics and reporting tools.
It covers all the fundamental metrics, including open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. However, it also offers some noteworthy reporting features that deserve special attention. These include:
Some noteworthy reporting features offered by GetResponse include:
- ‘One-click retargeting': This feature simplifies the process of identifying individuals who engaged or didn't engage with a specific newsletter. It enables you to send them tailored follow-up emails.
- ‘Email ROI': By integrating tracking code onto your post-sales webpage, you can gauge the effectiveness of your email campaigns in driving sales. This helps you calculate your return on investment from email marketing efforts.
- Per-user information: You have the ability to click on a subscriber's profile and access details such as their sign-up source, location, and their email engagement history.
- E-newsletter performance comparison: GetResponse makes it exceptionally easy to compare the performance of two e-newsletters side by side for quick analysis.
Split testing
Split testing, a valuable technique, entails sending different versions of your e-newsletters to a portion of your subscriber list, tracking their performance, and subsequently sending the most effective version to the rest of your list.
With GetResponse, you can conduct split tests that involve up to five variations in either subject headers or content.
It's important to note that during a split test, you can only modify one variable at a time. For example, you can test emails with distinct subject lines against each other, but the content in both versions of the email must remain identical (or vice versa).
Split testing in GetResponse
Some other email marketing tools offer greater flexibility in split testing, permitting you to experiment with more variables such as send time or sender name, and even mix variables during tests. Therefore, GetResponse has room for improvement in this aspect.
Nevertheless, GetResponse compensates for this limitation by offering comprehensive reports for each newsletter version in your split test. These reports include insights into who opened each version and provide a ‘click map,' allowing you to visualize the parts of your newsletters that garnered subscriber interaction.
Landing page creator
GetResponse offers a valuable lead generation feature that sets it apart from many of its competitors: a landing page creator.
The platform provides approximately 90 landing page templates, and similar to GetResponse's email templates, these landing page designs are professional and contemporary. This is particularly evident in the newer templates.
Landing pages play a crucial role in most online advertising campaigns, whether on platforms like Facebook or Google Ads. Unlike directing users to information-heavy websites, online ads are more effective when they guide users to appealing “squeeze pages” that feature clear information and well-designed data capture forms.
Creating a landing page with a GetResponse template
GetResponse lets you build sophisticated squeeze pages out of the box. Significantly, you can test the conversion rate of these pages against each other in real-time — and choose the best-performing one for your ad campaigns.
This can have a very positive effect on the number of leads you capture, and improve the reach of your email campaign.
Similar products often require you to make use of a third-party landing page-creating tool to attain this sort of functionality, so the inclusion of the landing page feature is a really useful — and cost-saving — piece of functionality to have in your email marketing toolbox.
Webinars
GetResponse recently introduced a webinar hosting feature, and the appeal of having both your email database and webinar tool integrated into a single platform is quite evident.
This is particularly attractive because webinars can serve as both lead-generation tools and revenue generators. Additionally, GetResponse's pricing for webinars is highly competitive, especially when you consider the array of marketing features it offers alongside webinar hosting.
For instance, a prominent webinar hosting service like GoToWebinar charges $59 per month solely for hosting live webinars. With GetResponse, you can accomplish the same, plus more, for the same price.
However, it's worth noting that GoToWebinar has a more generous participant limit, allowing you to conduct webinars for up to 250 participants, whereas GetResponse's limit on its $59 ‘Marketing Automation' plan is 100 participants.
The GetResponse webinars interface
If I’m honest, because I’ve found some aspects of the GetResponse interface — especially landing pages — a little bit clunky in the past, I wasn’t expecting that much from the webinars feature.
But I was pleasantly surprised: both the webinars interface and functionality are really excellent — and are generally up there in terms of quality with any dedicated platform I’ve used in the past for online meetings or webinars.
Customer support
GetResponse previously offered one of the most comprehensive customer support systems among email marketing tools. They provided phone support in addition to live chat support, email support, and various online tutorials and resources.
However, it's important to note that phone support is no longer available unless you are on the enterprise-level “Max2” plan. Instead, you'll have access to their 24/7 live chat support or email support.
On the positive side, GetResponse's live chat support has been known for its efficiency. Customers typically experience short wait times, and the agents are well-versed in the technical aspects of the platform.
GetResponse review conclusion
In summary, GetResponse offers a cost-effective and comprehensive solution for managing and communicating with your email database. It competes well in terms of pricing and stands out as an email marketing product that goes beyond just sending newsletters. It also includes features for ecommerce, sales funnels, live chat, push notifications, webinars, and web design.
GetResponse's versatility makes it a great choice, especially for new business owners who want an all-in-one solution without the need for multiple tools. Their ‘Free-forever' plan is also quite generous.
One standout feature is GetResponse's webinar functionality, which offers a wide range of features and represents excellent value for its capabilities.
However, there is room for improvement in some areas, such as the website builder, which could benefit from additional features, especially for ecommerce users. The landing page creator, while useful, could also have a more user-friendly interface.