We are going to take a look at one of the most popular materials for designing and sending HTML newspaper. Keep reading in this GetReponse review to see how it can be different in pricing and terms and even more!
What is Getresponse?
Getresponse is simply an email marketing app that give you the ability to:
- View and analyze statistics related to your email marketing campaigns – open rate, click through, forwards etc.
- Create newsletters which can be sent to the subscribers on your mailing list.
- Import and host a mailing list and capture data onto it.
- Automate your emails to subscribers via use of “autoresponders”.
It now also provides webinar hosting, landing pages, and some CRM (customer relationship management) functionality.
However, recently Getresponse’s feature set has evolved quite a bit, to the point where it is becoming more of an ‘all-in-one’ marketing solution.
Key Differences Between Getreponse Plans
All the plans of Getresponse cover the important basics – key features include:
- Autoresponder functionally
- Responsive email designs
- The ability to import, grow and host an email database
- A wide range of templates
- Social sharing tools
- Split testing
- Comprehensive segmentation options
- RSS / blog to-email functionally
- In-depth reporting
There are many differences between the “Email”, “Pro” and “Max” plans but for me as I think the key ones are:
– Users – you can only have one user account on the “Email” plan; by contrast you get 3 on “Pro”, 5 on “Max” and 10 on “Enterprise”.
– CRM – Getresponse provides a customer relationship manager tool on its “pro” plans up.
– Landing Pages – you can only avail of landing pages that allow split testing and unlimited views if you are on a “Pro” plan or higher.
– Webinars – this functionality is not actually available at all on the “Email” plan and the number of webinar attendees is capped for the “pro” and “Max” plans at 100, 500 respectively.
Getresponse Pricing
Getresponse has three main types of pricing plan – “Email”, “Pro”, and “Max” – and within each of these, several additional types of plan to choose from (all based on list size).
– Up to 1,000 subscribers: $15 (‘Email’) / $49 (‘Pro’) / $165 (‘Max’).
– 1,001 to 2,500 subscribers: $25 (‘Email’) / $49 (‘Pro’) / $165 (‘Max’).
– 2,501 to 5,000 subscribers: $45 (‘Email’) / $49 (‘Pro’) / $165 (‘Max’).
– 5,001 to 10,000 subscribers: $65 (‘Email’) / $75 (‘Pro’) / $165 (‘Max’).
– 10,001 to 25,000 subscribers: $145 (‘Email’) / $165 (‘Pro’) / $255 (‘Max’).
– 25,001 to 50,000 subscribers: $250 (‘Email’) / $280 (‘Pro’) / $370 (‘Max’).
– 50,001 to 100,000 subscribers: $450 (‘Email’) / $490 (‘Pro’) / $580 (‘Max’).
If you pay upfront for 12 or 24 month of service, there will be significant discounts available for you. These are considerably more generous than most competing platforms.
The users whose lists exceed 100,000 email addresses, there is an “Enterprise” plan additionally for them. With exact pricing depending on requirements that of course if you are interested in the “Enterprise” plan, then you have to contact the Getresponse to schedule a demo, outline your needs and discuss pricing.
Key Getresponse Features
The first thing to be wondered about is whether Getresponse is a jack of all trades and master of none.
Getresponse’s feature set is arguably one of the most overall out there.
It’s recently been expanding the feature set to the point where it’s morphing into an all-in-one, not only that. It also provides all the key stuff you’d expect from an email marketing platform – list hosting, templates, autoresponders, analytics and so on.
How does Getresponse pricing compare to that of its competitors?
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 will find that hosting it with Getresponse costs $65 per month.
And this is:
– $4 per month is cheaper than with Aweber
– $10 per month is cheaper that Mailchimp
– $84 per month is cheaper than Campaign Monitor
So, as long as you are happy to use one of the entry-level “Email” plans, the pay per month Getresponse plans are on the whole chapter than those provided by many of its key competitors, especially if you have a reasonably large number of email addresses on your database.
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.
Mailchimp is also offering narrower pricing bands, meaning that depending on the size of your list, it might occasionally be a slightly cheaper option than Getresponse.
So the bottom line is that Getresponse is pretty competitive in the pricing department. And it has its own special features.
Getresponse Autoresponders
Getresponse’s autoresponder offers one of the most comprehensive feature sets available. Its functionality is a key selling point.
Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your subscribers at intervals defined by you – after somebody signs up to your mailing list, you can set them up so that immediately. At first, they receive a welcome message from your business; and then they could receive a discount offer for some of your products or services and this after a week. And then they could receive an encouragement to follow you on social media after three weeks. And so on.
You can send either action-based or time-based messages; action-based messages can be triggered by user actions or information, and time-based options include cycles such as for example:
-subscriptions to particular lists
-changes in contact preference
-clicks
-birthdays
-opens
-changes in user data
-completed transactions and goals
Marketing Automation – this is a new version of Getresponse’s new autoresponder functionality.
This kind of functionality allows you to create a user journey that can be customized to the nth degree, and it goes way beyond what’s traditionally been an offer from autoresponders.
Actually, it also 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 open a particular offer, clicks on a certain link ad etc.
And one more thing else to know, that these more advanced marketing automation features are only available on the more expensive plans – the “Pro” plan and up.
Split testing
Testing functionality, is another feature that stands out there.
It’s more comprehensive than that provided by several competitors, because it allows you to split test up to five different messages.
By contrast:
-Mailchimp allows 3 (on its cheaper plan – more are available on the ‘Pro’ feature, but at a cost of an eye – watering $199 per month on top of the standard Mailchimp monthly fees)
-Aweber currently doesn’t offer any split testing functionality
-Campaign Monitor allows 2
-Mad Mimi doesn’t provide split testing.
Analytics
Getresponse offers some very comprehensive 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 features that are worth a particular mention, namely:
-“email ROI”: by adding some tracking code to your post-sales page on your site, you can find out how effectively your email campaigns are driving sales, and work out your return on investment in email marketing.
-“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.
-Per-user information – you can click on one of your subscribers and see where they signed up from, where they are located and which emails they’ve opened in the past.
-“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.
Mailchimp and Aweber offer some similar reporting functionality (particularly around sales tracking) but Getresponse’s reporting tool is definitely one of the most fully featured out there (it certainly trounces the stats options offered by Mad Mimi and Campaign Monitor)
Getresponse Responsive Email Designs
Most competing products offer responsive email templates, and have caught up on this now, but Getresponse is better than most similar products when it comes to displaying a responsive preview of your e-newsletter – you simply hit a ‘mobile preview’ button to get an instant snapshot of what your email looks like on a smartphone (see image right).
It is not only doing this, but you can ‘flip’ the smartphone preview around, so that you can preview what your email looks like when the screen is used in either portrait or landscape mode.
Getresponse was ahead of its competitors for quite some time with its responsive email design functionality, which automatically adjusts your e-newsletter’s template so that if a user is reading it on a mobile device, the layout and fonts will be automatically optimized for the device in question.
Getresponse’s Landing page creator
Getresponse offers something very useful in this regard that most of its competitors don’t: a landing page creator (and one that’s mobile-friendly to boot).
Online advertising campaign that make use of landing pages will usually generate for more leads if, rather than simply directing people to a (cluttered!) website, they point users to attractive ‘squeeze pages’ containing clear information and a clean, well-designed data capture form.
Products like Campaign Monitor and Aweber require you to make use of a third part (and paid-for) landing page creating tool like Unbounce or Instapage; Mailchimp recently introduced some landing page functionality but it is yet to become as sophisticated at Getresponse.
Very importantly and additionally, you can’t use the landing page A/B testing functionality on the cheapest Getresponse plan (whereby the system shows a sample of your users different versions of your landing page, calculates conversion rates, and ultimately rolls out the best performing landing page automatically).
However, unless you are on a Getresponse ‘Pro’, ‘Max’ or ‘Enterprise’ plan, the Getresponse landing page functionality is rather limited: you can just create one landing page, which can only be displayed 1,000 times per month.
And also you can buy the Landing Pages feature as an add-on for an extra $15 per month, but very frustratingly, although the add-on allows you to display an unlimited number of landing pages to potential subscribers, it doesn’t include A/B testing.
It is definitely worth looking at one of the more expensive Getresponse plans – if you are really serious about landing pages and they are unquestionably a useful feature.
Web fonts
The best thing that I’d be glad to see added to Getresponse is support for web fonts – as things stand, only the usual ‘web safe fonts’ can be used (Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, Trebuchet etc.) in e-newsletters created with Getresponse.
Giving the major email clients’ increasing allow users to incorporate them into their HTML emails. Some competing products now allow use of a limited number of some web fonts, so it would be nice to see this feature added to Getresponse soon.
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.
Getresponse Webinars
Recently, Getresponse has added the ability to host webinars on the platform.
What competitive too is their pricing, by comparison to established webinar solutions. For example, one of leading webinar services, Gotowebinar, charges $199 per month to host webinars with up to 500 attendees; you can actually do the same with Getresponse for $165 (so long as your list size is under 25,000).
These webinars are actually used as a lead-generation tactic, the idea of having your email database and your webinar tool under the same roof is extremely appealing.
Also, a couple of Getresponse webinar features worth flagging up as being particularly useful are:
-one-click record of your webinars
-free online storage for playback files
-the fact that your attendees don’t need to install any software to attend the webinars
-screensharing functionality
The Getresponse “Pro” plan allows you to host a webinar with up to 100 participants; the “Max” plan’s cap is 500.
And also a cool thing to do, is that you can buy webinars functionality as an add-on to a cheaper plan: $40 per month buys you a 500 attendees limit. It is not clear what your options are if you need to host larger scale webinars than that however.
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, especially when you consider that you can link it with a built in CRM tool.
CRM
One of the most breathtaking aspects of using many well-known CRM tools is the need to export data to CSV and back into your email marketing tool in order do mailouts (or the need to export data from your email marketing tool into your CRM to add leads to it).
Recently, Getresponse have upped their game a bit on this front. The CRM is now integrated with all of Getresponse’s email marketing functionality and you can add users to a CRM pipeline based on their activity (form completions, email open, purchases etc.) or trigger autoresponders based on the addition of a new contact to a pipeline stage.
This functionality would be as follows:
-you can add a contact to a particular stage on a sales pipeline based on the page of your site that they completed a form on;
-you could then send them an automated email tailored to that pipeline stage a couple of days later;
-and based on the action they took with regard to that email (clicking on a certain link etc) you could automatically move them onto another stage of the pipeline and automatically invite them to a webinar.
I can’t think of any similar email marketing product offering such a tight integration between autoresponders and CRM pipelines. For this kind of functionality you normally need to look at dedicated – and more expensive – CRM products such as Salesforce and Infusionsoft.
Email activity tracking is the most glaring omission. Other CRM packages allow you to bcc a dropbox email address any time you send an email to a lead or client; doing so keeps a record of the communication in the contact’s history. There is currently no way of doing this with the Getresponse CRM, nor is there an easy way to send one-to-one emails to leads or clients.
Task management is non-existent too: unlike dedicated CRM tools there’s no way to assign tasks to other team members.
So as things stand, the Getresponse CRM is a bit half-baked. But that said, it’s a new feature and the stuff it can do on the automation side is impressive.
Finally, adding contacts to a pipeline stage is difficult. You have to add contacts to a list first, then go to the CRM pipeline, add a deal and search your lists for the contact you just added. From a usability point of view this is very clunky and time consuming. You should just be able to add a deal directly to a pipeline and input the contact details of your lead or client at that point.
Data capture and forms
There are two ways to use forms in Getresponse – you can either add a HTML form which you style yourself, or you can design your form in Getresponse (picking from a decent range of templates and tweaking them to match your site design). If you go for the latter decision, you can add the form to your site using a snippet of code which runs some Javascript to display your form – which can be presented in a range of different formats.
You’re probably thinking that all of this sounds quite good – but to be honest, I think there is a lot of room for improvement with regard to Getresponse form templates.
Additionally, no controls are offered by Getresponse to switch forms on or off on particular devices or individual pages of your site. In the lite of Google’s new approach to pop-ups (where sites can take a hit in search results if they display ‘intrusive interstitials’ on mobile devices) this is a bit of a concern.
Data segmentation options
One of the things I like most about Getresponse is the way you can send to multiple segments of data at once. This is not the case with some of Getresponse’s key competitors, including Mailchimp and Aweber
For example, say you have a mailing list in Getresponse that you’ve divided up into four segments:
-Segment A
-Segment B
-Segment C
-Segment D
With Getresponse it’s pretty easy to message segment A,B and C all at once (you just tick three relevant checkboxes). You could also message segment B and C and exclude segment D.
Not only can you message / exclude multiple segments at once, you can also do the same with individuals lists – for example, if you had three separate mailing lists on Getresponse, you could mail individuals across all three of them.
This flexibility possibly one of the biggest arguments in favour of using Getresponse over key competitor Mailchimp, which doesn’t unlock advanced segmentation features unless you are on its very expensive ‘Mailchimp Pro’ plan.
The only frustrating thing about Getresponse’s approach to data segments is that it doesn’t refer to them as such! Rather, they are called ‘saved searches’, which is a bit confusing. But so long as you remember that, you will be fine.
Getresponse deliverability
The email deliverability rate – the percentage of e-newsletters sent that successfully reach inboxes – is obviously an important thing to look at when choosing an email marketing tool.
Not all email marketing providers are that forthright about their deliverability rates; but Getresponse seems reasonably open about this, with this to say about it on their website.
Obviously you are going to have to take the company’s word for this, but assuming it’s true, it’s a good rate and inspires confidence that the vast majority of emails you send using Getresponse will reach their intended recipients.
Getresponse actually gives you the deliverability rate of each message on your email analytics – this is something I haven’t encountered on competing products’ metrics. A thumbs up for this.
Although I have not encountered any deliverability problems using the cheaper plans, competing products don’t force you to invest in a more expensive plan to avail of this feature – it would be good to see Getresponse being more generous here.
Support
Up until very recently, Getresponse support was amongst the most comprehensive available for email marketing tools: the company offered phone support alongside live chat support, email support and various online tutorials / resources.
The phone support has now been discontinued. Instead you will have to use live chat or email support. To be fair, most similar e-marketing platform providers only offer these two channels – if phone support is a deal-breaker for you then you might want to consider Aweber, which still provides it.
Should You Use GetResponse For Your Online Business Email Needs?
Getresponse represents one of the more cost-effective ways to host and communicate with an email database.
Some improvements to Getresponse do need to be made however, particularly where the email designer is concerned – its drag and drop interface is more fiddly and less responsive than it should be. A lot of improvements could be made to the data capture forms too, particularly for users wishing to display them on mobile devices.
Pros of using Getresponse
-So long as you are happy to use an ‘Email’ plan, Getresponse is cheaper than many of its key competitors whilst offering just as much, if not more functionality as them.
-Excellent marketing automation options
-Its webinar functionality is a USP – something that is not offered by any similar products.
-The CRM functionality integrates neatly with Getresponse’s email automation functionality.
-The discounts you receive when paying upfront for one or two years of service are very generous – you will be hard pressed to find similar reductions in costs from key competitors.
-It offers a very flexible approach to data segmentation – more flexible than many competing products.
-Its reporting and comprehensive split testing feature are strong.
-It sends responsive emails and allows you to preview smartphone versions of your e-newsletters very easily.
-Getresponse is transparent about deliverability rates, publishing figures on its website and providing deliverability statistics for individual e-newsletters you send.
-It allows you to add subscribers to a mailing list on both a single-opt in and a double opt-in basis.
-It comes with a useful landing page creator – but keep in mind that you have to be on a more expensive plan to get the fully functional version of this.
Cons of using Getresponse
-CRM functionality needs to be improved considerably before it can be considered a replacement for a standalone CRM product.
-The drag and drop interface for designing email can be a little bit on the fiddly side.
-The data capture forms provided are not responsive and you can’t control when and where they are displayed on your site.
-There is a limited range of RSS-to-HTML e-newsletters templates provided.
-You can only use ‘web-safe’ fonts in e-newsletters, which can make the templates look slightly less slick than those provided by competing products.
-The free trial limits the number of subscribers you can send messages to until 1000.
-The pricing structure is a bit confusing, with users having to pay something of a premium to access the landing page creator.
-No phone support is provided.
-The landing page added-on doesn’t allow you to perform A/B tests, meaning that in order to gain this functionality you’re forced to use a more expensive plan that you might like.
You can try Getresponse by clicking HERE and start a trial. All you need to do is create a free account, add your customer’s email list if you have one or start creating one right away.
The key is to get started. My email list is now about 27,000 and I email my list 3x/week and see about an extra $3,000 per month in revenue. I couldn’t do it without the ease of Getresponse!
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