GetResponse

GetResponse, which starts at $15 a month, is a reliable email marketing solution that's well-suited for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) who might just be getting started with digital marketing. While it may seem sparse in comparison to more mature solutions, GetResponse is priced right and has a wide selection of third-party integrations. For SMBs, that could make it an easy selection if those integrations work with other solutions the business might already be running. With some basic analytics and an affordable pricing scheme for new users, GetResponse is a notable choice even if it lacks the more advanced features you can find in Editors' Choice honorees, Campaigner and Mailchimp.

On the marketing automation front, GetResponse isn't a bare bones solution either, though you might think so at first glance due to its linear and clean user interface. Dig into it, however, and managers will appreciate the structured workflow that walks them through the automation process without much of a learning curve. However, while again, these tools are likely good for beginners, overall the solution falls just short of our Editors' Choice winners in the marketing automation category, HubSpot Marketing Hub and Salesforce Pardot, though both of those are geared towards enterprise use.

Pricing and Plans

GetResponse offers pricing for wide range of businesses. The least expensive plan is the $15-per-month email tier, which lets you contact up to 1,000 subscribers. Packages with access to the Autofunnel feature (more on that below) start at $49 per month with the Plus plan. A small business with 2,500 contacts in its marketing database would pay $25 per month for GetResponse, one of the lower prices we have seen in the space. This becomes an even better deal when you consider that GetResponse doesn't impose any email sending limits, which is becoming a common practice among email marketing services. The range of pricing is well-balanced and anticipates what startups or growth stage businesses would need in terms of marketing tools.

The Basic Plan scales up to a maximum of $450 per month for 100,000 contacts. Each plan is available on a month-to-month basis. If you sign up for an annual contract, then the price goes down 18 percent for all tiers. If you prepay for two years of service, then you get a 30 percent discount. Campaigner offers no such discount for annual sign-ups.

GetResponse's Professional plan, which we tested, begins at $99 per month for 5,000 subscribers and adds an unlimited webinars feature, unlimited landing pages, and marketing automation, which lets you create templates for emails based on customer actions like abandoning a shopping cart. The automation features also let you create workflows to send auto-responder emails based on actions like filling out a customer form. Automation can take some time and trial and error to set up but will reward businesses with opportunities to retain customers, push sales, and find ways to segment the audience.

The company offers Salesforce integration for customer relationship management (CRM) and the ability to run webinars to collect leads. A basic CRM feature allows for a customizable sales pipeline overview. When viewing the sales pipeline in Stage view, you can drag-and-drop deals between stages. Users can monitor deals and stages as well as add notes and reminders to other team members. Aligning with Salesforce is a huge benefit, specially for SMBs that are already on the path to adopting a leading CRM platform solution.

GetResponse supports multiple users on an account should you need log-ins for employees or freelancers, or should you need to do email marketing for multiple clients. The first five user accounts are $20 per month, and additional users are $5 per month. In addition, the free trial offering has been expanded from 250 to 1,000 contacts, which is a big deal. An updated inbox preview tool gives the option to see what subscribers will see with the updated inbox preview tool before emails are sent.

GetResponse offers WordPress integration. The feature lets you create a landing page in the GetResponse landing page editor, then select a page in WordPress, assign your directory name and then publish the page. By integrating your landing page with WordPress, you can build webinar and promotion pages as well as use pop-ups to generate more conversations. In addition to WordPress, GetResponse also now integrates with the e-commerce platforms Magento and PrestaShop so e-commerce data can be imported into GetResponse so users can do advanced segmentation.

Sign-up is simple. You just provide your email address and name, and GetResponse sends you an activation email with a blue button labeled "Activate My Account." Once you click the verification link, you continue the registration, providing your mobile phone number so you can receive a verification code by text. Menu options in the Quick Actions tab at left are easily accessible. Options include Create Form, Create Newsletter, Create landing page, Add contacts, and Create Autoresponder.

Adding Contacts

GetResponse givers various options to build a subscriber list. The choice of approach will vary depending on where users are coming from. If your'e starting fresh, migrating from basic spreadsheets, or moving from another solution. If you have a relatively small contact list, then you can simply key in or copy and paste email addresses. For larger lists, you can upload a number of file types or connect to third-party services, such as Google, Salesforce, Zendesk Support, and many others. Not all services can import contacts from third-party address books so this is a win for GetResponse.

We added contacts to our account by using the upload option (a CSV file) and via Google Contacts. After you upload a file, you may need to map fields to match up with GetResponse's. When we reviewed the product previously it correctly mapped first names but not last names. But in our most recent tests, when using Google contacts to import, the fields for first name, last name, full name, and email were matched up correctly.

To set up our contact list, we dragged a CSV file into the Import contact box in GetResponse to add five contacts. Then we were prompted to confirm that the individuals in the CSV file have given us permission to be added to the list. Like with Campaigner and Pardot, you have to assign fields for the columns.

Once you have added subscribers, you can segment the list by location, open rate, and other criteria. As part of GetResponse's new marketing automation campaigns, you can also take advantage of advanced segmentation, which lets you target users based on location, opens and clicks, and autoresponder sequences. GetResponse also lets you send out automated emails if customers abandon their online shopping cart. The default setting is for emails to go out 30 minutes after an abandoned cart, but you can customize the amount of time.

GetResponse has a tool called the List Building Wizard that lets you create forms to embed on your website to solicit newsletter sign-ups, or create order forms, feedback forms, event sign-ups, and the like. You can also use GetResponse to build landing pages and surveys, and publish your newsletter to Facebook and Twitter. Finally, you can conduct A/B tests to try out different newsletter formats, subject lines, and other elements.

Email Campaign Creation

GetResponse's process for creating an email campaign hasn't changed since our last review. In GetResponse you can create a newsletter using the Drag-and-Drop Editor or the HTML Source Editor. The latter is useful for users who feel comfortable providing their own code. By using the Email Creator Tool, you can either start from scratch or use one of the hundreds of supplied templates. In our previous review GetResponse's templates were busy and dated compared with the clean designs you'll see on Campaigner and Mailchimp, our Editors' Choice picks in this category. However, this time around, we found that GetResponse has revamped its template menu and introduced a new marketing automation template to help people launch a campaign quickly (more on that below).

When you preview your newsletter, you can see how it looks on a desktop as well as in a number of browsers, email programs, and mobile devices. We liked how you can scroll down through the newsletter on a mock mobile device. Once you do that, you'll receive a spam score, which is helpful since you may be accidentally using terms that email programs flag as suspicious. The company requires all users to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and similar international legislation.

While this is a nice overall experience, we bumped into a technical issue when trying to generate a preview of our email campaign. We got spinning wheels due to a delay in delivering previews from external email services. Then the wheels turned into a broken image icon. We clicked on the tiles for the email services to get previews from services like Google and Yahoo, but we just got a blank screen with a broken image icon. We reported the issue to GetResponse, and the company said it's working on resolving some issues with its Inbox Preview feature. It has since introduced revamped queuing system that will allow the company to generate previews in about 60 seconds instead of 200 seconds.

You can send newsletters right away, schedule it for a later time, or use the Time Travel feature to deliver it to recipients based on their local time. For instance, you can have subscribers receive the newsletter at 9 a.m. local time, regardless of their time zone. GetResponse also has a Perfect Timing feature that predicts the best time of day to send mail to your subscribers and automatically delivers it at that time. The company says Perfect Timing can increase customer engagement rates by customizing messages based on the behavior of recipients.

You can also send out newsletters and autoresponder messages based on certain factors, including a subscriber's birthday, a confirmation of a profile change, or any other specific data you have collected. Start by choosing between time-based, clicked, opened, subscribed, or goal reached. Once you choose the type, then you set up the parameters. For instance, if a user subscribes to your newsletter, then you can send a Welcome message right away or a follow-up email within a specified time frame. You can also set which days of the week the autoresponder message is active.

Once you're satisfied with your campaign, you can send it to all subscribers, manually add subscribers, or use saved searches. Turns out, there's an Action button toward the bottom left-hand side of the results screen, and one of the options is Save Search, which means you can use it to create the same list criteria repeatedly.Other options include copy or move to a campaign, add a custom field, export, and tag. You can tag subscribers at this point or use that information to target contacts when you're sending a campaign. You can do so by using a saved search, with the condition that the tag is assigned and then you send a newsletter to that search.

Then you can choose whether to use the Perfect Timing feature or schedule or send right away. Once you send, a countdown clock counts down from 60 seconds; you can cancel the send until it reaches zero.

We needed to find and customize a suitable template for our refurbished furniture business and found various options in the.large selection of GetResponse templates. We created a simple newsletter for a summer sale. We didn't find the email templates to be as intuitive for building a newsletter as other platforms like Mailchimp, but they're decent enough to use. I quickly familiarized myself with various design and formatting controls and was able to create a workable template to use.

A huge bonus is that you can see both a desktop and a mobile view of your newsletter in GetResponse, and I liked how you're able to scroll down through the mobile newsletter in a preview screen of a mock mobile device. It's a well-designed feature that's similar to the mobile preview in HubSpot Marketing Hub and Zoho Campaigns. Speaking of mobile, GetReponse has a mobile app for iOS and Android that lets you send out previously created emails this is convenient for marketers needing to generate campaigns outside of office hours or away from their desktops or offices.

Convenient Reports

GetResponse makes it convenient to view all of your campaigns on one page, which shows top-level information such as how many contacts received your email and how many opened it. GetResponse has a simple tracking tool, which includes Google Analytics (GA) integration. The tool doesn't have a Refresh button (many don't) so when we opened emails, we had to refresh the browser to update the report.

In general, it updated within a few minutes of our opening or clicking an email. You can also get reports delivered to your inbox, which is convenient. In the Reports section, we were able to get a view of how many newsletters were opened. However, the Reports section seems to be a bit bare-bones, and we couldn't find the option to download a report as an Excel chart or PDF.

When we tested GetResponse previously, we weren't able to view subscriber information, but now it is easy to find contact details, a history of campaigns they received, and whether they opened or clicked them. Campaigner also offers this option, which can help you target future emails and specific customers and customer segments.

Top of Class Marketing Automation

GetResponse delivers a marketing automation suite that's near the top of the class. Automation workflows are based on three elements: Actions, Conditions, and Filters. You start by dragging and dropping a condition onto the Workflow page. These include things such as "Received an email" or "Joined a list." Next, you drag and drop an action to be taken as a response to your condition. Actions include which message to send the contact, to what list to add the contact, among other possibilities. Within this workflow environment, you're able to draw lines between actions and conditions to take recipients back and forth between different workflow stages, depending on how quickly they accomplish your preset workflow goals.

Like Salesforce Pardot and HubSpot, our Editors' Choices in the marketing automation category, GetResponse has a ton of neat workflow features that put interactive and responsive email marketing at your fingertips. For example, you can bump contacts from workflow to workflow. You can drag and drop tags into your workflow to label contacts who have dropped off or navigated through different stages of a workflow. This lets you shift contacts who have moved through a nurturing campaign into lists for more familiar contacts, or it lets you tag people as unresponsive if they have not gotten as far along the nurturing campaign as you would have liked. How you determine if someone is unresponsive is up to you, as GetResponse lets you set conditions to wait a certain period of time before designating someone as unresponsive.

GetResponse's filter options let you designate blocks of contacts to experience different paths of a workflow based on when they enter your list. For example, you can run a promotion that rewards the first 200 subscribers, and then the first people to submit a subscription form will be taken along a different path than the next 100 subscribers. You can build multiple outcomes for each stage of the workflow to make a more complex, layered experience. Another amazing feature that you'll find only on the most advanced systems is the ability to add JavaScript to e-commerce sites to add website visitors to workflows. This common, but not universal feature, lets marketers see if someone bought a product, added to a cart, or visited a specific URL.

GetResponse has added marketing automation. GetResponse's automation marketing workflow templates help marketers get started quickly. You'll find templates for a Consent-based Welcome message, Invite Contacts to a Demo, Automate CRM Pipeline, and others. Often automation newbies and marketers don't want to waste time building out basic nurturing campaigns and birthday-related customer win-backs.

Autofunnels Track The Customer Journey

One feature GetResponse has introduced since we last looked at it is called Autofunnel. This lets companies create visual funnels like webinars and then move into actually selling products. Funnels show the process a customer goes through before purchasing a product. This includes becoming aware of the product, going through a sales process, and then becoming a customer. GetResponse integrates with e-commerce platforms to make the point-of-sale process possible using services like PayPal, Square, or Stripe. Being able to track and quantify the customer journey as well as see it spelled out in understandable terms is a big win for any business and can inform future strategies.

If you want to sell an e-book or an online webinar, GetResponse now integrates these e-commerce capabilities to enable these payments. You can set up auto-response emails to trigger once a customer makes a purchase through AutoFunnel. An example of a funnel process would be creating a sign-up page, then creating an email, creating a sales page, and then adding a confirmation page. Some people may use the e-commerce features in GetResponse to promote their webinars, products like drones or services like a photography business. There are 40 templates for the Autofunnel process for an entire scenario, including an autoresponder and abandon cart email. GetResponse also integrates with e-commerce platforms like Etsy and Shopify to help pull product info into the email marketing platform to help fill out your email blasts with these product details.

Support Advantage

Support is an important feature for SMBs, especially those who may just be getting started or who do not have a dedicated in-house marketing team or expert on staff. The initial setting up of any service and solution is usually the biggest hurdle, so being able to call or chat with knowledge base or support experts can be a big help, and one that SMBs may be willing to pay extra for.

GetResponse has a comprehensive Help section that will likely answer most questions you have when you get started. In a move that won't make everyone happy, the company has discontinued its 24/7 phone support in favor of 24/7 live chat support. GetResponse also offers email support. By providing accessible support options, GetResponse offers better value than some of its competitors while boosting customer confidence that help will be there when they need it.

Overall, GetResponse provides an outstanding user experience (UX) and great third-party integration, and its free trial includes a large base of up to 1,000 contacts. Our Editor's Choice selection Mailchimp bests GetResponse by offering a free plan that supports 2,000 contacts. Our other Editors' Choice for basic email marketing, Campaigner, beats GetResponse by including round-the-clock phone support, which will make it more attractive to new users or SMBs kicking off the marketing activities. GetResponse does have its strengths and its friendly starting price as well as rich range of features will be a huge upgrade for any SMB designing their first multi-faceted marketing campaign.

GetResponse Specs

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