In-Depth GetResponse Review 2019 – 20 Solutions Compared

I researched over 20 autoresponders and email marketing software before finally settling with GetResponse.

This is a GetResponse review but you already know the verdict — I love GetResponse!

What you don’t know is my “why”.

If you are shopping around for an autoresponder or an email marketing software, you can stop because I believe GetResponse is it. And you can take my word for it because I checked quite a number of solutions before settling on GetResponse.

I have been using GetResponse for a while and I would like to share my experience and what I think of GetResponse.

Let me tell you what was my priorities when I was looking for an autoresponder. And later I will explain how GetResponse support my priorities with its features.

My first priority was price. I am cheapskate!

I always look for the cheapest option.

But OK… GetResponse is not the cheapest. But let’s go through what GetResponse offers with their tools. Here’s the thing with GetResponse’s pricing. When you look at GetResponse’s pricing, you are not presented with one product and several price levels, but instead with multiple products and multiple price levels:

Let me explain what I mean…

The four products and their prices are (monthly contract) :

List size Email Pro Max Enterprise
basic email marketing, landing page, automation with more powerful automation, webinar & CRM with your own domain, salesforce integration dedicated IP, personal account manager
1,000 $15
2,500 $25
5,000 $45 $49
10,000 $65 $75 $165
25,000 $145 $165 $255
50,000 $250 $280 $370
100,000 $450 $490 $580
100,000+ $1,199+

Checkout full pricing details at GetResponse

Which package you should get depends on where you are right now with your marketing. Let’s go through what you get in these packages.

Email Package — Best for Bloggers

Let say that you are starting out as a simple blogger who wants to connect with your readers with email marketing — I would say that the Email package is excellent for that. I always tell people not to spend big when you are starting out, however you need to do it right.

So $15 per month is a small investment that won’t burn your pocket, and would allow you build a contact list of 1000 email addresses.

With the Email package, you can start to build a list, add an opt-in widgets on your blog’s sidebar and create one landing page. You can also use the workflow and design some automation around your email marketing.

For example, you want add certain labels or tags to your subscribers that clicked on a certain link on your email. The next time you send out an email broadcast to your list, you can target these individuals specifically. This is what we call segmentation. And the Email package allows you to do this.

If you have a blog about survival skills in the wilderness, you can also plan and write a 10-part email series as an email course.

When your subscriber subscribes to your 10-part email course, they will get an email a day for the next 10 days. Not only you are giving valuable content, but you are also starting to build relationship with your visitors on autopilot. You easily do this with the Marketing Automation.

And the pricing option allows you to start small and grow whenever you are ready. If you am ready to upgrade to Pro, you can go for that, which is $49 per month. That would unlock tons of other features. But if you are getting more subscribers but not quite ready to upgrade to Pro yet, you can just upgrade to the next price level within the Email package for an additional $10 per month, amounting to $25 per month.

GetResponse gets you started quickly.

Something that I like about GetResponse is how neatly the interface is designed, which helps you get started easily and quickly. Without much learning curve, you can integrate your email marketing with your blog within a day.

Once you are logged in to your Dashboard, GetResponse get you started up really quickly. On the top, you see seven icons to the different core modules in GetResponse. They are

  • Contacts,
  • Email Marketing,
  • Automation,
  • Landing Pages,
  • Webinars,
  • Form & Surveys
  • and CRM.

To get started, you need create a Contact list. And then you can write your first autoresponder email that welcomes your new subscribers. This can be done in the Email Marketing. If you want to create an email series to be sent with specific time period intervals, you can do that with Automation. You can create your emails with the Automation Messages, and later use them and design your automation workflow.

Of course GetResponse has a really cool email newsletter designer, where you can get started with cool template designs. There are a ton to choose from. And later, for images, GetResponse via iStockphoto provides 1000 free stock photos to get you started.

Now that you have your Contact list, and your email series all set up, you can use Forms & Surveys to design a form where your visitors can enter their details to subscribe to your newsletter.

Here’s where GetResponse is cool. GetResponse Form Builder tool can help you build a simple widget for your sidebar or even cool interactive forms that appears and shakes, appear on scroll, appear on exit, appear on button click, and many, many more. Maybe you know about WordPress plugins that help you do this. But if you are using GetResponse, you don’t need to use those plugins. Also, everything is drag and drop. You don’t need to do any codings.

Alright, with any email marketing software provider, the process of setting up your email marketing campaign is going to take some time. You need to plan and write your email messages that will be sent out. And later use them with your email marketing software. But GetResponse helps to make things easier with all these tools I mentioned previously. And you also know that your visitors will have an amazing experience, and will be greeted with well-crafted email messages.

What are the major differences between the Email and Pro?

Landing page split-testing, more powerful automation, webinar, and CRM.

With the Pro, which starts at $49 per month, it allows you to have access to a bigger range of features. For example, while you can only build one landing page with the Email package, the Pro unlocks unlimited amount of land pages, with split testing capabilities. With this, not only you can build more landing pages, you can also have variations of the same landing page and test them against one another to see which performs better.

Before we get into split testing, let me explain what a Landing Page is. A landing page is a one-page microsite with a single objective. In this case, the objective is to get visitors to enter the name and email address so that they subscribe to your Contact list. Maybe you have seen some of these promoting dating sites, TV cable packages, insurance, and many more.

With the previous example of a Jungle Survival blog, perhaps you want to promote your new info-product, The Complete Jungle Survival Guide, that you sell for $49.

To frame your prospects into buying your product, you create a free 5-day email course, “5 Must Know Tips On How To Survive in the Jungle”. You can create a specific landing page to get people to subscribe to this email course. And of course, in each of your email, you sell them on the benefits of why they should get your complete package.

GetResponse allows you to create good-looking, highly converting (meaning they convert visitors to subscribers) landing pages and host them for you. There is no need to mess around with FTP, image software, HTML or codes. And also, it is all drag-and-drop and easy to use. You can put up a stunning landing pages in merely minutes.

Now let’s talk about split-testing…

Split-testing – Why would you want to do this?

Let say you build two landing pages, A and B. A has a headline that says, “Hello Survival Freaks”. B has a headline that says, “Hello Wilderness Friends”. With split testing, we can test them out with a small amount of traffic to see which is better at converting visitors into subscribers. Once we have a winner, we go wild and unlock our traffic floodgates.

If you have a budget of $1000 to spend on traffic, you can spend $100 for split testing, and the other $900 for your real traffic efforts. Let say each landing page A and B receives 1000 visitors during split testing. Landing page A converts 100 visitors into subscribers, while landing page B converts 50 visitors into subscribers. Now you know that landing page A is the one to go with. We can end our split testing and use the other $900 traffic budget to direct all traffic to landing page A.

So that is how you use the split-testing in the Landing Page. The split testing is only available to Pro users and above. So if you want this, you better get the Pro package.

Now let’s talk about the Marketing Automation in the Pro package.

GetResponse is best for E-Commerce and Membership Sites

In the Email package, you already have this. But you are limited by the triggers on how you can track your subscribers. A clear and simple example would be in e-commerce. If you sell from your website, especially with an e-commerce site like those built on WooCommerce or Shopify, with the Marketing Automation in the Pro package, you can track if the shopping cart has been abandoned, or the visitor did not complete the transaction and then you can start to send personalized messages to invite them back to complete the transaction.

And if you have any kind membership site, you can even track their movements around your membership site and notify GetResponse to trigger certain email campaign when they visited specific web page on your website. Perhaps a user just completed an online training, you can send them a message that says “Congratulations!”. Yes, you can do that with GetResponse.

You can also track if a purchase occurred and then you can send a personalized messages on how to use the products that they just bought.

Those are just some example on how powerful GetResponse Marketing Automation is. I believe, perhaps you can imagine more use case on how you can implement this for your website.

If you are using GetReponse right now, or will be getting GetResponse soon, we can talk more about how to implement this. Get in touch with me.

I think this is a powerful feature in Marketing Automation. You already have this in the Email package, but the Pro package unlocks more triggers that you can use. The three extra triggers in the Pro are Purchase, Abandoned Cart and Visit URL.

What else do you get in Pro package?

Webinar & CRM

You may or may not agree with me, but if you are not doing webinars, especially if you are running an online business, you are missing out on something big.

Webinar is a low-cost, high-impact solution to reaching out to hundreds of individuals and deliver your message. A webinar is where you can really connect with your customers, run training, do Q&A sessions, do a sales pitch and many more.

While in most cases, a webinar platform is sold as a separate solution, you get a webinar platform ready in GetResponse and integrated with your email marketing software. It is easy to plan and trigger email messages before and after your webinar.

You can remind them that the webinar is about to start before the webinar. And you can also track who attended the webinar and send them a thank you message after the webinar. Furthermore, you can probably remind them about your offer that is ending in 24 hours.

You may not be needing it now, but you know that it’s there when you need it.

And the same goes for CRM, a system that you can use to track leads and at which sales process they are at in your funnel. This is ideal for your sales people in the real world, or even for your telesales team. You can design move them around from one process to another and triggers appropriate messages when you do that. For example, you just did an sales presentation with a prospect, moving them to the next process can automatically trigger and thank you message.

OK, let’s talk about other things that GetResponse can do for you. Dynamic Content.

One little hidden feature in GetResponse that I find very powerful is the Dynamic Content. Before I get really technical on how it is done, let me explain what you can do with Dynamic Content.

Let say you tell your blog visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. And the first email, where you welcome them, you also list your 5 latest blog posts for them to checkout. While you can have the list written manually in the email message your design, with Dynamic Content, you can also have your email message be updated automatically.

Imagine this… a new subscriber yesterday will get a list of your latest blog posts. And then a new subscriber today will get a slightly different list today, because you just published a new blog post a few hours ago. This can be done even without having to login and update anything on GetResponse. This is achieved with Dynamic Content, where you can set up your email message to fetch some of its content from external URL, for example, your blog.

What is Dynamic Content? Dynamic Content is the simple syntax or message composing language that GetResponse developed for their customers. Using specific syntax, you can customize the messages that go out to your subscribers based on the information that you collected from your subscribers, certain dates and times, external data like the weather, and many more.

The Dynamic Content is very powerful and can be used in many ways.

Let’s look at another example. Say you created a custom field and asked what type of pet your subscribers own. You provided the options of:

  • Dog
  • Cat
  • Others
  • None

Based on these options, you can craft an email that says:

If it is a dog, your email says
“Buy a bone for your dog.”

If it is a cat, your email says
“Buy a toy mouse for your cat.”

If it is others, your email says
“Buy some food for your pet.”

If it is none, your email says
“Why don’t you get a pet?”

Personalization is something that help you connect with your subscribers on a deeper level. And with Dynamic Content, you take personalization on a whole new level.

What else can you do with GetResponse?

Honestly, a lot! This review is over 3000 words and I am only covering the surface. Perhaps I can briefly list other things that you can do with GetResponse.

  • Easy to import contacts from other sources
  • Time Travel feature where your emails can be delivered depending on your recipient’s timezone
  • Perfect Timing where you can have GetResponse intelligently deliver your emails based on when your subscribers will most likely to open them
  • Advanced Segmentation where you can create a campaign and have it sent only to people that qualifies certain criterias, ie, location, recent actions (like just joined your webinar), etc
  • Create online surveys
  • Advanced Analytics where you can see how your campaign is performing
  • Email previews for top email clients, ie, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook, web, desktop and mobile
  • Over 200 integration options with systems and apps like Salesforce, Shopify, Zapier, Github, Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, Slack, Facebook, LiveChat, Freshbooks, and more.
  • Notify your subscribers via email of new blog posts automatically with RSS-to-Email
  • Developer API unlocks a ton more stuffs that you can do with GetResponse
  • Mobile App for iOS and Android to always be informed about your campaign
  • And many more.

What else do you look for in an email marketing software?

Reliable company and strong customer support

Everything is well and good. But what else do you look for in an email marketing software? GetResponse has the features to support the small guys and newbies, up to the enterprise level companies.

You can get started with Email package, and later on grow up to the Pro and Max with webinar, CRM if needed to. Furthermore, with APIs that allows developers to extend the capabilities of GetResponse into their own application and services, GetResponse is definitely flexible to cater any kind of needs. Dynamic Content and other integration is really powerful to create personal, intelligent emails for your subscribers and make you look good at the same time.

Feature-wise, GetResponse is a clear winner… but…

What else is there to worry about? Well, let me tell you…

Since everything else looks good, I look at the company, GetResponse itself. To me, I want to be assured that I am in good hands. If something does not go well, having to switch from one provider to another is a pain. I want to have some peace of mind knowing that GetResponse is still going to be here tomorrow and years to come. And also I want to know that if I ever need help, GetResponse has a good customer support to back it up.

So here’s what I found out. GetResponse has been around since 1997 and has offices around the globe. That shows how reliable a company is. With over 350,000 customers, I can rest assured knowing that GetResponse will have my back whether my Contact list size is 10, or even 1,000,000.

And as for support goes, their 300 employees is ready to provide 24/7 live chat support from within the web application itself. I said this not only because I read about their support, but I’ve tried them too. They are always quick to respond to the chat if you encounter any issue with their system, no matter where you are on the globe. And while chatting, their support also knows where you are on the system so they can better help you with some technical issues you may be facing with.

not even the full list

My recent chat with the support, they are quick to suggest to me which is the better option for me to create a 10-day email course for my blog. I was confused to either use the Automation or the Autoresponder, because you can use either. But they quickly recommended that it is better to use the Automation which is easier and offers more flexibility for future updates. This shows how responsive and friendly their customer support personnels are, and also knowledgeable about their product.

I believe that a company that stops R&D is as good as dead. And if you check out their blog, a part from tips and tricks for better interaction with your subscribers, you also see that they are always rolling out new features and tools. At the time of this writing, you can check their website where they list 133 people in their tech team, actively maintaining the system and building new exciting features to be rolled out.

It is good to know that GetResponse invests heavily and is always active in developing new features and tools to support your online marketing.

So there you go. That is my review of GetResponse. And I say that you can’t go wrong with GetResponse.

If you need a summary, well here it is.

  • Good for bloggers – yes!
  • Good for e-commerce – yes!
  • Good for online marketers – yes!
  • Good for marketing agencies – yes!
  • Good for enterprise and big companies – yes!

Click here to start you 30-day trial at GetResponses

credit card is not required for free trial sign up

p.s. ~ Be sure you also subscribe to the Emailer Guy Newsletter to get tips and tricks on GetResponse.

p.p.s. ~ In case you were wondering, I had a looked at these other solutions before settling with GetResponse. Aweber, MailChimp, ConstantContact, iContact, CampaignMonitor, ActiveCampaign, VerticalResponse, ConvertKit, Drip, SendLoop, FlutterMail, MailiGen, Moosend, Benchmark Email, MailerLite, SendInBlue, ElasticEmail, MailJet, Clever Reach, Zoho Campaign, MyEmma, MadMimi.

p.p.p.s. ~ I have to give credit to some options, ie ActiveCampaign and Aweber. They are really good. If you feel GetResponse is not for you, checkout ActiveCampaign and Aweber. But GetResponse is best for my needs.

Dino

Dino

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