• 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’s feature set has evolved quite a bit, to the point where it has become more of an ‘all-in-one marketing solution.

In addition to email marketing, it now also provides webinar hosting, landing pages, automated sales funnels, and some CRM (customer relationship management) functionality.

Getresponse has been in business since 1998; and, according to the company, 350,000 individuals and businesses use the platform for their email marketing.

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
• Enterprise — starting at $1,199 per month for lists exceeding 100,000

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’

With regard to the “Enterprise” plan, exact pricing depends on requirements and list size — if you’re interested in the “Enterprise” plan, you’ll need to contact Getresponse to schedule a demo, discuss your needs and negotiate to price.

Significant discounts are available if you pay upfront for 12 or 24 months of service (18% and 30% respectively).

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 (we discuss them all in depth later on in the review):

• 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; unlimited on the other plans).

• Autofunnel — Getresponse’s tools and templates for building automated sales funnels becomes available on the ‘Plus’ plan (limited to 5 funnels)
• CRM — Getresponse provides a (rather basic) customer relationship manager tool on the ‘Plus’ plan or higher
• 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
• Users — 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 – you can only avail of the full set of Getresponse e-commerce tools (which allow you to sell products) if you are on a ‘Plus’ plan or higher.

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 is also 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
• $10 per month cheaper than Mailchimp
• $24 per month cheaper than Campaign Monitor

(The above figures all use entry level plans by 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, the functionality provided by this solution is nowhere near as comprehensive as that provided by the other platforms mentioned above.

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

• Some competing providers — notably Mailchimp — 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?

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 — so let’s drill down into its key features to find out.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your subscribers at intervals determined by you — 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 considerably 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 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.

The new templates are much better than the old ones, and up there with the best in terms of design quality. They are very contemporary and professional in appearance.

However, there are far less of them to choose from, and you can currently only use them for standard mailouts — i.e., you can’t currently use one of the new templates in an autoresponder cycle or automation workflow.

I’ve been told by Getresponse that this situation should be rectified within a few weeks — the sooner the better, really.

As for the ‘old’ templates, there is a big range of them available — over 500 — and they are presented in easy-to-understand categories — so it’s generally pretty straightforward to find a good starting point for a template and edit it until you are happy with the design.

The templates are also very tweakable — you can change fonts, layouts and imagery easily enough using the controls provided; and of course there is nothing to stop you simply designing your own HTML email template and importing the code for it.

Responsive email designs

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 optimised for the device in question.

Most competing products have caught up on this now, and offer responsive email templates, but I’d argue that 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).

Not only 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.

However, it’s not all good news when it comes to template behaviour on mobiles: some of Getresponse’s ‘old’ templates are currently not displaying correctly in the Gmail mobile app (both Android and iOS). In some cases, a non-responsive version is being shown, and in others, thumbnails are not displaying correctly.

This problem is fixed by the new email creator and its set of templates — but as discussed, you can only currently use this to send standard e-newsletters.

As mentioned above, however, you should be able to use the new version of the email creator in a few weeks time — so this is a problem which will hopefully go away quite soon. But the situation as it stands is not ideal.

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 (it certainly trounces the stats options offered by Mad Mimi and Campaign Monitor).

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 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.

Split testing

Another Getresponse feature that makes it stand out is its split-testing functionality.

It’s more comprehensive 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).

By contrast,

• Campaign Monitor allows you to test 2 messages against each other
• Mailchimp allows split testing of 3 messages (on its cheaper plan — more are available on the ‘Premium’ feature, but this is an eye-wateringly expensive option, starting at $299 per month to host 500 records)
• Aweber allows you to split-test three 3
• Mad Mimi doesn’t provide split testing.

The only negative thing I’d say about split testing in Getresponse is that it’s a bit hard to find this functionality — you have to look for a small and easily-missed ‘distribution settings’ link when you’re creating a newsletter.

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 a (cluttered!) 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).

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.

Products like Campaign Monitor and Aweber 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.

And crucially, Getresponse’s landing functionality is available on all plans (a recent development, and a welcome one). 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.

What you will have to live with however is a rather clunky interface for building your landing pages — it’s not particularly intuitive and you’ll usually need to create separate versions of your landing pages for desktop and mobile.

If you can live with this, you’ll find that Getresponse’s landing page creator is a valuable asset to your online marketing toolbox. The user experience could definitely be better though.

Walkthrough of Getresponse landing pages

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 $89 per month to host webinars with up to 100 attendees. You can actually do the same — and a lot more — with Getresponse for as little as $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, this functionality ‘may not’ be available.

It’s also unclear what your options are if you need to host webinars involving more than 500 participants.

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
• screen sharing functionality
• free online storage for playback files.

Ultimately, 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, particularly when you consider that you can link it to a built in CRM tool (more on that in a moment).

Getresponse CRM

One of the most frustrating 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 to do mailouts (or the need to export data from your email marketing tool into your CRM to add leads to it).

So when I saw Getresponse recently introducing a new CRM feature into their plans I was intrigued — this could potentially do away with all that data exporting and importing, and keep everything neatly in one place.

Initially I wasn’t that impressed with the Getresponse CRM tool as you could only use it to perform rather basic tasks: you could create sales pipelines, add contacts to them and track activity (emails, phone calls etc.) with those contacts manually.

But 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 opens, purchases etc.) or trigger autoresponders based on the addition of a new contact to a pipeline stage.

An example of how you could use 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 a 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.

It’s clever stuff, and 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 considerably more expensive — CRM products such as Hubspot, Salesforce or Infusionsoft.

However, it’s not all good news on the CRM front — there are some BIG things missing from Getresponse’s CRM feature set which render the feature a bit pointless.

The most glaring omission is email activity tracking. 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.

And oddly, when you click on a contact within a deal pipeline, you can’t see their contact activity — the actions they’ve taken (open, clicks etc.) with regard to previous e-newsletters that you’ve sent them are not displayed.

To see this, you have to go out of the CRM section of Getresponse, search for your contact in the contacts section and then click on their details. But guess what? Doing so doesn’t display their deal history.

Task management is non-existent too: unlike dedicated CRM tools, there’s no way to assign tasks to other team members (this might have something to do with the fact that the number of users you can add to Getresponse accounts is low anyway — again, not ideal).

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.

So as things stand, the Getresponse CRM is very half-baked (and this may be reflected in the fact that the feature has recently been renamed ‘Simple CRM’). But that said, it’s a new feature and the stuff it can do on the automation side is impressive. I hope that this feature gets developed over time because done right, it is potentially a game-changer for entrepreneurs and SMEs.

(For now, if you need CRM as part of your marketing mix, you’d be better off sticking with a dedicated CRM tool such as Hubspot, Capsule or Nimble.)

Getresponse Autofunnel

Getresponse’s newest feature is called ‘Autofunnel’ and 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.

Available on Getresponse’s ‘Plus’ plans or higher, the idea behind Autofunnel 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.

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

As things stand, Autofunnel 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.

Data management and deliverability

Opt-in processes

There are two methods you can employ to add subscribers to a mailing list — you can employ a ‘single opt-in’ or a ‘double opt-in’ process.

If you use use a single opt-in process, the person signing up to your mailing list is added to your mailing list the moment they hit the submit button on your sign-up form.

With a double opt-in process, the person signing up to your list is sent an email containing a confirmation link that s/he must click before being subscribed.

The main benefit of a single opt-in process is that it makes it really easy for users to subscribe to your mailing list; it also generally increases the conversion rate and therefore the number of subscribers on your list.

A double opt-in process is better for verifying that the people subscribing to your list are using real email addresses and leads to cleaner data and more accurate stats (because open rates etc. are calculated based on a list containing only real email addresses).

Now, the good news here is that Getresponse allows you to make use of either opt-in approach — this is not the case with all competing products (the recently launched  Email Campaigns being a case in point). So a thumbs up for Getresponse for being flexible on this.

Data capture and forms

There are two ways to use forms in Getresponse — you can either add a HTML form that 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 route, you can add the form to your site using a snippet of Javascript code to display your form; this form can be presented in a range of different formats (for example inline, pop-up or slide-up).

You’re probably thinking that all this sounds quite good — but to be honest, I think there’s a LOT of room for improvement with regard to Getresponse form templates.

For a start, the Javascript forms are not responsive (i.e., they won’t resize themselves automatically to suit the device they’re being viewed on).

Additionally, no controls are offered by Getresponse to switch forms on or off on particular devices or individual pages of your site. Given Google’s approach to pop-ups on smartphones (where sites can take a hit in search results if they display ‘intrusive interstitials’ on mobile devices), this is a bit of a concern.

To get around this, I generally avoid using Getresponse form templates, and make do with HTML embeded forms which I style myself; and for popups I connect my Getresponse to a growth-hacking tool called Sumo (this allows me to switch pop-ups off for mobile users, as well as display forms exactly as I’d like to and on the pages I want). But I’d rather not have to do this, as it involves an additional cost.

Using embedded forms also opens you up a bit to fake form completions, which is not ideal — only the javascript ones provided by Getresponse include the spambot-blocking CAPTCHA feature.

According to Getresponse customer support, the company is working on improving the forms so that they are mobile-responsive, but I don’t have a precise timeline to share with you on this yet.

It’s a definite ‘could-do-better’ here — given some of the impressive and innovative marketing features on offer from Getresponse (such as webinars, CRM and Autofunnel), it’s remarkable that the company can’t quite get their forms right.

Data segmentation options

One of the things I like most about Getresponse is the way you can send to (or exclude) 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 really easy to message segments A, B, and C all at once (you just tick three relevant checkboxes). You could also message segments B and C and exclude segments D.

Not only can you message/exclude multiple segments at once, you can also do the same with individual lists — for example, if you had three separate mailing lists on Getresponse, but you could also mail individuals across all three of them.

This sort of flexibility marks Getresponse out from its competitors — of the similar products I’ve reviewed to date, only Campaign Monitor offers a similar level of flexibility (and one which comes at a much higher price).

This flexibility is possibly one of the biggest arguments in favor of using Getresponse over key competitor Mailchimp, which doesn’t unlock advanced segmentation features unless you are on the hugely expensive ‘Mailchimp Premium’ plan.

Getresponse deliverability

The email deliverability rate — the percentage of e-newsletters sent that successfully reach your subscribers’ inboxes — is obviously an important thing to look at when choosing an email marketing tool.

Not all email marketing providers are that transparent about their deliverability rates; but Getresponse seems reasonably open about this, with this to say about it on their website:

At GetResponse we are frequently asked about the quality of our deliverability rate. Because deliverability depends on many factors, including the content of your messages, the deliverability rate could vary for each mailing. For all our customers collectively, however, we are proud to say our overall deliverability rate currently stands at 99%.

Obviously you are going to have to take the company’s word for this, but assuming it’s true, it’s a good deliverability rate and inspires confidence that the vast majority of emails you send using Getresponse will reach their intended recipients.

Furthermore, 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.

Finally, Custom DKIM — an authentication technique designed to enhance security for the senders and receivers of email — is also available on all Getresponse plans. This can further improve deliverability.

GDPR

In the light of the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rules, email marketing got a bit more complicated, because there are stricter rules about what constitutes consent to receive e-newsletters (and requirements about how that consent is logged).

Getresponse is to be commended for providing users with clear information about what their GDPR responsibilities are, along with special GDPR fields that make it easier to log consent and comply with the regulations.

However, an area where Getresponse could do better on the GDPR front involves logins. Unlike rival Mailchimp, the login process does not involve two-factor authentication, where a user is granted access only after successfully presenting two or more pieces of information — i.e., a password and a code sent via SMS.

Given that data security is a key aspect of GDPR, it would be good to see this functionality introduced as soon as possible.

User-friendliness / interface

On the whole, Getresponse is pretty straightforward to use. Its interface was redesigned recently, and it’s now a reasonably uncluttered and intuitive affair.

It’s certainly easy enough to do all the basics in Getresponse: import contacts, create campaigns, set up autoresponders and check statistics.

In terms of how the Getresponse interface stacks up against those of its competitors, I would argue that Campaign Monitor is a bit more user friendly, and that the Mailchimp interface features a cleaner design. Aweber’s interface probably comes closest in terms of look and feel.

One area I feel that could be significantly better from a user-friendliness point of view is the existing Getresponse e-newsletter editor. (As mentioned above, there’s currently two available — the original one, and a BETA version of the new one).

Whilst the ‘old’ editor’s drag-and-drop approach does in theory provide a very flexible way to create blocks of content and move them around an e-newsletter, it is a bit clunky to use and can lead to accidental deletion of content, or placement of it in the wrong part of the e-newsletter.

If you can get your head around it, and practice using it a bit, it does make for a useful tool — it’s just that the implementation of it could be so much better.

The new version of the email creator is MUCH better — it’s got a cleaner interface, and it is extremely easy to use. The sooner it becomes the default email creator, the better.

Support

Up until very recently Getresponse customer 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.

Sadly, the phone support has now been discontinued. Instead you’ll have to use live chat (24/7) 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 (you can read our Aweber review here).

And the email support provided by Getresponse is available in 7 languages, which is commendable. These are: English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese.

In terms of the quality of Getresponse support, I’ve not had to use it very often (a good thing) but when I have, I’ve found it to be a bit of a mixed bag (less of a good thing).

Some of the live chat support I’ve received has been excellent, and I haven’t had to wait very long at all to chat with an agent.

My experience of email support hasn’t been quite as good — more to-and-fro has been necessary to get my queries addressed properly. But overall, I’ve been happy enough with the quality of support. As with a lot of support desks, it will often boil down to who you get on the day…

Getresponse free trial

The 30-day free trial that Getresponse provides is fully functional (up to 1,000 subscribers) and it is not contingent upon providing credit card details. You can access the free trial here.

GETRESPONSE FREE TRIAL

Review conclusions / Getresponse pros and cons

Getresponse represents one of the more cost-effective ways to host and communicate with an email database; it’s priced pretty competitively in its marketplace.

It’s also one of the more interesting products of its kind — in that it provides email marketing, automation, landing pages, e-commerce, sales funnels, some CRM functionality, and webinars all under one roof.

It’s hard to think of any competing product that offers this ‘all round’ proposition, and it’s what continues to persuade us to use it for Style Factory’s email marketing.

Some improvements to Getresponse definitely need to be made, however, particularly where the email designer and landing page builder are concerned — their drag and drop interfaces are more fiddly and less responsive than they 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.

Below you’ll find my summary of the pros and cons of using Getresponse overall.

Pros of using Getresponse

• It gives you excellent marketing automation options.
• So long as you are happy to use a ‘Basic’ plan, Getresponse is cheaper than many of its key competitors (in certain cases, significantly so) whilst offering just as much, if not more functionality as them.
• The discounts you receive when paying upfront for one or two years of service are very generous — you’ll be hard-pressed to find similar discounts from key competitors.
• The new ‘Autofunnel’ feature is potentially useful for merchants who want to manage all aspects of their sales funnels and e-commerce activity under one roof.
• Its webinar functionality is a USP — something that is not offered by any similar products.
• Similarly, the CRM functionality is fairly unique amongst competing products (although it does need to be developed considerably before Getresponse can be considered a true replacement for a CRM tool).
• The reporting and comprehensive split testing features are strong.
• Getresponse is transparent about deliverability rates, publishing figures on its website and providing deliverability statistics for the e-newsletters you send.
• It offers a good approach to data segmentation — it’s far more flexible on this front than many competing products, especially Mailchimp.
• It sends responsive emails and allows you to preview smartphone versions of your e-newsletters very easily.
• All Getresponse plans come with a useful (if fiddly) landing page creator that facilitates A/B testing — something that could potentially save you a lot of money.
• Custom DKIM is provided on all plans.
• It provides good tools for complying with GDPR.
• 24/7 support is included on all plans.
• You can try out all the Getresponse features free for 30 days without the need to enter credit card details.

FREE TRIAL OF GETRESPONSE

Cons of using Getresponse

• The current email creator is clunky and buggy (I’d use the new version, available in BETA, wherever possible).
• The drag-and-drop interface for designing emails and landing pages is fiddly and needs improvement.
• Although a fix is forthcoming soon, some e-newsletters created in Getresponse are not currently displaying as they should in the Gmail mobile app.
• The new version of the email creator does not yet allow you to design emails that can be used in autoresponders or automated workflows.
• The data capture forms provided are not responsive.
• CRM functionality needs to be improved considerably before it can be considered a replacement for a standalone CRM product.
• There’s no 2-factor authentication at login.
• No phone support is provided.

A free trial of Getresponse is available here.

Alternatives to Getresponse

There are a lot of alternatives to Getresponse available — key competitors include Aweber, Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor.

Aweber is probably the most basic tool of the three mentioned above, but it is a solid and reliable offering. Its key advantage over Getresponse is that comes with phone support.

With the exception of webinars, Mailchimp offers a broadly similar feature set to Getresponse — the main advantage it offers over Getresponse is that it tends to integrate more easily with other services, and its e-newsletter templates (currently) behave better than Getresponse ones in the Gmail mobile app. Check out our Getresponse vs Mailchimp post for a full comparison of the two tools.

Campaign Monitor is a very expensive option, but it does come with some lovely templates and a super user-friendly interface. It’s not as fully featured as Getresponse however. Check out our Campaign Monitor review for more details.