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Getresponse Review (2021)

In this in-depth Getresponse review, I take a look at a well-known email marketing solution and drill down into its pros and cons. Is it right for your business?

What is Getresponse?

Getresponse is an email marketing app that allows you to:

create a mailing list and capture data onto it

send emails to the subscribers on your mailing list

automate your emails to subscribers via use of ‘autoresponders’

view and analyse statistics related to your email campaigns – open rate, click through, forwards etc.

In recent years however, Getresponse has shifted its emphasis considerably: the product now aims to be more of an ‘all-in-one’ e-commerce and marketing solution rather than just an email marketing tool.

Accordingly, in addition to email marketing, Getresponse now also provides e-commerce features, webinar hosting, landing pages and automated sales funnels.

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

Whilst this user base is not as big as those for some other email marketing tools (notably Mailchimp), it is large enough to provide confidence that the company is well-established and is not likely to disappear any time soon.

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

Max — negotiable.

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 to use Getresponse with a list containing 100,000 subscribers on the ‘Basic’, ‘Plus’ and ‘Professional’ plans (respectively). 

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

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

In addition to the paid plans, a 30-day free trial is also available, which you can access via this link

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 entry level 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.

As you go up the pricing ladder, Getresponse remains competitively priced.

If you have a contact list containing between 9,000 and 10,000 records, hosting it on the ‘Basic’ Getresponse plan costs $65 per month.

This works out:

$4 per month cheaper than Aweber

$34 per month cheaper than Mailchimp (Standard Plan)

Key Getresponse features

By comparison with other email marketing tools, Getresponse comes with an unusually large feature set — even on its entry-level plan.

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.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your subscribers at intervals of your choosing.

For example, 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 tools

In addition to basic the ‘drip’ style autoresponders mentioned above, Getresponse provides a more sophisticated option for sequencing emails automatically. This is called ‘Marketing Automation,’ and is available on Plus’ plans or higher.

This feature 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.

Getresponse email templates

There are 220 Getresponse templates available — less than some competing email marketing solutions (notably Aweber, which offers around 700) — but they are varied in nature and the designs are very contemporary (and tweakable).

The email templates are grouped into a few categories focussed around core goals (promoting, educating, selling etc.).

The quality of all the templates is high and I’d have no reservations about using them for my email campaigns.

There is one thing I’d like to see introduced however: the ability to set ‘global’ styles for headings and text. As things stand, the template editor doesn’t let you define heading and paragraph styles that you can re-use throughout a message — this means more formatting of text as you compose emails, which is a bit of a pain.

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

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 an information-packed 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 too).

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. This can have a massively positive effect on the number of leads you capture and improve the reach of your email campaign.

Similar products often require you to make use of a third-party landing page creating tool like Unbounce or Instapage to attain this sort of functionality, so the inclusion of the landing page feature is a really useful — and cost-saving — piece of functionality to have in your email marketing toolbox.

Crucially, Getresponse’s landing functionality is available on all plans. Given that leading landing page tools Unbounce and Instapage cost a minimum of $80 and $199 per month respectively, there are considerable savings to be made here.

The landing pages you create can be hooked up to a wide range of analytics tools and cookies, such as Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Kissmetrics and your Facebook pixel.

And there’s 180 landing page templates to choose from — as with Getresponse’s email templates, these are very professional and contemporary in appearance (particularly the more recently-introduced ones).

There are a couple of problems with the landing page creator however that need to be flagged up.

First, the interface is not particularly intuitive — in fact, it’s pretty clunky.

Second, you’ll usually need to create separate versions of your landing pages for desktop and mobile.

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:

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 in a Getresponse email campaign 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.

Customer 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 (unless you’re on the enterprise level “Max” plan). Instead you’ll have to use live chat (24/7) or email support.

Getresponse review conclusion

Overall, Getresponse represents one of the more cost-effective ways to host and communicate with an email database. It’s priced competitively in its marketplace, and is also one of the more interesting products of its kind, in that it provides email marketing, automation, landing pages, e-commerce, sales funnels and webinars all in one place. 

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