GetResponse Review: A Robust All-In-One Marketing Platform
We’re drowning in a sea of email marketing and marketing automation tools, all of which do the same thing as the other.
However, one of the names that get floated around when talking about email marketing software is GetResponse.
It’s one of those tools that has been around since forever but continues to deliver the goods year in and out.
In this GetResponse review, we’ll try to break down the tool into its features and discuss its main strengths and weaknesses.
In the end, you should be able to determine if GetResponse is powerful enough to use for your business.
What is Getresponse?
In recent years however, Getresponse has shifted its emphasis considerably: the product now aims 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.
Since then, GetResponse has been expanding its features and growing its team globally. The tool has also attracted praise from publications like Website Magazine which awarded GetResponse as the second-best email marketing provider in 2011.
But fast forward to now, with much stiffer competition chock full of bells and whistles to the delight of users, how has GetResponse managed to stay on top of its game?
Its constant growth and ability to change with the times is one of GetResponse’s best qualities. It hasn’t rested on its laurels as it continues to provide users with the best email marketing features to help them grow their business.
Instead of gushing about how good GetResponse is, it’s best to get deep in the weeds and check out the tool in action.
Below are its main features and how each of them works in unison to help make an impact with your
Email marketing
Its flagship service remains one of the finest in the industry.
Building beautiful emails your subscribers will want to open is made easy using GetResponse.
It works like a barter system. You offer comments on someone else’s website and in return, you’ll get credits for it. With these credits, you can request comments for specific posts and pages on your site.
It is a win-win for everyone. Not only can you pick up ideas from other sites and learn from it but also your website becomes more engaging and comes to life. Real people leaving a comment, asking questions and that will help you getting better results in Google as well.
SiteFeedback
The SiteFeedback feature works just like the SiteComent feature. You offer feedback, receive credits, and then you can request feedback for your site.
The difference is that the feedback is not visible to the public and serves a different purpose. The feedback is all about your website in general e.g. is the site easy to navigate, is the content easy to read, are the links working and so on.
The feedback should help you making improvements to your site. It’s about creating a user-friendly website which will assist with rankings in the Search Engines.
Overall, these three features are unique and will help you a) creating a better site and b) improve your ranking in the Search engines.
It all starts with choosing from its predesigned templates.
Instead of creating a design from scratch, just select which template you’d like to use for your email campaign. You can preview the template first and see if it matches the appearance and feel you’re looking for in your email.
To help you make searching for the right template much easier, show only templates from the category that fits your needs best.
From here, click on the blocks and sections you want to edit.
Its WYSIWYG editor lets you make changes on the page as your subscribers will see it once you’re done editing it.
You can also make design changes on each block or section by tweaking its settings. Even if you don’t have any design skills, changing the color or resizing the font size is easy with just a few clicks.
You can even drag and drop blocks and sections you want to add to the template to further personalize it.
There’s also an Ecommerce section in the email editor where you can add the Product box and Recommended products blocks. However, you can only use these if you set up your store on GetResponse.
If you want to use the same email design on your other campaigns, you can save the current one as a template. You can then access your custom design in the Design and Content section (just click on the My templates tab) for future use.
Once you’re done with the design and figuring out who will receive the email, you need to schedule when the email will be sent to them.
You can send it immediately or set the time for your recipients to see them.
Better yet, enable Perfect timing to ensure that subscribers will receive the email at the best time based on when they opened previous emails from you.
Autoresponders
Now, let’s say you want to create an email or a series of emails to be sent to a group of subscribers automatically. Since it’s impossible to manually send the emails one by one, GetResponse makes this more convenient to you via its Autoresponders feature.
Create the first autoresponder by configuring when the email will be sent to a subscriber of your list.
For example, you can use autoresponders to greet new subscribers by sending them a welcome email and links to pages on your site they need to visit to get them acquainted with your business.
Once you’ve determined the autoresponder’s schedule, you can design the email and publish it the same way as shown above.
While sending autoresponders is a great way to onboard new subscribers, this feature becomes much better when coupled with the marketing automation feature, which we will tackle shortly.
But just to give you an idea, you can automate your sales and engagement by setting up multiple autoresponders to create a drip-feed campaign!
Email analytics
To ensure the success of your email campaign, you must know how your subscribers received it.
Even if you felt you created the best email campaign out there, there’s a chance that all your subscribers don’t share the same sentiment.
If anything, you need to understand how your campaign fared with your subscribers for you to understand what you did right and/or wrong and help you improve upon your next campaign.
To do this, review the campaign’s analytics to see the different metrics that determine its overall performance.
From the dashboard, you will see the overview of how your list responded to one of your email campaigns.
It shows you how many of the emails you sent were delivered to your subscribers, as well as the campaign’s open and click-through rates.
Digging deeper, you can see more information about the campaign like the bounce and unsubscribe rates, as well as the number of complaints it got.
List management
GetResponse’s list management capabilities are superb. You can use custom filters to save segments of contacts with similar characteristics (e.g. based on contact field data, email engagement, or lead scores). Through automations, you’ve got the ability to add tags, and even automate list management rules. There’s also a section dedicated to list hygiene, allowing you to create rules for deleting and blacklisting contacts.
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.
GetResponse’s List Management feature helps you achieve this by first segmenting and adding conditions to your subscribers.
For example, you can segment groups of people who signed up using a different form with a specific message on your site (more on this later).
Try get response for free
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.
In some ways, this is a good thing, as it lets you hide bits of your landing page that you don’t want mobile users to see. But doing so involves a rather fiddly process.
And finally, although you can use analytics cookies on your Getresponse landing page, for example via the Facebook pixel, it’s impossible to do so in a GDPR-compliant way.
In order to meet the EU’s GDPR requirements on cookies (and some US data protection laws), you need to give users a clear mechanism to opt in or out of cookie use. Getresponse doesn’t let you do this — the best you’ll get is the option to notify users that cookies are being run on a landing page.
So in essence, many Getresponse users (especially EU ones) will end up breaking the law if they add their Facebook pixel to a Getresponse landing page. This is far from ideal and it’s a situation that Getresponse should address urgently.
So the landing page is a potentially great feature — but it is let down a bit by the interface and particularly by the lack of a proper cookie consent banner.
Registration Forms/ Opt-in & Opt-out- Process
Fairly easy to use, with many templates available, or the ability to create your own. There are several types of integration available: you can embed on your site or host the form on GetResponse. Options to edit thank you pages and the backend (e.g. which lists to add subscribers to) are a little hidden, though.
GetResponse’s deliverability leaves room for improvement. If you are looking for a solid tool and a better performer, ActiveCampaign would be a better choice.
Thorough reports, with geo-tracking available and desktop vs. mobile. You can also see which clients were used, as well as when people clicked and opened emails in a chart view. You can get all the details of the openers and clickers, as well as Google Analytics integration, and conversion/ecommerce tracking. There’s even an option to compare the performance of different campaigns; however, there is no heatmap available.
Located within their ‘list hygiene’ section. Hard bounces are removed immediately from your lists, while soft bounces are removed after four unsuccessful attempts.
Located within their ‘list hygiene’ section. Hard bounces are removed immediately from your lists, while soft bounces are removed after four unsuccessful attempts.
The ‘Essential’ plan allows up to 3 users, while the ‘Professional’ plan allows up to 5. On top of this, you can buy multi-user add-ons for $20 per month, adding another 5 users. There’s no specific access levels, but you can define specific access areas for each user.
The landing page editor is part of the Conversion Funnel feature, where you can also set up your advertising and social media campaigns, web forms, webinars, and ecommerce, and track your conversions.
There are over 180 landing page templates, and A/B testing and responsive design are also available. Unlimited landing pages are available on all of the plans, though other funnel features are limited to the Plus plan and above.
GetResponse is a very powerful, versatile and user-friendly newsletter tool. It’s also good value for the amount of features available. Deliverability could be better, though.
GetResponse really came through with the goods, managing to provide both the features and ease-of-use that most other newsletter tools fall short of. We also noted the great automation mechanisms for list management, as well as its flexible and intuitive automation workflows..
While the editor can be a little fiddly when performing certain tasks, their templates are responsive and good enough to create something useful. There’s even an app for iOS and Android that allows you not only to track, but also to send newsletters on the go.
With its long list of powerful features like landing pages and even webinars, and now with their new Autofunnel feature, GetResponse is certainly doing quite a few things right. While it would be great to see an uplift in deliverability rates, GetResponse scores extremely well in most other areas. As an email marketing tool, it’s definitely versatile enough to perform almost everything you’d need. We certainly found this to be true in our case for EmailToolTester’s own email campaigns, and it’s a tool we’d have few reservations about recommending to others.
