While GetResponse is very attractive thanks to its low price and extra features, it still doesn't beat Campaigner and MailChimp, the PCMag Editors' Choice award winners for advanced and basic email marketing tools, respectively. We like that Campaigner has 24/7 phone support and MailChimp offers a generous free plan.
Pricing and Features
Since email marketing pricing varies wildly, we calculated how much it would cost a small business with 2,500 contacts in its marketing database to sign up for each service we reviewed. GetResponse's price tag is $25 per month, one of the lower prices we've 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.GetResponse offers a variety of plans. The least expensive is the $15 per month email option, which lets you contact up to 1,000 subscribers. It 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 Pro plan, which starts at $49 per month for 5,000 subscribers and adds an unlimited webinars feature, unlimited landing pages, and advanced marketing automation, is its most popular plan. There are specialized enterprise and nonprofit plans available, too. GetResponse doesn't offer refunds for canceled accounts, so it's worth at least starting out month to month until you decide if the service suits you.
Since we last looked at GetResponse, the company has added Salesforce integration for customer relationship management (CRM) and the ability to run webinars in order to collect leads. It also now supports multiple users on an account should you need logins for employees or freelancers, or should you need to do email marketing for multiple clients. The first five user accounts are $20 per month; 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.
Sign-up is simple. You just provide your email address and name and GetResponse sends you an activation email. Once you click the verification link, you continue registration, providing your mobile phone number so you can receive a verification code by text. The last time we reviewed GetResponse, we never received the text verification, even after three attempts and eventually having to contact support (which assisted us via chat). This time, we received the text in seconds on the first try. Get more GetResponse coupon codes
Creating a Subscriber List
GetResponse offers several ways to build a subscriber list. 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. If you choose to import your list, then you can run it through a partner service called BriteVerify, which can weed out invalid email addresses. GetResponse customers get a 10-percent discount.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. In our test, it correctly mapped first names but not last names. We had to create a custom field for last names since it showed that the last name field was already in use. We later received a message that our list had been rejected due to problematic email addresses. This made sense since we'd generated several disposable addresses using Mailinator.
When using Google contacts to import, the fields for first name, last name, full name, and email were matched up. It also pulled in two phone number fields that needed to be mapped. However, we opted not to import them.
Once you've 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. Other features include online shopping cart tools such as cart abandonment.
GetResponse has a tool 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.
Setting Up a GetResponse Campaign
The service offers two tools for creating campaigns: an Email Creator Tool with templates and an HTML tool. The latter is useful for those 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. The templates could use a refresh as many are rather busy and look slightly dated compared to the clean designs you'll see on Emma as well as Campaigner and MailChimp, our Editors' Choice picks in this category.
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. 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.
You can send the newsletter right away, schedule it for a later time, or even use Time Travel 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 during that time. The company says this can result in a 23-percent increase in open rates and a 20-percent increase in click rates.
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've 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 timeframe. 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. However, we had to consult the Help section to figure out that last one. Turns out, there's an action button towards the bottom left-hand side of the results screen, and one of the options is Save Search. 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.
Tracking a Campaign
We like that you can 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 in order to update the report.In general, it updated within a few minutes of our opening or clicking on an email. You can also get reports delivered to your inbox, which is convenient. The last time we tested GetResponse, we weren't able to view subscriber information but, this time, it was easy to find contact details, a history of campaigns they received, and whether they opened or clicked on them. Campaigner also offers this option, which can help you target future emails and specific customers and customer segments.
Solid Marketing Automation
GetResponse delivers a marketing automation suite that's near the top of the class. Automation workflows are based on three elements: Conditions, Actions, 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 in order to take receipients back and forth between different workflow stages, depending on how quickly they accomplish your pre-set workflow goals.
Like Pardot and HubSpot, our Editors' Choices for marketing automation, 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 in order to label contacts who have dropped off or navigated through different stages of a workflow. This lets you move contact files 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, if you run a promotion that rewards the first 200 subscribers, 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 in order to add website vistors to workflows. This common, but not universal feature, allows marketers to see if someone bought a product, added to cart, or visited a specific URL.
GetResponse doesn't limit the number of actions and conditions you can add. However, you can only add six filters to each condition, which is somewhat limiting compared to what you'll find in Pardot or HubSpot. Unfortunately, you can't create messages within a workflow so you'll have to save email messages ahead of time and then go into the workflow and add the messages to the chain. This is time consuming and annoying, and we expect GetResponse to update this in its next major revamp. GetResponse doesn't offer any workflow templates, which is another issue, especially for automation newbies and marketers who don't want to waste time building out basic nurturing campaigns and birthday-related customer win-backs. GetResponse doesn't offer A/B testing, social media automation, or search marketing-related research. The company hasn't built Android and iOS apps, so all of your work will have to be done on a desktop operating system (OS).
Recent Updates
Since we initially reviewed GetResponse, the company updated its main dashboard to provide a more intuitive and fully customizable experience. The dashboard is comprised of seven navigation tabs, as well as customizable widgets that determine what data is shown on the home screen. Widgets can be added from the widget library, and they can be moved from location to location on the home screen depending on your preferences.Additionally, GetResponse launched a basic customer relationship management (CRM) feature that allows for a customizable, drag-and-drop sales pipeline overview. Users can monitor deals and stages as well as add notes and reminders to other team members.
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