Description of Getresponse Email Marketing Software For Gmail

Getresponse is primarily an email marketing program that allows you to: Email Marketing Software For Gmail

Import and host a mailing list and catch data on it

generate newsletters that can be delivered to the subscribers in your mailing list

automate your mails to subscribers via utilization of’autoresponders’

perspective and analyse statistics linked to your email marketing campaigns — open rate, click through, forwards etc..

Lately however, Getresponse’s feature set has developed quite a bit, to the point at which it is becoming more of an’all-purpose’ marketing solution.

In addition to email advertising, it also provides webinar hosting, landing pages, and a few CRM (customer relationship management) performance.

We are going to discuss all these features in depth below, but first, let us look at pricing.

Primary Capabilities

Getresponse’s attribute set is arguably among the most comprehensive on the market.

Not only does this provide all the crucial stuff you would expect from an email marketing platform – list hosting, templates, autoresponders, analytics and so forth, but as mentioned above, it’s been expanding the feature set to the point where it is morphing into an all-in-one / CRM-style advertising and marketing platform.

The question is if Getresponse is a jack of all trades and master of none – let us drill down to the crucial qualities to find out.

Customer Support

Up until quite recently Getresponse support was one of the most comprehensive available for email advertising tools: the firm offered phone support together with live chat support, email service and various online tutorials / resources.

Sadly, the phone service has been discontinued. Instead you are going to have to use live chat (24/7) or email service. To be fair, many similar e-marketing platform providers only offer you both of these channels – if telephone support is a deal-breaker for you you might want to consider Aweber, which nonetheless provides it (you can read our Aweber review ).

Concerning the caliber of Getresponse support, I have never needed to use it very often (a fantastic thing) but when I’ve I have found it for a small mixed bag (less of a fantastic thing). A number of the live chat service I have received has been outstanding, and I haven’t needed to wait too long to chat with a broker; the email service .

Some of the comments I’ve got from our readers will indicate that there do need to be improvements made concerning the caliber of service Getresponse offer. Much like a number of these kinds of businesses, I anticipate it boils down to that you get on the day. Email Marketing Software For Gmail

Click here to begin your free trial of Getresponse.

Analytics

Getresponse offers some very comprehensive reporting and analytics choices. You get all the Fundamentals of track – open rate, click-through, unsubscribe Prices and so forth – but also to that you will find some very nifty features that are worth a particular mention, specifically:

‘one-click segmentation’: the choice to spot individuals who didn’t engage with an e-newsletter that you shipped and put them in a segment of readers which you can then email again with a different version of the e-newsletter

‘metrics over time’: you can find out exactly when a lot of your subscribers do it in your mails, and period your future mailouts according to this info

’email ROI’: by adding some tracking code to your post-sales webpage on your site, it is possible to find out how efficiently (or not!) Your email campaigns are driving sales, and work out your return on investment in electronic mail advertising.

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 have opened previously.

Mailchimp and Aweber offer some similar reporting performance (especially around sales tracking) however Getresponse’s reporting application is decidedly one of most featured on the market (it surely trounces the stats choices offered by Mad Mimi and Campaign Monitor).

Templates

Thus far so good with Getresponse, but in regards to templates, Getresponse arguably drops down a bit.

Unfortunately, the templates provided out of the box look a bit dated; they are not as attractive as the ones provided by Mailchimp or even Campaign Monitor (and that I slightly prefer Aweber’s offering here also ).

On the plus side, the templates are extremely tweakable – you can change fonts, designs and imagery easily enough with all the controls supplied; and of course there is nothing to stop you simply designing your own HTML email template and minding the code for it.

Furthermore, there are a lot of templates to choose from — around 500 — and they’re presented in easy-to-understand categories, therefore it’s generally pretty simple to find a good beginning point for a template and edit it until you’re happy with the plan.

If you are really not pleased with the templates offered by Getresponse, there’s also the choice of buying a template by a third party supplier such as Theme Forest.

Another thing worth pointing out regarding Getresponse’s templates is the assortment of RSS-to-email applications options aren’t so extensive (just 11 templates are supplied – well short of their 700+ available for regular newsletters!) And a few of them played up a bit for me when I tested them in Outlook (2010). I finally found something that worked for me, but I think there are definitely a few improvements which could be created in this region. Email Marketing Software For Gmail

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your readers at intervals depending on you — you can put them up so that immediately after someone signals up to your mailing list, they get a welcome message from the company; a week after they could receive a discount deal for some of your goods or services; three weeks later they could obtain an encouragement to accompany you on social networking. And so on.

Getresponse’s autoresponder functionality is a key selling point – it offers one of the most extensive feature sets available.

You can send either time-based or action-based messages; time-based choices comprise cycles like the illustration above, and action-based messages may be triggered by user actions or advice, for example:

Opens

clicks

subscriptions to certain lists

changes in contact preferences

completed transactions / goals

birthdays

changes in consumer information

Recently Getresponse launched a new version of their new autoresponder functionality, called’Marketing Automation.’

This allows you to create automation workflows with a drag and drop builder – you basically install an’automation flowchart’ that educates Getresponse what to do when a user opens a specific deal, clicks on a specific link .

This kind of functionality goes way beyond what’s traditionally been on offer from autoresponders, and lets you make a user journey which can be customised to the nth level.

For a quick overview I would suggest having a look in Getresponse’s video review for Marketing Automation.

It is important to notice, however, these more advanced marketing automation features are only available on the pricier programs – the’Pro’ program and upward. Email Marketing Software For Gmail

Landing page Builder

Online advertising campaigns which make use of landing pages will typically generate far more leads if, rather than simply directing individuals to a (cluttered!) Site, they tip users to attractive’squeeze pages’ containing clear information and a tidy, well-designed data capture type.

Getresponse offers something very useful in this respect that the majority of its rivals do not: a landing page creator (and one that is mobile-friendly to boot).

Products like Campaign Monitor and Aweber ask you to make use of a third party (and non invasive ) landing page generating tool like Unbounce or Instapage; Mailchimp recently introduced a landing page functionality but it’s yet to become sophisticated at Getresponse’s.

But unless you’re on a Getresponse’Pro’,’Max’ or’Enterprise’ plan, the Getresponse landing page functionality is fairly limited: you can just produce 1 landing page, that can simply be displayed 1,000 times a month.

Additionally, and above all, you can not use the landing page A/B testing functionality on the least expensive Getresponse program (where the system shows a sample of your customers different versions of your landing page, computes conversion rates, and finally rolls out the best performing landing page automatically).

If you are serious about landing pages – and they are unquestionably a helpful attribute – then it’s definitely worth considering among the more expensive Getresponse plans.

You can buy the Landing Pages feature as an add-on to get an additional $15 a month, but quite frustratingly, even though the add-on permits you to display an unlimited number of landing pages to potential subscribers, it doesn’t consist of A/B testing.

Accordingly, if I was interested in the Getresponse landing page performance, I would not bother with this fairly half-baked add-on: I would just go for a few of the pricier programs (which I guess is exactly what Getresponse want one to do) .

Mobile-Responsive Design

Getresponse was ahead of its rivals for quite a while using its responsive email layout performance, which automatically corrects your e-newsletter’s template so that if an individual is reading it on a mobile device, the layout and fonts will be optimized for the device in question.

Most competing products have caught up on this today, and extend responsive email templates, but Getresponse is better than many similar products when it comes to displaying a responsive preview of your e-newsletter – you just hit a’cellphone preview’ button for a quick snapshot of your email looks like on a smartphone (see image right).

Not just this but you can’reverse’ the smartphone trailer around, so that you can preview what your own email looks like when the display is used in either portrait or landscape style. Email Marketing Software For Gmail

Customer Relationship Management

One of the most frustrating aspects of using many famous CRM tools is the need to export data to CSV and back to your email marketing tool as a way to do mailouts (or the need to export info from the email marketing tool in your CRM to include prospects to it).

So when I watched Getresponse lately introducing a new CRM feature in their plans I was intrigued – this could potentially do away with all that info exporting and importing, and keep everything neatly in 1 place.

Initially I wasn’t that impressed with the Getresponse CRM tool since you could only use it to carry out quite basic tasks: you can create sales pipelines, add contacts to them and monitor activity (mails, telephone 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 operation and you can add users to a CRM pipeline based on their action (form completions, email opens, purchases etc.) or trigger autoresponders depending on the addition of a new contact to a pipeline phase.

An example of how to use this operation would be as follows:

It is possible to add a contact to a particular stage on a sales pipeline based on the page of your site they finished a form on;

you could then send a automated email tailored to that pipeline stage a couple of days afterwards;

and dependent on the actions they took with regard to that email (clicking on a particular link ) you could automatically move them onto another stage of the pipeline and invite invite them to a webinar.

It’s very smart stuff, and I can not think of any similar email marketing product offering this kind of tight integration between autoresponders and CRM pipelines. For this type of functionality you normally must appear at dedicated — and more costly — CRM products like Salesforce and Infusionsoft.

However, it’s not all fantastic news about the CRM front — there are some big things missing out of Getresponse’s CRM feature set.

The most glaring omission is email activity tracking. Additional CRM packages permit you to bcc a dropbox email address whenever you send an email to a lead or customer; doing so keeps a list of the communication from the contact’s history. There is now no way of doing this together with the Getresponse CRM, nor is there an easy way to send one-to-one mails to prospects or clients.

And strangely, when you click a contact in a bargain pipeline, you can not see their contact action — i.e., the activities they’ve taken (open, clicks etc.) with regard to previous communications that you have delivered to your prospects aren’t displayed. To observe this, you have to go from the CRM part of Getresponse, hunt for your own contact in the contacts section and click on their details. But guess what? Doing this does not display their deal history.

Task management is non-existent too: unlike committed CRM tools, there is no way to assign tasks to other group members.

Finally, adding contacts into your pipeline stage is difficult. You have to add contacts to a list , then go to the CRM pipeline, add a deal and search your lists for the contact you just added. From a usability standpoint this is extremely clunky and time consuming. You should just be able to put in a bargain right to a pipeline and then enter the contact information of your guide or client at the point.

So as things stand, the Getresponse CRM is somewhat half-baked. But that said, it’s a new feature and the stuff it could perform on the automation aspect is impressive. I’m optimistic that this feature gets developed over time because done right, it is potentially a game-changer for entrepreneurs and SMEs.

Webcasts

Getresponse recently introduced the ability to host webinars on the platform.

Given that webinars are generally used as a lead-generation strategy, the idea of having your email database along with your webinar tool under the same roof is extremely attractive.

The pricing is also very aggressive too by comparison to established webinar solutions. By way of instance, among the primary webinar providers, Gotowebinar, charges $199 a month to sponsor webinars with as much as 500 attendees; you can really do exactly the same (plus a whole lot more) with Getresponse for $165 (as long as your listing size is below 25,000).

With regard to attendee limits, the Getresponse’Guru’ plan allows you to sponsor a webinar with up to 100 participants; the’Max’ plan’s cap is 500.

You can also buy webinars performance as an add-on to a cheaper plan: $40 per month buys you a 100 attendees limitation, $99 a month buys you a 500 attendees restrict. It’s not clear what your options are if you need to host larger scale distributions compared to that however.

A couple of Getresponse webinar features worth flagging up as being especially useful are:

The very fact Your attendees don’t have to install any software to attend the webinars

one-click list of your webinars

screensharing performance

free online storage for playback documents

Ultimately webinar performance is potentially an extremely useful feature to have sitting on your e-marketing arsenal and its inclusion as a characteristic provides Getresponse a very significant edge over its key rivals, especially when you consider that you can link it in using a built in CRM tool (more on that in a moment). Email Marketing Software For Gmail

Email Deliverability

The email deliverability rate – the proportion of e-newsletters sent that successfully reach inboxes – is obviously an important thing to check at when choosing an email marketing tool.

Not all email marketing providers are that forthright about their deliverability prices; but Getresponse seems pretty open about this, with this to say about it in their site:

At GetResponse we are often asked about the quality of the deliverability speed. Since deliverability is dependent upon many factors, including the content of your messages, the deliverability rate could vary for every mailing. For all our clients collectively, nevertheless, we are pleased to say our overall deliverability rate now stands at 99%.

Obviously you are going to have to choose the organization’s term for this, but supposing it is true, it’s a good rate and inspires confidence that the vast majority of emails that you send using Getresponse will reach their receivers.

Furthermore, Getresponse actually gives you the deliverability rate of every message on your email analytics – that is something I have not struck on competing goods’ metrics. A thumbs up for it.

I really do need to pull Getresponse up on one thing relating to deliverability however: to guarantee a high deliverability speed, it’s a good idea to use a system named DKIM email authentication. You are able to use DKIM with Getresponse – but just on the costlier Getresponse’Max’ programs.

Though I have not encountered any deliverability difficulties utilizing the less costly plans, competing products do not make you invest in a more expensive strategy to avail of the feature — it’d be useful to see Getresponse becoming more generous here.

Click here to start your free trial of Getresponse.

Email Opt-in

There are two approaches you can employ to add subscribers to a mailing list: having a’single opt-in’ or even a’double click’ process.

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

Using a double opt-in procedure, the individual registering to your record is sent via an email containing a confirmation link that s/he have to click before being subscribed.

The main benefit of one sampling procedure is that it makes it really easy for users to sign up for a mailing list; additionally, it generally increases conversion speed and so the number of subscribers on your record. A double opt-in procedure is best for verifying that the folks subscribing to a record are using actual email addresses and contributes to cleaner information and more accurate stats (because receptive rates etc. are calculated according to a list containing just email addresses).

The good news is that Getresponse permits you to make use of either opt-in approach – this is not true with all competing goods. Thus a thumbs up for Getresponse to be flexible on this.

Collecting Data

There are two ways to use types in Getresponse – you can either add a HTML form which you style yourself, or you can style your kind in Getresponse (choosing from an adequate range of templates and tweaking them to suit your site design). If you go for the latter path, you may add the form to your website using a snippet of code which runs a few Javascript to display your type — which can be presented in a range of different formats (for example inline, pop-up or slide-up).

You’re probably thinking that this sounds quite fine — but to tell the truth, I think there is a lot of room for advancement with respect to Getresponse kind templates.

To begin with, they are not responsive (i.e., they won’t resize themselves automatically to suit the device they’re being viewed on).

Additionally, no controls are provided by Getresponse to change forms on or off on particular devices or pages of your site. At the light of Google’s new approach to pop-ups (where sites can take a hit in search results if they display’intrusive interstitials’ on cellular devices) this is a bit of a concern.

To circumvent this, I generally avoid using Getresponse form templates, and make do with HTML embeded forms which I design myself, and also for popups I connect my Getresponse into some growth-hacking instrument named Sumo (this allows me to switch pop-ups off for cellular users, as well as display forms exactly as I’d like to and on the pages I want). Email Marketing Software For Gmail

UI Expertise

Overall, Getresponse is pretty straightforward to use. It’s certainly easy enough to do all of the basics: import contacts, create campaigns, set up autoresponders and check statistics and the interface is really intuitive and clean.

In terms of how it stacks up against its rivals in this respect, I’d argue that Campaign Monitor is a little bit more user friendly, and Mailchimp has a slicker user interface (though one which makes locating certain performance a little bit tricky at times).

1 area I feel that might be significantly better from a user-friendliness standpoint is that the Getresponse e-newsletter editor.

Whilst its drag-and-drop strategy does in theory provide an extremely flexible approach to make blocks of articles and move them around an e-newsletter, in practice it’s fairly user friendly to use and can cause 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 little bit, it will make for a helpful instrument – it’s just that the execution of it could be somewhat better.

Also, as explained above, the CRM instrument could be far better from a usability point of view — adding contacts to deals can be unnecessarily difficult.

Free Trial

The 30-day free trial which Getresponse supplies is completely functional and the free trial is not contingent upon providing credit card information.

This makes it possible to avoid that annoying”oops I forgot I signed up for that trial and now I’m getting charged for a product that I don’t use” scenario.

The only down side to this free trial is that it limits the number of readers it is possible to send to to 1000. It would be good if this could be raised a little, as it would help prospective users try out the tool in more’real-world’ situations.

Pricing

There are 3 chief sorts of Getresponse pricing strategy -‘Email’,’Guru’ and’Max’ — and within each of them, many additional kinds of plan to choose from (all based on record size).

As much as 1,000 contributors: $15 (‘Email’) / $49 (‘Pro’) / $165 (‘Max’)

1,001 to 2,500 subscribers: $25 (‘Email’) / $49 (‘Pro’) / $165 (‘Max’)

2,501 to 5,000 readers: $45 (‘Email’) / $49 (‘Guru’) / $165 (‘Max’)

5,001 to 10,000 readers: $65 (‘Email’)/ $75 (‘Pro’) / $165 (‘Max’)

10,001 to 25,000 readers: $145 (‘Email’) / $165 (‘Guru’) / $255 (‘Max’)

25,001 to 50,000 readers: $250 (‘Email’) / $280 (‘Pro’) / $370 (‘Max’)

50,001 to 100,000 readers: $450 (‘Email’) / $490 (‘Guru’) / $580 (‘Max’

Additionally there’s an”Enterprise” program for users whose lists transcend 100,000 email addresses: this starts at $1199, with accurate pricing based on prerequisites (if you’re considering the”Enterprise” plan, you will need to contact Getresponse to schedule a demo, outline your requirements and discuss pricing).

Substantial discounts are available if you pay upfront for 12 or 24 weeks of support (18% and 30% respectively) — these are considerably more generous than many competing platforms. Email Marketing Software For Gmail

Distinctions of Each Strategy

All the Getresponse plans cover the important basics — key characteristics include:

The capacity to export, grow and host an email database

a wide range of templates

autoresponder functionality

responsive email designs

split testing

comprehensive reporting

RSS / blog to-email functionality

comprehensive segmentation options

social sharing tools

There are a number of differences between the’Email’,’Guru’ and’Max’ plans but for me the key ones are:

CRM – Getresponse provides a customer relationship manager tool on its’Pro’ plans up

landing pages – you can only avail of all landing pages which allow split testing and boundless views if you’re on a’Pro’ program or higher

Webinars – that functionality is not available at all around the’Email’ strategy and the number of webinar attendees is restricted for the’Pro’ and’Max’ plans at 100, 500 respectively (it is unclear what the limitation is on the’Enterprise’ program ).

Users – you can only have one user account on the’Email’ plan; by contrast you get 3 on’Guru’, 5 ‘Max’ and 10 on’Enterprise’.

Pricing Vs Competitors

Provided that you’re pleased to use one of those entry-level’Email’ programs, the pay-per-month Getresponse programs are on the whole more affordable than those provided by many of its key competitors, particularly in case you’ve got a fairly large number of email addresses on your own database.

By way of example, if you have a mailing list containing between 9,000 and 10,000 records that you wish to send an unlimited number of mails each month to, then you might find that hosting it using Getresponse prices $65 monthly.

That is:

$4 a month cheaper compared to Aweber

$10 cheaper per month than Mailchimp

$84 per month cheaper than Campaign Monitor*

Decision Campaign Monitor’s pricing structure is dependent not just the number of email addresses on your own database however on how many emails you send a month too. If you are happy to limit the number of emails sent via Campaign Monitor (in the example above, to 50k mails ), you can expect to pay a monthly charge of $89, nevertheless considerably higher than Getresponse’s.

The sole well-known service that I can think of that comes from significantly cheaper is Mad Mimi, which costs $42 a month to sponsor up to 10,000 email addresses (note however that the functionality provided by Mad Mimi is nowhere near as broad as Getresponse’s or really the other products mentioned above).

Additionally, it is worth pointing out that Mailchimp offers thinner pricing bands, meaning that based on the size of your listing, it may occasionally be a slightly cheaper alternative than Getresponse.

At the database end of things, Getresponse’s pricing is really competitive too – you can sponsor a database containing 1,000 email addresses for $15 per month with Getresponse, compared to $29 with Aweber; $59 on Campaign Monitor (unlimited send).

Mailchimp’s monthly fee to get a 1,000 record database is exactly the like Getresponse’s; and Mad Mimi provides a slightly cheaper, if much less functional offering for $12 per month.

Two final things to be aware of about the pricing front:

Some competing suppliers — especially Mailchimp – provide completely free accounts for users with a few records (but these don’t offer the entire assortment of features that you get on a paid program ).

As stated earlier, if you are ready to pay upfront for 1 or 2 decades, you can avail of substantial discounts that the other competitors don’t yet supply.

So the bottom line is that Getresponse is fairly competitive in the pricing department. However, what about features? Email Marketing Software For Gmail

Conclusion

Getresponse represents among the more cost-effective ways to host and speak using an email .

It is also among the most intriguing products of its kind – in that it provides email marketing, landing pages, CRM and webinars all under a single roof. It is hard to think of any competing product that offers this’all around’ proposition, and it is what proceeds to convince us to use it to Style Factory’s email advertising.

Some developments to Getresponse do have to be made nonetheless, especially where the email designer is concerned – its own drag and drop interface is more fiddly and not as responsive than it should be. A good deal of improvements could be made to the data capture types too, especially for users wishing to display them on mobile devices.

And from what I gather from reader opinions, there are improvements that could be made to the service offering.

All in all though I rate Getresponse very highly – you get considerable bang for your buck with this product.

Here are a few pros and cons of utilizing Getresponse overall:

Advantages of Getresponse

Excellent marketing automation options.

The CRM performance integrates neatly with Getresponse’s email automation operation.

Provided that you are pleased to utilize an’Email’ plan, Getresponse is cheaper than most of its key competitors (in certain cases, significantly so) whilst supplying just as much, or even more functionality as them.

The reductions you get when paying for a couple of decades of service are extremely generous – you will be hard pushed to find comparable reductions in prices from key competitors.

Its webinar functionality is a USP – something that is not offered by any products that are similar.

Its reporting and comprehensive split testing attributes are powerful.

Getresponse is clear about deliverability rates, publishing characters on its website and providing deliverability data for person e-newsletters that you send.

It provides a very flexible approach to information segmentation – more flexible than many competing products.

It allows you to add subscribers to your mailing list on either a single-opt in and a dual opt-in basis.

It sends responsive emails and allows you to preview smartphone versions of your e-newsletters really easily.

It includes a helpful landing page founder – but keep in mind you have to be on a more expensive plan to get the fully operational version of this.

You are able to try out all of its features free for 30 days without the need to enter credit card details.

Disadvantages of Getresponse

The drag and drop interface for designing emails can be a little bit on the fiddly side.

The data capture forms supplied are not responsive and you can’t control when and where they’re displayed on your website.

CRM performance has to be improved considerably before it could be thought of as a replacement for a standalone CRM product.

There is a limited selection of RSS-to-HTML e-newsletter templates supplied.

You can just use’web-safe’ fonts in e-newsletters, which may make the templates seem marginally less slick than those provided by competing products.

The pricing structure is a bit perplexing, with users having to pay something of a superior to get the landing page creator tool.

The free trial limits the amount of subscribers you’ll be able to send messages into 1000.

The landing page add-on doesn’t allow you to perform A/B tests, meaning that in order to gain this functionality you are forced to use a more expensive plan than you might like.

DKIM authentication is only available on the more expensive’Max’ plans.

No phone service is provided. Email Marketing Software For Gmail

Click here to begin your free trial of Getresponse.