Description of Getresponse What Is Email Marketing

Getresponse is primarily an email marketing program that allows you to: What Is Email Marketing

Import and host 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 utilization of’autoresponders’

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

Lately however, Getresponse’s attribute set has evolved quite a bit, to the point where it’s getting more of an’all-in-one’ marketing alternative.

Besides email advertising, it also supplies training hosting, landing pages, and a few CRM (client relationship management) performance.

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

Primary Features

Getresponse’s attribute set is arguably one of the most comprehensive out there.

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

The inquiry is if Getresponse is a jack of all trades and master of none – let’s drill down to the crucial qualities to learn.

Customer Support

Up until very recently Getresponse service was amongst the most comprehensive available for email advertising tools: the company offered phone support alongside live chat support, email support and assorted online tutorials / tools.

Regrettably, the telephone service has now been discontinued. Instead you’ll need to use live chat (24/7) or email support. To be fair, many similar e-marketing platform suppliers only offer these two stations – if phone service is a deal-breaker for you then you may want to consider Aweber, which still provides it (you can read our Aweber review here).

Concerning the caliber of Getresponse support, I have never needed to use it very frequently (a good thing) but once I have I have discovered it for a bit of a mixed bag (less of a good thing). Some of those live chat support I’ve received was outstanding, and I haven’t needed to wait too much time to chat with a broker; the email service .

Some of the comments I have from our readers does suggest that there do have to be improvements made concerning the quality of support Getresponse offer. As with a lot of these types of businesses, I anticipate it boils down to who you get daily. What Is Email Marketing

Click here to start your free trial of Getresponse.

Analytics

Getresponse provides some very comprehensive analytics and reporting choices. You get all the basics of track – open speed, click-through, unsubscribe Prices and so forth – but also to that there are some very nifty features that are worth a particular mention, namely:

‘one-click segmentation’: the option to identify people who didn’t engage with an e-newsletter that you sent and put them in a section of readers which you can then email again using a different version of the e-newsletter

‘metrics over time’: you can find out exactly when most of your subscribers do it on your mails, and time your future mailouts based on this information

’email ROI’: by incorporating some monitoring code into your post-sales webpage on your website, you can find out how effectively (or not!) Your email campaigns are driving earnings, and workout your return on investment in electronic mail marketing.

Per-user information – you can click one of your readers and see where they signed from, where they are found and which emails they’ve opened in the past.

Mailchimp and Aweber provide some comparable reporting performance (especially around sales tracking) however Getresponse’s reporting application is decidedly one of most fully featured out there (it certainly trounces the stats choices offered by Mad Mimi and Campaign Monitor).

Templates

Thus far so good with Getresponse, but when it comes to templates, Getresponse arguably drops down a little.

Unfortunately, the templates provided from the box seem somewhat dated; they are not as attractive as the ones offered by Mailchimp or even Campaign Monitor (and that I slightly prefer Aweber’s offering here also ).

On the other hand, the templates are very tweakable – you can change fonts, layouts and imagery easily enough using the controls supplied; and naturally there is nothing to prevent you designing your own HTML email template and importing the code for it.

Furthermore, there are tons of templates to choose from — over 500 — and they are presented in easy-to-understand categories, therefore it’s generally pretty straightforward to find a good starting point to get a template and then edit it until you are happy with the plan.

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

Another thing worth pointing out seeing Getresponse’s templates is that the assortment of RSS-to-email software options aren’t so extensive (only 11 templates are provided – well short of their 700+ available for routine 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 personally, but I think that there are definitely a few improvements that could be made in this region. What Is Email Marketing

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your readers at intervals determined by you — you can put them up so that immediately after somebody signals up to a mailing list, they get a welcome message from the company; a week after they could get a discount offer for a number of your goods or services; three months after they could obtain an encouragement to follow you on social media. And so Forth.

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

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

Unlocks

clicks

subscriptions to certain lists

changes connected tastes

finished transactions / targets

birthdays

changes in user data

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

This permits you to make automation workflows using a drag and drop builder – you essentially install an’automation flowchart’ that educates Getresponse what to do if a user opens a particular deal, clicks on a specific link etc..

This kind of performance goes way beyond what’s traditionally been available from autoresponders, and lets you make an individual journey that may be customised to the nth level.

For a quick overview I’d suggest taking a look in Getresponse’s video overview for Marketing Automation.

It is important to note, however, these more advanced marketing automation features are only available to the more expensive plans – the’Pro’ plan and up. What Is Email Marketing

Landing page Builder

Online advertising campaigns which make use of landing pages will usually generate far more leads in the event, rather than simply directing people to some (cluttered!) Site, they tip users to attractive’squeeze pages’ comprising clear info and a tidy, well-designed data capture form.

Getresponse offers something quite useful in this regard that the majority of its rivals don’t: a landing page creator (and one that is mobile-friendly to boot).

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

But unless you’re on a Getresponse’Guru’,’Max’ or’Enterprise’ program, the Getresponse landing page performance is fairly limited: you can just produce 1 landing page, which can only be displayed 1,000 times per month.

Additionally, and above all, you can’t use the landing page A/B testing performance on the least expensive Getresponse plan (whereby the machine indicates a sample of your users different versions of your landing page, calculates conversion speeds, and ultimately rolls out the top performing landing page automatically).

If you are serious about landing pages – and they’re certainly a useful attribute – then it is definitely worth considering among the costlier Getresponse plans.

You can purchase the Landing Pages feature as an add-on for an extra $15 per month, however quite frustratingly, although the add-on allows you to show an unlimited number of landing pages to potential subscribers, it doesn’t consist of A/B testing.

Accordingly, if I had been interested in the Getresponse landing page functionality, I wouldn’t bother with this rather half-baked add-on: I’d just go for one of the pricier programs (which I guess is what Getresponse want you to do) .

Mobile-Responsive Design

Getresponse was before its competitors for quite some time using its responsive email layout functionality, which automatically adjusts your e-newsletter’s template so that if a user is reading it onto 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 extend responsive email templates, but Getresponse is far better than many similar products when it comes to displaying a responsive preview of your e-newsletter – you just hit a’mobile preview’ button to get an instant snapshot of what your email resembles on a smartphone (see image right).

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

Customer Relationship Management

Among the most frustrating facets of using many well-known CRM tools is that the necessity to export data to CSV and straight back to your email marketing instrument as a way to perform mailouts (or the need to export data from your email marketing tool into your CRM to add prospects to it).

So when I watched Getresponse recently introducing a brand new CRM feature into their plans I was intrigued – that could potentially eliminate all that data exporting and exporting, and keep everything neatly in 1 place.

Initially I was not that impressed with the Getresponse CRM tool as you can only use it in order to perform rather basic jobs: you can create sales pipelines, add contacts to these and track activity (mails, phone calls etc.) with those contacts manually.

But lately Getresponse have upped their video game somewhat on this particular front. The CRM is now integrated with all Getresponse’s email marketing functionality and you can add users into a CRM pipeline according to their activity (form completions, email opens, purchases etc.) or trigger autoresponders based on the addition of a new contact into a pipeline stage.

An example of how to use this functionality is as follows:

It is possible to add a contact to a specific stage on a revenue pipeline based on the page of your website they completed a form ;

you can then send a automated email tailored to this pipeline stage a couple of days later;

and dependent on the action they took in regards to that email (clicking on a certain link ) you can automatically move them onto another stage of the pipeline and automatically invite them to a webinar.

It is very clever stuff, and I can’t think of any email advertising product offering this kind of tight integration between autoresponders and CRM pipelines. For this kind of functionality you normally need to look at dedicated — and more expensive — CRM products like Salesforce and Infusionsoft.

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

The most glaring omission is e mail activity monitoring. Other CRM packages permit you to bcc a dropbox email address whenever you send an email to some lead or client; doing this keeps a record of this communication from the contact’s history. There’s currently no way of doing so with the Getresponse CRM, nor is there an easy way to send one-to-one emails to leads or customers.

And oddly, when you click on a contact within a bargain pipeline, you can not see their contact activity — i.e., the actions they have taken (open, clicks etc.) in regards to previous communications which you have sent to your prospects aren’t displayed. To observe this, you have to go out of the CRM part of Getresponse, search for your own contact in the contacts section and click on their details. But guess what? Doing so does not display their history.

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

Eventually, adding contacts to your pipeline stage is tough. You need to add contacts to a list , then go to the CRM pipeline, add a deal and hunt your lists for the contact you just added. From a usability standpoint this is very clunky and time consuming. You should just have the ability to add a deal right to a pipeline and input the contact information of your guide or client at the point.

So as things stand, the Getresponse CRM is a bit half-baked. However, it’s a new feature and the things it can do on the automation side is impressive. I am optimistic that this feature becomes developed over time since done right, it is potentially a game-changer for entrepreneurs and SMEs.

Webcasts

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

Given that webinars are usually utilized as a lead-generation strategy, the notion of having your email database and your webinar tool under precisely the exact same roof is extremely appealing.

The pricing is also very aggressive too compared to established webinar solutions. For example, one of the leading webinar services, Gotowebinar, fees $199 per month to host webinars with up to 500 attendees; you can actually do exactly the same (plus a great deal more) with Getresponse for $165 (so long as your list size is below 25,000).

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

You might even purchase webinars performance as a add on to a more affordable plan: $40 a month buys you a 100 attendees limitation, $99 per month buys you a 500 attendees limit. It’s not clear what your options are if you need to host larger scale distributions compared to that however.

Two or Three Getresponse webinar features worth flagging up as being especially useful are:

The very fact Your attendees do not need to install any software to attend the webinars

one-click record of your webinars

screensharing functionality

free online storage for playback documents

Ultimately webinar functionality is potentially a very helpful feature to have sitting on your e-marketing arsenal and its addition as a feature gives Getresponse a very significant advantage over its key competitors, particularly when you consider you could link it in with a built-in CRM tool (more on this in a minute ). What Is Email Marketing

Email Deliverability

The email deliverability rate – the proportion of e-newsletters delivered that successfully hit inboxes – is always an important point to look at when choosing an email marketing instrument.

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

At GetResponse we’re often asked about the quality of our deliverability rate. Since deliverability is dependent upon many things, including the content of your messages, the deliverability rate could vary for each mailing. For our customers collectively, however, we’re pleased to say our general deliverability rate now stands at 99%.

Clearly you’re going to have to choose the company’s term for this, but assuming it is accurate, it is a good speed and inspires confidence that the vast majority of emails that you send using Getresponse will reach their intended recipients.

What’s more, Getresponse actually gives you the deliverability rate of every message on your email analytics – that is something that I have not encountered on competing goods’ metrics. A thumbs up for this.

I do have to pull Getresponse up on something relating to deliverability however: to ensure a high deliverability speed, it is advisable to use a platform named DKIM email authentication. You can use DKIM with Getresponse – but just on the more expensive Getresponse’Max’ plans.

Though I’ve not encountered any deliverability difficulties using the cheaper plans, competing goods don’t make you invest in a more expensive plan to avail of this feature — it would be useful to see Getresponse becoming more generous here.

Click here to begin your free trial of Getresponse.

Email Opt-in

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

If you utilize one opt-in process, the person registering to your mailing list is added to a mailing list the minute they hit the submit button on your sign up form.

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

The main advantage of one opt-in process is that it makes it very simple for users to sign up for a mailing list; it also generally increases conversion rate and so the amount of readers on your list. A dual opt-in process is best for verifying that the people subscribing to your list are using real email addresses and contributes to cleaner data and more accurate stats (because open rates etc. are calculated according to a list comprising just email addresses).

The good news is that Getresponse permits you to make use of either opt-in approach – this isn’t the case with all competing products. So a thumbs up for Getresponse for being flexible on this.

Collecting Data

There are two methods to use types in Getresponse – you can either add a HTML form which you design yourself, or you could design your form in Getresponse (choosing from an adequate range of templates and tweaking them to match your website design). If you like the latter route, you can add the form it to your site using a snippet of code that runs some Javascript to display your type — that 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 be honest, I think there is a lot of room for improvement with respect to Getresponse kind templates.

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

Additionally, no controls are offered by Getresponse to change forms off or on on particular devices or individual pages of your site. In the light of Google’s new approach to pop-ups (where websites can have a hit in search results if they display’intrusive interstitials’ on mobile devices) this really is a small concern.

To get around this, I generally avoid using Getresponse form templates, and make do using HTML embeded forms which I design myself, and also for popups I link my Getresponse into a growth-hacking tool called Sumo (this allows me to change pop-ups off for cellular users, as well as display forms precisely as I’d love to and on the pages I need ). What Is Email Marketing

UI Expertise

On the whole, Getresponse is pretty straightforward to use. It is certainly easy enough to perform all the fundamentals: import contacts, create campaigns, set up autoresponders and check statistics and the interface is pretty intuitive and clean.

With regards to how it stacks up against its rivals in this respect, I would assert that Campaign Monitor is a tiny bit more user friendly, and Mailchimp includes a slicker user interface (though one that makes locating certain performance a little bit tricky at times).

One place I think that could be significantly better in the user-friendliness standpoint is the Getresponse e-newsletter editor.

Whilst its drag-and-drop approach does in theory provide a very flexible approach to create blocks of articles and move them around an e-newsletter, in practice it’s quite clunky to use and can lead to accidental deletion of material, or placement of it at the incorrect part of the e-newsletter.

If you’re able to get your head about it, and practice using it a bit, it will make for a useful tool – it is just that the implementation of it might be rather better.

Also, as described above, the CRM instrument might 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 operational and the free trial is not contingent upon supplying credit card information.

This makes it possible to avoid that annoying”oops I forgot I signed up for this particular trial and today I am getting charged for a product I do not use” scenario.

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

Pricing

There are 3 main types of Getresponse pricing strategy -‘Email’,’Guru’ and’Max’ — and within each of these, several additional kinds of plan to pick from (all based on list size).

Up to 1,000 contributors: $15 (‘Email’) / $49 (‘Pro’) / $165 (‘Max’)

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

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

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

10,001 to 25,000 subscribers: $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 is an”Enterprise” plan for users whose lists transcend 100,000 email addresses: that starts at $1199, with exact pricing based on requirements (if you’re interested in the”Enterprise” program, you’ll want to contact Getresponse to schedule a demo, outline your needs and share pricing).

Substantial discounts are available if you pay upfront for 12 or 24 weeks of service (18% and 30% respectively) — these are considerably more generous than most competing platforms. What Is Email Marketing

Distinctions of Each Strategy

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

The ability to export, develop and host an email database

a wide range of templates

autoresponder functionality

responsive email designs

split testing

in-depth reporting

RSS / site to-email functionality

comprehensive segmentation options

societal sharing tools

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

CRM – Getresponse provides a customer relationship manager tool on its’Guru’ programs up

Landing pages – you can simply avail of all landing pages which enable split testing and unlimited views if you’re on a’Guru’ program or greater

Webinars – this functionality isn’t available at all on the’Email’ plan and the amount of webinar attendees is restricted for the’Pro’ and’Max’ programs at 100, 500 respectively (it is unclear what the limit is on the’Enterprise’ plan).

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

Pricing Vs Competitors

Provided that you are pleased to use one of those entry-level’Email’ plans, the pay-per-month Getresponse programs are on the whole cheaper than those supplied by many of its key competitors, especially if you have a reasonably high number of email addresses onto your database.

By way of example, in case you’ve got a mailing list comprising between 9,000 and 10,000 records that you want to send an infinite number of emails each month to, then you’ll discover that hosting it with Getresponse costs $65 per month.

That is:

$4 a month more affordable than with Aweber

$10 cheaper per month than Mailchimp

$84 per month cheaper than Campaign Monitor*

Decision Campaign Monitor’s pricing structure depends not just the amount of email addresses in your database but on how many emails you send a month too. If you are delighted to set a limit on the number of emails delivered via Campaign Monitor (from the case above, to 50k mails ), you can expect to pay a monthly fee of $89, nevertheless substantially greater than Getresponse’s.

The only well-known service that I can think of that comes in significantly more affordable is Mad Mimi, which charges $42 per month to sponsor up to 10,000 email addresses (note however that the performance 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 narrower pricing rings, meaning that based on how big your list, it might occasionally be a slightly cheaper option than Getresponse.

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

Mailchimp’s monthly fee to get a 1,000 recording database is the like Getresponse’s; and Mad Mimi supplies a marginally more affordable, if less operational offering for $12 a month.

Two final things to be Conscious of on the pricing :

Some competing suppliers — especially Mailchimp – provide completely free account for users that have a small number of documents (but these do not supply the full range of features that you get on a paid plan).

As stated earlier, if you’re prepared to pay upfront for 1 or two decades, you can avail of significant discounts that the other competitors don’t yet supply.

So the most important thing is that Getresponse is fairly competitive in the pricing department. But what about attributes? What Is Email Marketing

Conclusion

Getresponse represents among the more cost-effective tactics to host and communicate using an email database.

It is also one of the most interesting products of its kind – because it provides email marketing, landing pages, CRM and webinars all under a single roof. It’s hard to think of any competing product that offers this’all around’ proposal, and it is what continues to convince us to utilize it to Style Factory’s email marketing.

Some developments to Getresponse do need 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 lot of improvements can be made into the data capture forms also, especially for consumers wanting to exhibit them on mobile devices.

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

Overall though I speed Getresponse very highly – you receive substantial bang for your dollar with this item.

Listed below are a few pros and cons of using Getresponse overall:

Benefits of Getresponse

Excellent marketing automation choices.

The CRM functionality integrates neatly with Getresponse’s email automation functionality.

So long as you’re pleased to utilize an’Email’ program, Getresponse is cheaper than most of its key competitors (in certain cases, significantly so) whilst supplying as much, or even more functionality as them.

The reductions you get when paying upfront for one or two decades of support are extremely generous – you’ll be hard pushed to find similar reductions in costs from key opponents.

Its webinar functionality is a USP – something that isn’t provided by any similar products.

Its own reporting and comprehensive split testing attributes are strong.

Getresponse is transparent regarding deliverability rates, publishing figures on its own site and supplying deliverability statistics for person e-newsletters you send.

It offers an extremely flexible approach to information segmentation – more elastic than many competing goods.

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

It sends emails that are reactive and permits you to preview smartphone versions of your e-newsletters very readily.

It includes a helpful landing page creator – but bear in mind that you have to be on a more expensive plan to get the fully functional version of this.

You can try out all its features free for 30 days without the need to enter credit card information.

Disadvantages of Getresponse

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

The information capture forms provided aren’t responsive and you can’t control when and in which they are displayed on your site.

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

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

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

The pricing arrangement is a bit perplexing, with customers having to cover something of a superior to access the landing page creator tool.

The free trial restricts the number of readers you can send messages into 1000.

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

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

No telephone service is provided. What Is Email Marketing

Click here to start your free trial of Getresponse.