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…or should you use an alternative?
Our overall score: 4.6/5
There is an increasing number of email marketing tools on the market, and choosing the right one can feel very difficult.
You’re probably here because you’ve heard a bit about Getresponse, and you’re wondering if it is the right fit for your business.
Well, this Getresponse review is here to help. I’m going to discuss the product’s pricing, templates, and marketing features in-depth — and give you the verdict on all of them.
So, read on to get:
By the end of this post, you’ll have a much clearer idea of whether this product is right for you — or whether you should look elsewhere.
Let’s start things off with an important question…
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 the use of ‘autoresponders’
view and analyze 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 recently introduced new features, including conversion funnels and webinar hosting, that aim to make it more of an ‘all in one marketing platform.
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 userbase is not as big as those of 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 to price.
Decent 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.
Key Differences between plans
All the Getresponse plans cover the email marketing basics you might expect — core features include:
the ability to import, grow and host a subscriber list
a selection of themes to use for your e-newsletters
autoresponder functionality
responsive email designs
split testing
landing pages
in-depth reporting
RSS / blog to-email functionality
segmentation options
Automation builder — arguably Getresponse’s standout feature, the automation builder (which allows you to build complex autoresponder sequences based on user behavior) is only available on the ‘Plus’ plan or higher (you can create 5 automation on the plus plan; or an unlimited number on the other plans).
Conversion funnels — you get access to more automated sales funnels as you go up the pricing ladder.
Webinars — this functionality is not available at all on the ‘Basic’ plan and the number of webinar attendees is capped for the ‘Plus’, ‘Professional’ and ‘Enterprise’ plans at 100, 300, and 500 respectively.
Team management — you can only have one user account on the ‘Basic’ plan; by contrast, you get 3 on ‘Plus’, 5 on ‘Professional’, and 10 on ‘Enterprise.
‘E-commerce — the abandoned order recovery feature is only available on the ‘Plus’ plan or higher.
I’ll discuss all these features in more depth as I progress through the review.
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 10,000 records, hosting it on the ‘Basic’ Getresponse plan costs $65 per month.
This works out:
$4 per month cheaper than Aweber
$24 per month cheaper than Campaign Monitor
$40 per month cheaper than Mailchimp (Standard Plan)
Some other things to be aware of on the competitor pricing front are:
Some competing providers — notably Mailchimp and Aweber — offer free accounts for users with a small number of records (note however that these do not offer the full range of features that you get on a paid plan).
Getresponse doesn’t yet offer a similar free plan.Some solutions (Mailchimp again being a prime example) charge you to host both subscribed and unsubscribed contacts, which can become a significant hidden cost. Getresponse only charges you for your active subscribers.
If you are prepared to pay upfront for 1 or 2 years, you can avail of substantial discounts with Getresponse that other competitors don’t yet provide.
So the bottom line is that its lack of an entirely free plan aside, Getresponse stacks up well against competitors in the pricing department.
But what about features?
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.
Let’s drill down into its key features to find out.
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 the basic ‘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.
In addition to the basic ‘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.
The functionality on offer here goes far beyond what’s traditionally been available from autoresponders and allows you to create a user journey that can be customized to the nth degree.
For a quick visual overview of how all this works, I’d suggest taking a look at Getresponse’s video walkthrough of its marketing automation features, below.
Getresponse email templates
There are around 115 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 omission worth flagging up, however — the option 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.
On the plus side, the Getresponse email creator allows you to make extensive use of web fonts. A really wide selection of Google Fonts can be used in your e-newsletters — more than any competing tool that I’ve tested to date.
This wide selection of web fonts is great, because — given the prevalence of Google fonts in corporate branding these days — it will help many users to create email campaigns that maintain brand values.
It’s important to remember that not all email programs support the use of web fonts — you can specify a ‘fallback font’ in Getresponse to accommodate those — but in the ones that do, emails created via Getresponse have the potential to look very nice indeed.
Finally, the Getresponse templates are all responsive, meaning they adjust themselves automatically to suit the device that an e-newsletter is being viewed on — mobile, tablet, desktop computer, etc.
A preview function is available to see how your newsletter will appear on each.
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.
Mailchimp and Aweber offer some similar reporting functionality — particularly where sales tracking is concerned— but Getresponse’s reporting tool is definitely one of more fully featured out there
Split Testing
Split testing involves sending variants of your e-newsletters to some of the people on your subscriber list, monitoring the performance of each, and sending the ‘best’ version to the remainder of your list.
Getresponse allows you to test run split tests using up to 5 subject headers or content variants. However, you can only use one variable at a time during a split test — for example, you can test two emails with different subject headers against each other, but both versions of the email must contain the same content.
Some other email marketing tools are a bit more flexible in this regard, allowing you to test using more variables (for example send time or sender name) or the option to mix variables during tests.
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 than 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 are 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 in many ways a great feature — but it is let down a bit by the interface and particularly by the lack of a proper cookie consent banner.
Webinars
Getresponse recently introduced the ability to host webinars on the platform.
Given that webinars are can be both used as a lead-generation tactic — or indeed a revenue-generating feature — the idea of having your email database and your webinar tool under the same roof is very appealing.
The pricing is also very competitive too by comparison to established webinar solutions. For example, one of the leading webinar hosting services, Gotowebinar, charges $59 per month to host webinars with up to 100 participants. You can actually do the same — and a whole lot more — with Getresponse from $49 per month.
With regard to attendee limits, the Getresponse ‘Plus’ plan allows you to host a webinar with up to 100 participants; the ‘Professional’ plan’s cap is 300, and the ‘Enterprise’ plan’s cap is 500.
You can also buy webinars functionality as an add-on for the ‘Basic’ plan: $40 per month buys you a 100 attendees limit, $99 per month buys you a 500 attendees limit (note however that these add-ons may not be available to all users in North America).
If I’m honest, because I’ve found some aspects of the Getresponse interface — especially landing pages — a little bit clunky in the past, I wasn’t expecting that much from the webinars feature.
But I was pleasantly surprised: both the webinar's interface and functionality are really excellent — and up there with any dedicated platform I’ve used in the past for online meetings or webinars.
A few Getresponse webinar features worth flagging up as being particularly useful are:
the fact that your attendees don’t need to install any software to attend the webinars
one-click record of your webinars
screen sharing functionality
video sharing functionality (YouTube)
the option to upload Powerpoint presentations to Getresponse for use during a webinar
free online storage for playback files.
On the downside,
you can only run paid webinars (i.e., where viewers have to pay for access) on the ‘Professional’ plan or higher.
the 500 attendee limit is the absolute max — you can’t pay for an add-on to increase this limit.
the file storage limits for your recorded webinars aren’t hugely generous — you get 3 hours of storage on the ‘Plus’ plan, 6 on ‘Professional’, and 10 on the ‘Enterprise’ plan. As is the case with the attendee cap, it seems as though there’s no way to increase this limit.
Despite these limits, webinar functionality is a very useful feature to have in your email marketing arsenal and its inclusion as a feature arguably gives Getresponse a very significant edge over its key competitors.
The fact that your email list is fully integrated with your webinar broadcasting tool is a serious plus point, and the quality of this feature is surprisingly high.
Let’s look at another feature now that is also pretty unique to Getresponse: “conversion funnels.”
conversion funnels
Another new feature recently introduced by Getresponse is ‘conversion funnels’ — and this represents quite a departure for the product.
This is because — to a degree — it turns Getresponse from being an email marketing platform into something that you can use to run an entire e-commerce business.
The idea behind this feature is that you can do the following things without ever leaving the Getresponse environment:
Create a product catalog
Create and run Facebook ad campaigns
Create landing pages
Add subscribers to an autoresponder cycle
Drive users to sales pages (also created in Getresponse)
Take payment for products
Send abandoned cart emails if necessary
In other words, Getresponse aims to provide you with an easy means to create an online store and an accompanying sales funnel without the need for any other apps at all being necessary.
You can access the conversion funnel feature on all plans — but you should note that the version available on the ‘Basic’ plan only allows you to create one funnel, and doesn’t permit you to make use of the abandoned cart recovery feature (which automatically emails people who added an item to their cart only to not complete their purchase).
If you like, you can involve third-party platforms with this feature — Shopify, BigCommerce, and Etsy can all be integrated.
As things stand, this feature is probably best suited towards ‘solopreneurs’ or small businesses who want an all-in-one option for creating all the assets they need to create a sales funnel, right up to converting subscribers into customers.
Merchants with large product catalogs and extensive e-commerce requirements will still probably be better off using a dedicated e-commerce platform like BigCommerce or Shopify for the actual selling part of the mix, however.
Apps And intergrations
If you want to integrate Getresponse with another platform or tool, there are around 150 integrations to help you do so.
You can use these to hook Getresponse up to popular e-commerce solutions and content management systems, including Shopify and WordPress, as well as some CRM systems, like Capsule and Highrise.
There are quite a few useful Google integrations too — which allow you to import contacts; add Google Analytics tags to an email campaign, and link your landing pages to Google Ads in a way that helps you better measure the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.
Quite a lot of these integrations are ‘official’ Getresponse integrations which work out of the box — but you should note that many involve using a third-party tool like Zapier for the connection. (This can bring additional costs.)
The other way you can integrate Getresponse with another system — assuming you have the development skills — is by using its API (Application Programming Interface). This lets you send and receive data to and from Getresponse in whatever way suits your application.
Data management And Deliverability
Opet-in processes
There are two methods you can employ to add subscribers to a mailing list — you can employ a ‘single opt-in‘ or a ‘double opt-in‘ process.
If you use use a single opt-in process, the person signing up is added to your mailing list the moment they hit the submit button on your sign-up form. This approach is good for growing a list but can attract fake signups.
With a double opt-in process, the person signing up to your list is sent an email containing a confirmation link that he/she must click before being subscribed. This reduces the number of spammy signups — but can also reduce the overall size of your list.
Now, the good news here is that Getresponse allows you to make use of either opt-in approach — this is not the case with all competing products. So a thumbs up to Getresponse for being flexible on this.
What’s the best value Getresponse plan?
Of the plans under discussion, the ‘Plus’ plan probably represents the ‘sweet spot’ in the lineup. This is because it unlocks the bulk of Getresponse’s feature set whilst remaining competitively priced.
Two key features included in this plan, automation building and webinars, make the upgrade from ‘Basic’ particularly worthwhile. (Note however that you can only charge for webinars if you’re on a ‘Pro’ plan.) You can try out the ‘Plus’ plan here.
data capture and forms
There are two ways to use forms in Getresponse — you can either add an HTML form that you style yourself, or you can design your form in Getresponse (picking from a decent range of templates and tweaking them to match your site design).
If you go for the latter route, you can add the form to your site using a snippet of Javascript code to display your form; this form can be presented in a range of different formats (for example inline, pop-up, or slide-up).
You can use both the HTML forms and the javascript ones to capture data into standard Getresponse fields, or, if you prefer, populate custom fields.
These javascript forms are pretty good. You can create both desktop and mobile versions, and you can make use of a reasonable range of web fonts when styling them. You can also enable a spambot-blocking CAPTCHA feature, which helps prevents fake signups.
Significantly, however, no controls are offered by Getresponse to switch pop-up forms on or off on particular devices or individual pages of your site.
Given Google’s approach to pop-ups on smartphones (which leads to sites taking a hit in search results if they display ‘intrusive interstitials on mobile devices), this is a bit of a concern.
A workaround is to connect Getresponse to a growth-hacking tool — there are quite a few available (Sumo or Privvy being well-known examples). Doing this allows you to switch pop-ups off for mobile users, as well as style forms extensively, and control which pages they appear on. But this isn’t ideal, as it involves an additional cost.
Of course, if you’re integrating Getresponse with a CMS and using a forms package, you may not find this an issue — WordPress users could, for example, connect a tool like Gravity Forms (which gives you a lot of control over form appearance) to Getresponse via its API.
Data segmentation options
One of the things I like most about Getresponse is the way you can send emails to multiple segments of subscribers at once (or indeed exclude multiple segments). This is not the case with some of Getresponse’s key competitors, including Mailchimp and Aweber.
For example, say you have a subscriber list in Getresponse that you’ve divided up into four segments:
– Segment A
– Segment B
– Segment C
– Segment D
With Getresponse, it’s really easy to message segments A, B, and C all at once (you just tick three relevant checkboxes). You could also message segments B and C and exclude segment D.
Not only can you message/exclude multiple segments at once, but you can also do the same with individual lists — for example, if you had three separate mailing lists on Getresponse, but you could also mail individuals across all three of them.
This sort of flexibility marks Getresponse out from its competitors and lets you really tailor your email campaign audience to the nth degree — of the similar products I’ve reviewed to date, only Campaign Monitor offers a comparable level of flexibility (and one which comes at a much higher price).
This flexibility is possibly one of the biggest arguments in favor of using Getresponse over key competitor Mailchimp, which doesn’t unlock advanced segmentation features unless you are on the hugely expensive ‘Mailchimp Premium’ plan.
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%.
Getresponse
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.
GDPR
In the light of the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rules, email marketing got a bit more complicated, because there are stricter rules about what constitutes consent to receive e-newsletters (and requirements about how that consent is logged).
Getresponse is to be commended for providing users with clear information about what their GDPR responsibilities are, along with special GDPR fields that make it easier to log consent and comply with the regulations.
Additionally, you can enable two-factor authentication (2FA) for Getresponse login. This ensures that a user is granted access only after successfully presenting two or more pieces of information — for example, a password and a code generated by an authentication smartphone app.
Given that data security is a key aspect of GDPR, this is a good feature to have in place.
On the downside, Getresponse’s landing page feature is not GDPR compliant if you plan on using a Facebook pixel in conjunction with it — so some definite room for improvement here.
Ease of use/interface
On the whole, Getresponse is pretty easy to use. This wasn’t always the case, but its interface was redesigned recently and its menu system is now relatively straightforward, with key features being easily accessible.
It’s certainly easy enough to do all the basics in Getresponse: import contacts, create an email campaign, set up autoresponders and check statistics. In particular, and as mentioned above, segment management is excellent.
And when it comes to Getresponse’s more advanced features, like its marketing automation tools, the learning curve isn’t too steep.
However, Getresponse’s form designer and landing page creator tools could still benefit from a bit of an overhaul — unlike most features of the product, they haven’t been improved much as part of the interface revamp. They could be more user-friendly.
In terms of how the Getresponse interface stacks up against those of its competitors, I would argue that Campaign Monitor is a bit more user-friendly and that the Mailchimp interface features a cleaner design. Aweber’s interface probably comes closest in terms of look and feel.
Traditionally, Getresponse’s main usability failing involved its email editor: it was clunky and buggy.
However, the new version of the email creator has improved things considerably — it’s got a cleaner, more intuitive drag and drop interface; it doesn’t crash, and it is easy to use. It’s probably not quite as good as those offered by some competing apps, but it’s perfectly acceptable.
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.
On the plus side, I have had extremely good experiences with Getresponse’s chat service — I’ve never had to wait long to chat with an agent, and anyone I’ve dealt with has had a really robust technical knowledge of the platform.
And the email support provided by Getresponse is available in 8 languages, which is commendable. These are English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese.
How good is the Getresponse free trial?
Like many competing email marketing products, you can try Getresponse out for free before buying it.
The free trial is fully functional and lasts 30 days, and allows you to use a list of up to 1,000 subscribers.
You can sign up for the free trial here.
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.
It’s hard to think of any competing email marketing solution that offers this ‘all round’ proposition, and its free trial length of 30 days is generous too.
I’ve been particularly impressed by Getresponse webinar functionality — it’s feature-packed, and amazingly good value for what it is.
Some improvements to Getresponse do need to be made, however.
Probably the most important thing Getresponse needs to look at is introducing a GDPR compliant cookie consent mechanism for the landing pages.
The landing page interface could do with an overhaul too — it could be much more user-friendly.
I’d also like to see more controls for Getresponse’s data capture forms introduced — you should have the option to switch them on or off on mobile.
I’ll sum up this Getresponse review with a rundown of the key pros and cons of using the product.
Pros and cons of Getresponse
It’s pretty user-friendly.
So long as you are happy to use a ‘Basic’ plan, Getresponse is cheaper than many of its key competitors (in certain cases, significantly so) whilst offering just as much, if not more functionality as them.
The discounts you receive when paying upfront for one or two years of service are extremely generous — you’ll be hard-pressed to find similar discounts from key competitors.
You get really advanced features when it comes to marketing automation.
Its flexible approach to data segmentation makes list management really straightforward — it outshines many competing products on this front.
Getresponse’s webinar functionality is great, and a genuine USP — I haven’t come across this functionality on similar products.
Its ‘Conversion Funnel’ feature is potentially useful for small businesses who want to manage all aspects of their social media ads, sales funnels, and e-commerce activity under one roof.
Its reporting features are comprehensive.
Getresponse is transparent about deliverability rates, publishing figures on its website, and providing deliverability statistics for the e-newsletters you send.
All Getresponse plans come with a useful (if fiddly) landing page creator that facilitates A/B testing — something that could potentially save you a lot of money.
Custom DKIM is provided on all plans.
It integrates nicely with Google Analytics and other metrics tools.
With the exception of adequate cookie consent features on its landing pages, it’s pretty good at meeting GDPR requirements.
You can try out all the Getresponse features free for 30 days without the need to enter credit card details.
Cons OF using Getresponse
The drag and drop interfaces for creating landing pages and forms are a bit fiddly and need improvement.
Although you can use the Facebook pixel with Getresponse’s landing page feature, you can’t do so in a GDPR compliant way.
Improvements could be made to how data capture forms work so that users have the option to switch them on or off on mobile devices.
There’s a hard limit of 500 webinar attendees.
No phone support is provided (unless you’re on a “Max” plan).
- Split testing functionality is limited to subject headers and content — it would be good if you could test using sender and send time as well.
Quite a lot of the integrations for Getresponse involve a third-party syncing tool like Zapier.
Getresponse alternatives
No Getresponse review would be complete without a mention of some of the alternatives.
Well-known solutions that compete with Getresponse include Aweber, Mailchimp, and Campaign Monitor.
Aweber is probably the most basic tool of the three mentioned above, but it is a solid and reliable offering. Its key advantage over Getresponse is that it comes with phone support, and now provides a free plan (which you can use to host a maximum of 500 contacts). You can read our Aweber review here.
With the exception of webinars, Mailchimp offers a broadly similar feature set to Getresponse — the main advantage it offers over Getresponse is that it tends to integrate more easily with other services. But it is expensive, and Mailchimp charges you for every contact on your list — even the unsubscribed ones. Check out our Getresponse vs Mailchimp post for a full comparison of the two tools.
Campaign Monitor is another expensive option, but it does come with some lovely templates and a super user-friendly interface. Check out our Campaign Monitor review for more details.