GetResponse claim to be the easiest newsletter tool available, with a tonne of pro features. This is a big claim, especially as their prices are so competitive. The Polish-based company’s global reach extends to 182 countries, and claim to engage over 1 billion subscribers every month! That’s a lot of emails.
Feature-wise, they do boast a lot more than most other email marketing services. From simple A/B testing, to custom landing pages; comprehensive design testing to video email marketing.
The landing pages are especially interesting as they are part of Conversion Funnel, a new feature that takes care of traffic generation and can even act as an online store including payment processing. Another feature that’s worth mentioning is their automation, allowing for advanced automated campaigns based on triggers/conditions such as sales or even location. Other tools offer automation, but most are not as powerful or user-friendly.
On higher-tier plans, you also get access to their webinar feature, as well as an inbuilt CRM - extras you don’t commonly see in email marketing platforms. It was certainly enough to capture our interest - and, eventually, our business (we now use GetResponse for many of our automated campaigns). So let’s take a deeper dive into this tool.
GetResponse Review: Summary
GetResponse is an all-in-one marketing platform which, as well as email marketing, offers landing pages, a CRM and advanced automations. We rank them pretty favorably due to their range of advanced features. Their entry plan is reasonably priced and they offer a generous discount to NGOs. Try GetResponse free for 30 days
GetResponse screenshots
GetResponse Pricing
Pros and Cons
Is GetResponse the right newsletter service for you?
Recommended if:
You want to capture customer leads:
GetResponse is one of the few newsletter tools we’ve tested that’s truly built for inbound. It offers flexible forms, a landing page editor, Google Analytics integration and sophisticated automation for segmentation and emails, allowing you to both capture and nurture new leads. On top of that, it’s even possible to host live and on-demand webinars with them.
Their new Conversion Funnel feature allows you to do all of this in an organized manner and easily track where’s converting best.
You’re an ecommerce:
If you’re an online store owner, GetResponse is packed with features to help you drive more sales – integrations with platforms like Magento and Shopify, abandoned cart campaigns, dynamic email content (e.g. based on purchases), and sales tracking. These are available from the PROFESSIONAL plan and upwards.
If you opt for the cheaper ESSENTIAL plan, as an ecommerce, you’ll benefit from GetResponse’s Autofunnel feature. Here you can set up or connect your ecommerce site and start building your sales funnel with landing and thank you pages, social media campaigns and much more. Autofunnel is ideal for small businesses selling products and services online.
You need sophisticated automation:
We were impressed with GetResponse’s workflow builder, which enables you to set up automations for a whole range of actions, including sending emails, assigning lead scores, contact tagging, segmentation and data updates. (Available on higher-tier plans only.)
Not recommended if:
You need solid deliverability rates:
Deliverability should be an important consideration for any email marketer. GetResponse had some room for improvement in our deliverability tests. Of course, deliverability rates can always change, so we’re hoping this will improve in the future.
You’re after a free plan:
GetResponse don’t offer a free (or even freemium) plan – just a free trial of 30 days. If you want a free newsletter service,
Rating details
| CRITERION | RATING | COMMENTS |
|---|---|---|
Ease of Use | Mostly easy to navigate. The design is clean and intuitive and there is a handy Quick actions section that lists the most commonly performed tasks. Widgets can be added to or removed from the dashboard, giving you full control to manage your dashboard views. One small thing they could improve is to make it a little easier to navigate out of the email editor. | |
Newsletter Creation | ||
Editor | The drag and drop editor is user-friendly, allowing for a wide range of email types. In fact, the editor is perhaps more flexible than most other tools – the range of options for editing might take a bit of practice though. Bonus points for including undo/redo buttons and a revision history. Our main gripe is the lack of a central style editor. It would be handy to set fonts and colors for the entire newsletter. | |
Personalization |
| You can personalize subject lines and email text using contact field data (and specify fallbacks if this data doesn’t exist for a particular contact), but it requires a tiny bit of if/then/else coding. |
Email types | Classic newsletters, autoresponders, RSS to newsletter, easy A/B testing, also surveys. A good range. | |
Choice and Flexibility of Template Designs | There is a lot of choice and all of the designs are responsive. It’s easy to use and edit the templates. We couldn’t find an easy way to add columns to templates, though. | |
Email Automation | With GetResponse’s powerful and flexible workflow editor, you can build some pretty complex automated sequences. Unfortunately, you’ll need at least the expensive Professional plan to use this feature. Aside from being able to send series of emails based on specified conditions and triggers, there are also rules to move subscribers from one list to another. Automations for lead scoring, abandoned cart campaigns, and web event tracking are also available. More on email automation. | |
List Management | GetResponse’s list management capabilities are superb. You can use custom filters to save segments of contacts with similar characteristics (e.g. based on contact field data, email engagement, or lead scores). Through automations, you’ve got the ability to add tags, and even automate list management rules. There’s also a section dedicated to list hygiene, allowing you to create rules for deleting and blacklisting contacts. | |
Registration Forms/ Opt-in & Opt-out- Process | Fairly easy to use, with many templates available, or the ability to create your own. There are several types of integration available: you can embed on your site or host the form on GetResponse. Options to edit thank you pages and the backend (e.g. which lists to add subscribers to) are a little hidden, though. | |
Deliverability | GetResponse’s deliverability leaves room for improvement. If you are looking for a solid tool and a better performer, ActiveCampaign would be a better choice. | |
Reports and Analysis | Thorough reports, with geo-tracking available and desktop vs. mobile. You can also see which clients were used, as well as when people clicked and opened emails in a chart view. You can get all the details of the openers and clickers, as well as Google Analytics integration, and conversion/ecommerce tracking. There’s even an option to compare the performance of different campaigns; however, there is no heatmap available. | |
Languages | Available in up to 25 languages. | |
Further Features | ||
Spam- and Design-Testing | Inbox testing is available on the site, allowing you to see the design in many different browsers and devices. You can also view the email’s SpamScore, which is a rating from 0-5 of how likely your email will be recognized as spam. | |
Bounce Management |
| Located within their ‘list hygiene’ section. Hard bounces are removed immediately from your lists, while soft bounces are removed after four unsuccessful attempts. |
Blacklist |
| Both a blacklist and suppression lists are available. Manual import, but no export options available. |
Storage available for data and images | 1 Gigabyte | Apart from being able to add your own files, you also have over 1,000 stock photos available for use. |
Pro Features | ||
Authentication |
| SPF and DKIM are supported. They are apparently whitelisted by major clients (AOL, Yahoo, Outlook etc.) |
Own Domain |
| This is only available on the ‘Enterprise’ plan. You can assign your own domains/subdomains to landing page URLs. |
Different levels of account access |
| The ‘Essential’ plan allows up to 3 users, while the ‘Professional’ plan allows up to 5. On top of this, you can buy multi-user add-ons for $20 per month, adding another 5 users. There’s no specific access levels, but you can define specific access areas for each user. |
Integrations |
| Quite a few available, including all the big tools from ecommerce, CRM, social and CMS (Shopify, Magento, Salesforce, Facebook, WordPress etc). |
Landing Page Editor |
| The landing page editor is part of the Conversion Funnel feature, where you can also set up your advertising and social media campaigns, web forms, webinars, and ecommerce, and track your conversions. There are over 180 landing page templates, and A/B testing and responsive design are also available. Unlimited landing pages are available on all of the plans, though other funnel features are limited to the Plus plan and above. |
Support | 4/5 | Via e-mail and live chat, support was very quick, friendly and helpful. The knowledge base is thorough and easy to navigate. |
Overall rating | 4.2/5 | GetResponse is a very powerful, versatile and user-friendly newsletter tool. It’s also good value for the amount of features available. Deliverability could be better, though. |
Conclusion
GetResponse really came through with the goods, managing to provide both the features and ease-of-use that most other newsletter tools fall short of. We also noted the great automation mechanisms for list management, as well as its flexible and intuitive automation workflows..
While the editor can be a little fiddly when performing certain tasks, their templates are responsive and good enough to create something useful. There’s even an app for iOS and Android that allows you not only to track, but also to send newsletters on the go.
With its long list of powerful features like landing pages and even webinars, and now with their new Autofunnel feature, GetResponse is certainly doing quite a few things right. While it would be great to see an uplift in deliverability rates, GetResponse scores extremely well in most other areas. As an email marketing tool, it’s definitely versatile enough to perform almost everything you’d need. We certainly found this to be true in our case for EmailToolTester’s own email campaigns, and it’s a tool we’d have few reservations about recommending to others.