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.
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.
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 customised to the nth degree.
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 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 that 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.
