GetResponse is one of the most popular email marketing services.
With the addition of Autofunnel (now known as Conversion Funnel), GetResponse has become a great tool for building sales funnels as well.
GetResponse is a perfect tool for both beginners and professional marketers. It has tools to become an email marketing service, build a sales funnel, become a checkout software, or you can create social media ads using it.
It’s like a complete tool for internet marketers. Even if you require tools like drip automation, retargeting, and tagging for e-commerce, GetResponse has everything. You get 100+ email templates to match your brand and niche.
In this review, I’ll show you why GetResponse is the best email marketing service for bloggers, e-commerce websites, small businesses, and internet marketers.
You’ll also learn some of its pros-n-cons and find out if it is the right email marketing tool for your online business.
What is GetResponse?
It would be wrong to introduce GetResponse as an email marketing software.
GetResponse is a cloud app that consists of email marketing software, sales funnel builder, landing page builder, webinar software, and social ads creator.
With one platform, you can manage your whole marketing and sales campaigns. GetResponse makes internet marketing simpler.
I’ve been a GetResponse user for a long time. I keep testing multiple tools, but GetResponse is the best I’ve ever used. Not just me, but people that I’ve referred to GetResponse, a bunch of clients, have never had any issues with it.
GetResponse allows you to build automation workflows, create autoresponders, retarget website visitors with drip campaigns, and more. You can even set up an e-commerce store using an in-built payment processor.
It does everything an internet marketer, blogger, small business owner, or e-course seller would ask for.
That’s why GetResponse labels itself as an Inbound Marketing solution.
Since you get so many tools under one dashboard, managing multiple marketing channels is streamlined.
GetResponse Features
GetResponse has some of the best features regarding affordable email marketing services.
Here are some of it’s best features:
- One of the best email marketing software that is beginner-friendly and equally powerful for scaling businesses.
- Conversion Funnel allows you to build sales funnels.
- Webinar software integrated with GetResponse’s marketing platform.
- A checkout page with a payment processor already integrated.
- Landing page builder with 50+ templates.
- Marketing automation.
- Opt-in form builder and integration with popular lead generation tools.
- Retargeting automation workflow.
- Drip campaigns.
- Custom workflow builder with the visual editor.
- 150+ email templates for various niches and industries.
- Facebook Ads integration and builder.
- Unlimited email autoresponders.
GetResponse Email Marketing
The biggest challenge for any beginner is to set up automation workflows with email autoresponders. Most of the tools have a cluttered dashboard and a block-based automation builder.
GetResponse, on the other hand, has a visual automation builder.
Using the visual editor, you can create custom automation without much trouble. It’s easy, and with the help of pre-made templates, you can create autoresponder emails quickly and save tons of time.
The visual editor is fairly simple to use. GetResponse allows you to create autoresponder emails and use them in marketing automation.
You can set autoresponder cycles. A cycle will define how many days should pass after a subscriber is added to your email list.
You can choose which days the autoresponder is active. It could be active the whole week, only on weekends, and so on.
Well-written emails should also look good, and based on your industry, how your emails look and feel will make a difference in conversions.
Take the pets niche, for example. Pet owners are extremely devoted and caring. They don’t compromise on quality. Emails that look basic won’t generate high conversions in such a niche.
What would work is an email written in a professional tone and looks like a pet lover sent it. And GetResponse has templates that’ll help you convert your emails into beautiful and personalized formats.
GetResponse has email templates specifically curated for hundreds of niches and the purpose of your email.
You can choose from email templates designed for:
- Selling products.
- Promoting services.
- Educate subscribers.
- Welcome leads.
- Celebration.
Custom email templates are also a possibility. You can create a new HTML template using the CSS block-based drag n-drop editor and save it for future purposes and repetitive use.
Speaking of templates, GetResponse has a landing page builder too. It’s not just a basic page builder. Just like emails, you have landing page templates too.
These landing page templates are also optimized for a high conversion rate. Host your landing pages on a custom domain or on a GetResponse URL. It’s your choice.
The pages connect with your funnels and email lists instantly.
You can upload media files straight to GetResponse to add them to your emails quickly. You get 2 GB of file storage.
Most of the time, you’ll send your email according to your regional timing. But your subscribers will receive your emails at their regional timing.
This situation results in a lower open rate and an even lower clickthrough rate. GetResponse has a feature called Perfect Timing.
Perfect Timing is a feature that allows you to send emails at the time that each subscriber is more likely to open and read your email. Perfect Timing is based on data collected by GetResponse.
When you use Perfect Timing, even when you click on send, the email isn’t sent instantly. GetResponse analyzes each subscriber, then according to the generated data, emails are sent when the response rate is recorded at the highest.
Their email marketing software is robust. GetResponse looks very clean and the dashboard is well organized.
In fact, it is the best-looking and put-together email marketing dashboard.
You will easily find mailing list sats, email reports, automation insights, sales numbers, and other settings right on the dashboard.
There are two versions of API offered by GetResponse V2 and V3. The API V3 gives you slightly more control and access to commands over the connection at GetResponse.
It integrates with hundreds of web apps, cloud apps, lead generation software, CRM, chat software, and more. OptinMonster, Thrive Leads, Unbounce, HubSpot, LiveChat are a few examples.
If you’re looking to survey your audience, you can create survey forms to collect leads using GetResponse.
You can create multiple email lists inside your GetResponse account. Multiple lists can be interconnected using segments inside automation workflows.
Each list allows you to tag individual subscribers. This tagging function works on two things:
- Automation
- Lead generation tools/Manually
Firstly, you can tag subscribers by creating an automation workflow. I’ll show you how to in the tutorial below.
Secondly, you can use a lead generation tool like Privy or Thrive Leads to tag subscribers based on the opt-in form they signup from. Or you can also tag them manually.
Unlike other email marketing services, GetResponse allows you to send a double-optin confirmation email twice. Suppose someone subscribes to your list but forgets to confirm the double-optin.
In such a case, you can resend the confirmation email by going to your mailing list. To resend a confirmation email, go to your mailing list.
Then click on the list name and click on the “Unconfirmed” link. This will open a new page where everyone who hasn’t confirmed their subscription will appear. Click on the three dots and select “Re-send.”
You get tons of options for optimizing your email marketing campaigns. GetResponse has an active A/B testing feature. Using A/B testing, you can compare two different emails and identify which one got more open rate and clicks.
A/B testing is a good way to measure the success of email templates, colors, text font, writing style, etc. It shows you what your subscribers are really loving and what’s not working.
I actively use A/B testing to check the difference between multiple subject variations. This one practice has helped to increase the open rate of my RSS digest emails. I highly recommend you test these two subjects every time you send an email broadcast.
To automate things up a little bit, there is an option to use a blog RSS feed to automatically send emails to your subscribers. Every time you publish a blog post, your RSS feeds get’s updated as well. Using your feeds, GetResponse prepares an email and automatically sends it to your subscribers.
Set how the email looks, whether it will be sent immediately when a post is published or weekly as a digest. I use it for sending a weekly digest to my subscribers.
If you wish to send transactional emails through GetResponse, you’ll need to sign up for a MAX account. Here’s a link to book a demo for GetResponse MAX.
Emails trigger transactional emails. Emails such as account creation details, password recovery, cart recovery, checkout assistance are all known as transactional emails. Since these emails are sent to individual subscribers, they are not considered a typical marketing email sent to bulk email subscribers on a list.
It runs a spam check every time you write an email. If it doesn’t pass the spam score check, you’ll have to edit the email content.
You can send a test message to check how your email will look when it’s sent to your subscribers.
GetResponse also shows you the global preview where you can see your emails getting accessed live by different devices. This will help you to identify any HTML or CSS issues within your template before they get sent.
GetResponse has tons of features. It might sound overwhelming, but the platform is very well optimized for ease of access, and it makes managing your email marketing campaigns swift.
GetResponse also has a mobile application to help you manage your email marketing and sales funnels on the go. The app is supported on both Android and iOS.
The GetResponse smartphone app lets you:
- Send emails and track statistics.
- Keep in touch with new contacts.
- Manage your mailing list
- Get marketing insights
You can also create social media ads using their Social Ads creator. You’ll get the app download link once you register for a GetResponse account.
GetResponse Conversion Funnel
I covered Conversion Funnel a few weeks before it was launched as a BETA tester. Conversion Funnel was previously known as Autofunnel.
With the addition of this new software, GetResponse has stepped into the sales funnel and conversion optimization competition.
Conversion Funnel basically helps you to create a sales funnel, with no prior knowledge required. Unlike other sales funnel software, GetResponse Conversion Funnel is built for beginners and small businesses.
It consists of beginner-friendly sales funnel templates and a shop listing platform. The sales funnel templates are what make Conversion Funnel so interesting and popular.
Using the sales funnel template, you can build a complete lead-to-sale funnel optimized for high conversions in a few clicks.
You can choose from a bunch of templates depending on your needs and industry.
There are three categories of sales funnel inside the GetResponse conversion funnel:
- Building a list
- Sell a product
- Promote a webinar
That means you won’t have to bother building a sales funnel from scratch if you are going to sell a product, promote a webinar, or are looking to build your email list.
Beginners will highly appreciate the pre-built sales funnels offered by Conversion Funnel. It removes the guesswork, which is why most beginners fail at creating a highly successful sales funnel.
Using the pre-built funnels, you’ll make sure the success of your sales funnels. Because successful email marketers and CROs build these templates. If your product/service and customer onboarding system is solid, these sales funnels will not fail.
All GetResponse Conversion Funnel templates are optimized for higher customer retention and high sales. You just have to fill in the blank and edit the sales funnel templates with your product information, services, and other stuff. It’s that easy.
GetResponse has over 30 conversion-optimized scenarios created by professional marketers.
That’s just not it. Conversion Funnel is a combination of additional features such as:
- Social Ads creator
- Lead generation form builder including exit-intent popup forms
- Product manager and listing – both physical and digital (you can use the product listed directly in your emails)
- Sales page optimized for a higher click-through rate.
- Checkout page and payment processor (Stripe, PayPal, PayU, and more integrated within GetResponse app)
- Webinars
- Landing page builder to create sale and lead generation pages hosted on GetResponse URL or custom domain
- Ecommerce software integrations (Shopify, Esty, Sellfy, PrestaShop, Magento, and more)
- Email autoresponders are customized for each funnel stage.
- Perfectly timed emails to recover cart abandonment (automatic setup)
- One-click upsell offers
- Automated order confirmation
Each stage of the sales funnel template you choose is pre-defined for your needs and the current marketing strategies.
For example, if you choose to build a sales funnel to sell products, the default settings will:
- Automatically retarget your email subscribers and online store visitors.
- Send autoresponders to create specifically for selling products.
- Automatically send confirmation emails (you don’t have to pay for transactional email)
- Process credit card, stripe, and PayPal payments
- Automatically display and send upsell offers.
- Automatically recommend new products based on past transactions.
There’s another option if you want to create a lead magnet funnel. A lead magnet is an incentive that acts as an ethical bribe to turn visitors into subscribers.
If your goal is to generate more leads, use the lead magnet funnel. Prepare a checklist, an eBook, or a free PDF report and offer it on your website as an incentive in exchange for an email.
Using GetResponse lead magnet funnel, you can deliver the lead agent and nurture the subscriber.
What’s cool is that if you don’t have a lead magnet of your own, you can choose one of the four free lead magnets created by GetResponse for you.
Platforms like InfusionSoft and ActiveCampaign are highly complex. You will have to pass a learning curve to use such email marketing and CRM software.
For in-experience marketers, such as beginners who are just starting, Getresponse is a complete solution.
From the basic email marketing features to advanced marketing & sales automation, you get all of them under one roof.
Not just that, but GetResponse makes it simple. Which is a huge plus point, if you ask me. You don’t have to spend days learning about the platform or hiring someone and spend extra money to get things done.
Heck, you only need a couple hours to understand and start using all GetResponse email marketing and sales software. It saves time, and time is money.
Facebook & Instagram Ads Creator/Publisher
Facebook marketing partner integration allows you to buy targeted Facebook and Instagram ads using the GetResponse dashboard.
From within GetResponse dashboard, you can create and manage Facebook ads. Since Facebook and Instagram ads are integrated, you are also able to create ads for Instagram.
The interesting part is the audience targeting. GetResponse lets you target your subscribers as your Facebook ads audience.
You can also set it to a target audience group similar to the people you have on your mailing list.
Generally, expensive CRM services such as Drip & HubSpot offer this level of retargeting. At the price you pay for GetResponse, no other tool, software, or platform offers this feature as of now.
GetResponse Support
Regarding supporting, GetResponse is not the best.
Their platform is good, so I haven’t had any frequent issues. But I’m an online marketer, so I can tackle most of the issues on the front-end myself.
However, not everyone using GetResponse will be a professional.
GetResponse says they are the world’s easiest email marketing platform, and yes, they are. Most of the issues are solved quickly.
There is live chat support, 24×7 accessible. You can send an email for ticket support in over 8 languages.
Resolutions come pretty fast for normal, day-to-day issues. You won’t have any delays in getting an answer as well as done for-you support.
But GetResponse support is quite weak at resolving complex issues. Their support staff is knowledgeable enough to answer and solve front-end software issues and errors.
As soon as you ask about something complex, they fall short. In my case, I once asked their support staff about creating groups, like we do in MailChimp, to sort leads in my mailing list.
It took about an hour-long chat with multiple screenshots and my best ability to explain just to make them understand what I was looking for. In the end, they didn’t have a straight answer.
I had to find the solution myself. In case you’re also looking for a way to send multiple lead magnets to multiple subscribers in one email list, check out my other tutorial here.
GetResponse has good support. For average users, there isn’t any deal-breaker, and you’ll appreciate the quick live chat.
Enterprise plan customers get priority support with a dedicated manager. If you’re a company with more than 20,000 subscribers, get a free consultation using this link and negotiate a price for using GetResponse as an enterprise.
The email support is sure good enough. Normally you’ll get a reply to a ticket within 10-20 minutes.
That’s not it. You get a complete documentation library to quickly find solutions for general on-board and troubleshooting.
Moreover, you get access to the GetResponse growth library, a collection of video tutorials to help you grow your email list.
GetResponse Email Deliverability
Many email marketing services are good on the front end but fail to perform at the backend.
An email marketing service’s most important role is to deliver emails surely and securely to the recipient.
Your marketing and transactional emails must get delivered to the primary inbox of your subscribers. They should not get in the spam inbox.
After all, if your emails are not getting delivered in the primary inbox, people won’t see them, and there is no good.
Out of several factors that determine whether an email is moved to spam/promotional inbox or not, three of the most important are:
- Email subject line.
- Email content quality and structure.
- The delivery server & reputation of your domain and email marketing service IP address.
Pro tip: To ensure your emails are seen, your focus should be on writing quality emails that sound human and reliable. Your subject lines should be natural. You can be persuasive but maintain a friendly sales pitch. Don’t write cheeky subject lines that look like they have been sent by some vacuum cleaner salesperson pushing the new cleaner down your throat.
GetResponse is one of the oldest email marketing platforms. It’s almost two decades old, which means it is one of the most respected email marketing services.
There are only a handful of email marketing services, such as Aweber, that have the reputation level of GetResponse.
As per their own data, GetResponse has an email deliverability rate of 99%. This kind of deliverability rate is hard to achieve and even harder to maintain.
By constantly curating and scanning new as well as old users, GetResponse maintains its standard.
You need to make sure your email lists are clean; they don’t get too many spam complaints and bounces. Each user must verify the emails before they can import an email list from other platforms using CSV and other methods.
GetResponse has zero tolerance for spam.
One easy way to reduce bounces and keep your list clean is by enabling Double-Optin.
When using Double-Optin, new subscribers will have to confirm their email addresses by clicking on the confirmation link sent by GetResponse.
This way, you won’t have to worry about unwanted subscribers on your list.
You can periodically clean your email list in GetResponse using its feature called List Hygiene.
List Hygiene allows you to remove inactive and non-engaged subscribers as well as control duplicate and blacklisted emails.
You can create a rule so that GetResponse can automatically delete the email for you every time a condition is met.
GetRespone Integrations
One of the many reasons people are afraid to migrate to a new email marketing service is integrating their current software with the new platform.
Many times, the only reason you might not shift to a more powerful tool could be as simple as this:
You are afraid to lose control and disrupt sync among the software you’re using. You don’t want the hassle of adding a new tool and changing the way you operate.
Well, that’s not an issue with GetResponse. It integrates with 120+ software, cloud apps, and web services. It also connects with Automate.io and Zapier to further integrate with over 1300+ apps.
It integrates with all popular and not-so-popular landing page builders, funnels and pipeline software, CRM, and chatbot software, just to name a few.
You can also connect it with a custom app using the newer version of the GetResponse API key.
GetResponse Pricing & Plans
As far as pricing goes, GetResponse is a winner. It’s affordable and costs much less than its competitors.
I’m not talking about GetResponse’s direct competitors. Compared to Aweber, MailChimp, Moosend, and Mailerlite, GetResponse is similarly priced.
Since GetResponse has a sales funnel and checkout software with e-commerce capabilities, it puts GetResponse in the competition with ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and Drip.
Fortunately, GetResponse beats its competition pretty easily. It’s much cheaper than Drip or ConvertKit. A lot cheaper than Keap.
Here’s the detailed pricing and plans for GetResponse:
Their pricing starts at $15/month. The basic plan for $15/month allows you to store up to 1,000 subscribers. You’ll get all the core features in this plan, except for webinars, lead scoring, and e-commerce targeting.
To get the best of GetResponse, choose the PLUS plan at $49/month. You’ll get advanced features like webinars, lead scoring, automation builder, and you can create up to 5 sales funnels.
GetResponse offers a 30-day free trial. Use this trial period to understand and identify if this is the right tool for your business and, if it suits your requirements, purchase an annual plan. Because there is a flat discount of 18%.
And if you are super confident in GetResponse, you can purchase the 24-month plan and save 30% on your billing.
There is also a Professional and Enterprise plan. The professional plan is best suited for small businesses in need of scaling their email marketing campaigns to reach more customers. The Enterprise plan is built for agencies and customers with high-efficiency marketing needs.
If you’re a blogger, single site owner, or a small business startup, the GetResponse basic plan should be enough for you. But if you’re an agency or an established business, you probably want to go with the GetResponse PLUS or Professional plan.
GetResponse Pros
Things that I liked about GetResponse are:
- Intuitive dashboard, quick navigation across all marketing software and apps.
- Powerful email marketing templates for various niches. This makes it easy to generate more conversions, even if you are a novice.
- Marketing automation to personalize and automate your email communication based on your audience habits and preferences.
- Straight forward sales funnel builder. Sales funnel templates are the biggest advantage over its competitors.
- Ecommerce store platform built-in. You can list physical and digital products right inside GetResponse and sell using the integrated funnel and email marketing automation.
- Allows affiliate marketers to send raw affiliate links.
- The landing page builder is quite powerful and has the qualities of a full-fledged page builder.
- Integrates with PayPal and other payment processors. You get a built-in high-performing checkout page as standard.
- Social Ads creator to publish Facebook and Instagram Ads. It’s much easier to use GetResponse Ads creator than Facebook.
GetResponse Cons
Here are the things I didn’t like about it:
- The support is decent, but if you need solutions to complex marketing requirements, you’d better be buying the enterprise or Professional plan.
- Deleted emails are still counted towards the invoice for the month.
- The form builder is quite basic.
GetResponse Review: The Conclusion
Overall, GetResponse is a complete marketing solution, but at the core, it is one of the best email marketing services.
It is beginner-friendly, has tons of powerful features, and allows you to create complex marketing automation workflows with ease.
With Autofunnel Conversion Funnel software, building sales funnels and lead pipelines are easy as it gets.
If you’re a beginner or small business, GetResponse seems to be the perfect tool for you.
But, if you’re looking for something to scale your e-commerce store or a tool that allows you to customize content for your customers, you might want to consider Drip or Keap.
Now it’s your turn…
Are you using or planning to use GetResponse for your online business?
Let me know in the comments. If you have a question, ask us using the comment section. And don’t forget to share this with your fellow marketers and friends.
Ayesha
Thanks for the brilliant Getresponse review. Really appreciate the way you write it you covered all relevant points. Need more content like this. Thanks ????