Getresponse Email Marketing

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 use of ‘autoresponders‘

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 use of ‘autoresponders’
• view and analyse 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 be more of an ‘all-in-one’ e-commerce and online marketing solution — rather than a conventional email marketing tool.

Accordingly, in addition to email marketing features, Getresponse now also provides a website builder, chat features, e-commerce features, webinar hosting, landing pages and automated sales funnels.

But how much does all this cost?

Getresponse pricing and plans

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 it, you’ll need to contact Getresponse to schedule a demo, discuss your needs and negotiate pricing.

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 — but the core features common to all plans are:

• 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
• analytics
• list segmentation options
• a website builder tool

There are a number of differences between the ‘Basic’, ‘Plus’ and ‘Professional’ plans, but for me the key ones are below:

• Automation builder — arguably Getresponse’s standout feature, the automation builder (which allows you to build complex autoresponder sequences based on user behaviour) is only available on the ‘Plus’ plan or higher
• 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.

Getresponse’s starting price 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. The pricing for Mailchimp’s broadly comparable ‘Standard’ plan is $14.99 per month.

As you go up the pricing ladder, Getresponse continues to come in a bit cheaper than these products too.

Some other things to be aware of on the competitor pricing front are:

• Some competing providers — notably Mailchimp and Aweber — offer free plans for users with a small number of records. 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.

The platform provides 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.