GetResponse Review – What you need to know!
When you have an online business, you need to engage with customers. The online world is saturated and it’s not always easy to generate interest or engagement. Keeping in touch with your customers is one way to do this. This is where GetResponse can really help you stay in touch with your customers.
What Is GetResponse?
GetResponse is an email marketing application. It provides businesses with the tools that they need to manage subscriber lists, generate auto-response emails, and stay in touch with customers and subscribers.
It provides any business with an easy, intuitive way to create newsletters and promotional emails and send them to a list of subscribers. It also provides useful analytics tools so that one can see at a glance how well promotional campaigns are doing, the number of subscribers, bounce rates, and more.
When Should a Business Use GetResponse?
The average web user of today forms an impression of a website within moments of visiting it. If you run a business, you have very little time to grab the attention of users. When you do engage with them, you need to ensure that you retain their attention so that you can turn them into paying customers.
Let’s face it; doing business online is not easy. There are plenty of tools available and buying a domain for your business is easy enough to do but you have to engage with your customers. It’s not enough to provide great media and content. You need to be able to engage with your customers as often as possible so that you can stay relevant in their minds. This is where a tool such as GetResponse can help.
If you’re spending your business budget on social media promotions and good-looking media, you’re only going halfway. The fact is that you will be missing out on customers because you’re not touching base with them often enough. When you use an email marketing tool such as GetResponse, you experience the following benefits:
1. You Acquire More Customers
Businesses these days are spending a significant part of their budgets on social media promotions. As important as that is, email marketing is more effective at retaining customers.
The bulk of people will have become so fatigued by the time that they read your social media business promotion that they simply switch off and move to the next post in the timeline. When customers receive a promotional email right to their inboxes, they are more likely to open it and actually read it.
2. More Affordable
Email has always been cheap. This is why it has always been a popular way to stay in touch with people. Though social media has risen in popularity, most people still have active email addresses that they check.
A marketing campaign through GetResponse provides a great return on investment. Email itself is cheap and sending an email to hundreds and even thousands of subscribers is a very affordable way to get the word out and develop a business brand.
Why pay thousands of dollars for a social media campaign when you could be building a subscriber list that’s more effective and a lot cheaper? The sobering truth is that many businesses simply do not have the budget to cover multiple social media campaigns; this is where direct email marketing can be so incredibly useful.
3. A More Personal Way to Connect with People
We are all dealing with spam on a daily basis but emails that have a personal touch to them are still a very effective way to reach people and engage with them. Receiving an email has always been more personal than engaging with a banner ad or some other form of online promotion.
A tool such as GetResponse provides any business with the necessary tools to create personalized marketing campaigns. Doing this can engage more effectively with people and convert them into paying customers.
4. Connect with Mobile Users
More and more people are using their mobile devices to connect to the web, check social media, and open and respond to emails. It’s crucial for any business to engage
with and retain these users. Creating email campaigns allows you to direct your personal brand and your products right into the email inboxes of customers.
5. Remind Customers Who You Are
Emails feel more personal and can generate a useful call to action from customers. By delivering regular emails to subscribers, a business reminds them of their brand. And because email is less ephemeral than a social media post, people are more likely to feel engaged with it when they open it and take the time to read it. This personal investment in an email may then translate to a higher level of engagement.
6. Access Critical Analytical Tools
One of the biggest challenges for any modern business is to get into the heads of their customers to find out what they’re thinking. Entire marketing departments are set up to solve this issue and to make promotional strategies more effective.
GetResponse provides useful analytical tools that make it easy to gather information about the number of subscribers, how many people have opened an email, how many people have clicked on the links within that email, and how many emails are bouncing back to the server.
This means that a business using an email marketing tool can gather information on why a promotional campaign is either working or not. It provides them with the insight to change their approach and generate different email marketing tactics.
Unlike some paid advertising, email marketing tools have these kinds of analytics built right into them. This provides business with a way to solve the problem of getting into the heads of their customers and tracking customer behavior. In this way, email marketing tools provide perhaps their biggest advantage: the ability to understand customers and customize marketing campaigns to make them more effective.
How Does GetResponse Work?
GetResponse is one of the most full-featured email marketing tools on the market today. Here’s a list of some of the top features and how they work:
- Auto-Response Functionality
When customers sign up to receive your newsletters and promotional emails, they are taking time to commit to you. The best way to engage with them is to provide them with an immediate response. An auto-responder can be set to send an automated email as soon as a new subscriber joins a mailing list. It’s also possible to schedule automated emails at different times so it makes it very easy to run a marketing or promotional campaign for a new product or sale.
GetResponse goes one step further than most services of this type and allows you to send action-based messages. For example, if subscribers click on a link in a newsletter that you’ve sent out, they will automatically receive another email in relation to the link they clicked, such as more information about that product.
The product also makes it incredibly easy to set up these action-based auto-responses. A drag-and-drop editor allows anyone, even those with little experience, to set up these auto-responder rules. This means, for example, that you can send out emails to specific people when they have their birthdays. It’s a great way to make promotional emails more personal.
- Analysis
All email marketing tools include a suite of dashboard analytics but GetResponse provides a really excellent feature as well. It’s called One-click Segmentation.
For example, you’ve sent out an email newsletter and you can see though the analytics dashboard that some people haven’t engaged with it. You can actually use the segmentation feature to place them into a separate mailing list so that you can then send them a different set of emails. This allows any business to test out different strategies on different subscribers to see what works best in terms of promotion.
- Responsive Email Templates
It’s important that your subscribers can see the emails you send out properly on their various mobile devices. There are lots of included templates and though the designs aren’t as eye-catching as some, the responsive email templates are very useful.
Where GetResponse shines in this area in how easy it is to preview these templates across different mobile devices and screen sizes. It’s just a matter of clicking a preview button. Unfortunately, there’s no support yet for web fonts. This means that you’re going to be limited to the basic “safe” fonts such as Arial and Verdana for your email messages. This will limit the ability to really drill down and fully customize promotional emails.
- Landing Pages
The problem with many cheaper email marketing applications is that when subscribers click on the email, they are taken to the company’s website. The problem is that many websites can be pretty busy and cluttered-looking. Ideally, they would click a link in an email and be taken to a customized landing page that’s tidy, neat, and completely focused.
GetResponse offers a really easy-to-use landing page editor. The landing pages can also be tested against each other in the context of how users interact with them and respond to them.
- Autofunnel
The concept of a sales funnel is relatively recent and goes well beyond email marketing applications. A sales funnel includes everything that a single customer needs to engage with a product, browse a product inventory, find out more information, engage with media, add the product to a cart, and pay for it.
GetResponse has an autofunnel creation system built right in but it’s only available on the Plus tier and above. This means that you could literally use GetResponse for everything from building a subscriber list to building a catalog of products and selling them without using another application.
What Are the Prices and Packages?
It’s important to note that some of the most interesting features, such as action-based auto-response editing, are only available in paid plans. This may limit its usefulness to some people but it’s still a great tool nonetheless and the fact is that it’s still going to be cheaper to invest in than a year of social media profiling and campaigning.
Here’s what you get in terms of plans and pricing structure:
- The Basic plan only costs $15 per month but doesn’t include some of the auto-responder features mentioned earlier as well as some others. However, it does allow unlimited emails for up to 1000 subscribers. This makes it an ideal tier for smaller businesses. If you need to customize it for more subscribers, you can do that if you’re prepared to pay more.
- The Plus plan is good value at $49 and has a 30-day free trial period. It includes all the basics plus some extra features such as webinars and sales funnels. If you need to allow for more subscribers, you can choose to pay more.
- The Professional plan is $99 a month but for this you’ll get the excellent automation builder so that you can completely customize your auto-response strategy. This will still be cheaper than hiring a full-time social media person.
- Finally, the Enterprise tier is $1199 a month and includes 100,000 plus subscribers. It provides absolutely every single feature but it’s not going to suit all businesses. Smaller businesses will likely not have the budget to cover the monthly fee, for example.
How Does it Compare to its Competitors?
The good news is that GetResponse is typically cheaper across all tiers in terms of pricing than competitors such as Mailchimp, Aweber, and Campaign Monitor. That said, Mailchimp does offer a free tier for a limited number of list subscribers where GetResponse is $15 per month at the cheapest level.
Here are some of the other differences worth noting:
- Split testing: Testing promotional emails against each other is a cornerstone of the marketing feedback loop. GetResponse allows you to test up to five emails against each other. Mailchimp only allows up to three and Campaign Monitor only allows two.
- Web fonts: Being able to use a wide range of fonts in promotional emails is important but GetResponse does not yet support support web fonts. Two of its biggest competitors, Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor, do allow web fonts.
Final Thoughts
GetResponse is an excellent tool that provides features over and above many of its biggest competitors. The automation tools alone are worth the monthly price for many companies that want a much more in-depth control of their promotional emails.
In today’s media-saturated world, GetResponse goes well beyond a simple email marketing tool and provides in-depth analytics, automation features, and sales funnel features that make it a serious contender.