Build Your Email List Today With GetResponse (30-Day Free Trial)

In this GetResponse review, you will find out if GetReponse is a viable solution for your email marketing when finding much software that does the same job.

There are literally hundreds of email marketing services you can sign up for today and start building your email list regarding email marketing. One of the most popular email marketing tools is GetResponse.

GetResponse was founded in 1999 by Simon Grabowski, and currently, there are over 350 employees and whopping 350,000 customers.

Personally, I have used GetResponse since the middle of 2016 and have gotten great experience so far.

Therefore, today, I thought to share my experience using GetResponse email marketing software and its pros and cons.

At the end of this GetResponse review, I have also released an important personal message, so I recommend reading this through GetResponse review and drop your comments to let the world know your experiences with GetResponse and comparisons GetResponse vs. XYZ tool. You know what I meant, right?

Great, let’s dive into GetResponse and determine whether it fits nicely for your marketing plan in 2021.

If you are a bit tedious to read all this GetResponse review, then here’s a “Table Of Contents” of this post. Click on each chapter hyperlink to move on.

The Ultimate GetResponse Review: Experience-Based Unbiased Review

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Contacts

One major thing every marketer is looking for in every online email marketing tool is a secure, good, and flexible contacts management system (CMS).

In fact, the key to success in email marketing is managing your subscribers well. If you cannot add and remove contacts from your email lists, then you can’t actually make out of it.

Concerning contacts management, GetResponse gets nine out of ten stars. (10/10 stars is perfect, right? 😉 )

Here are few key features of GetResponse Contacts.

Unlimited Contact Lists

Like most other email marketing service providers, GetResponse offers unlimited “Contacts Lists,” yet a limited number of total subscribers.

That’s the pricing model most email marketing services use these days. Some use email messages per month. However, unlimited contacts lists based on certain contacts are the most popular and populated pricing model.

Single Opt-in and Double Opt-in

If you intend to use GetResponse for transactional emails, you would be glad to have an option to change the email subscription setting from Double Opt-in, which is what most email marketing service providers have by default, to Single Opt-in.

The good thing is you can enable Single Opt-in very easily inside the setting of the current email list (or contact list). It is not limited to subscriptions based on web contact forms (the HTML forms method) and subscriptions made through API or direct application integration.

Primary Settings

Email messages like the confirmation email, unsubscribe email, and pages like confirmation and unsubscribe are essential parts of your email marketing campaigns.

The very first look at your personality and business from a new subscriber’s perspective is your first mail (or email confirmation message) and confirmation page (or thank you page).

If those things are poorly designed, inappropriately prepared, broadly targeted, and non-creative, then there is very little chance of getting positive attention out of your new subscribers. Fortunately, GetResponse provides almost all facilities to customize your list’s confirmation message and confirmation page.

Custom Fields

By default, by all means, most marketers would want only to have name and email address fields under contact details. However, if you’re a local business, you may want to grab custom information like Mobile phone number, address, and Zip Code, etc.

Currently, GetResponse has these custom fields, which you can enable whenever you want without editing anything.

(Note: Field values must be available to customize them. Else you have to customize your tags)

Field Name	Field Type	User Defined?	Visibility	Shortcode	Default Value(s)
work_phone	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus work_phone]]	—
url	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus url]]	—
street	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus street]]	—
state	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus state]]	—
ref	text	Yes	Hidden	[[cus ref]]	—
postal_code	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus postal_code]]	—
phone	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus phone]]	—
mobile_phone	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus mobile_phone]]	—
list_name	text	No	Shown	[[cus list_name]]	—
http_referer	text	No	Hidden	[[cus http_referer]]	—
home_phone	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus home_phone]]	—
gender	single_select	No	Shown	[[cus gender]]	Female, Male
fax	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus fax]]	—
country	single_select	No	Shown	[[cus country]]	Default Values
company	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus company]]	—
comment	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus comment]]	—
city	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus city]]	—
birthdate	text	Yes	Shown	[[cus birthdate]]	—
age	single_select	No	Shown	[[cus age]]	18-29, 30-44, 45-59, 60+, <18

If you’re holding a local event or a webinar and want to create custom fields in GetResponse to have custom dates or something like that, you can create them instantly.

Overall, Custom fields in GetResponse are helpful concerning they support almost the most wanted fields, and you can create custom fields easily.

List Hygiene

List Hygiene is a life-saver tool.

Not all of your subscribers will ever engage with your emails.

And a few may have subscribed to multiple email lists which distribute the same marketing messages or have the same conversion funnel. That’s where List Hygiene comes in handy.

With GetResponse List Hygiene, you could find inactive subscribers who haven’t opened your messages in a certain time and can remove all of them from your GetResponse email lists.

Or block certain email addresses based on the email client or email service provider they had used.

Suppression Lists

As the name suggests itself, Suppression Lists filter contacts based on email addresses they have used when signing up for your email list.

I have personally found that when I run a giveaway, contest, and offer bribe instead of email address, a chunk of people uses disposable email services.

So, you can utilize GetResponse Suppression Lists feature to have valid email addresses.

Import Contacts

Well, you might have used an in-house email marketing software like Sendy, Mautic before considering using a subscription-based, cloud email marketing software like GetResponse, or even a free email marketing service like MailChimp.

In my case, I have been using MailChimp before moving to GetResponse.

Or a case like you have run a viral marketing campaign using an external tool such as UpViral and want to import contact details collected from the viral campaign to your email marketing service.

Although you’re in any case scenario, you can import contacts to GetResponse in three ways.

1. Upload a file: You can use: CSV, TXT, VCF, XLS, XLSX, ODS up to 10MB each file size.
2. Connect a Service: Supported ones: Zendesk, HighRise, Magento, SalesForce, Google Docs, Google Contacts, Formstack, FreshBooks, BatchBook.
3. Paste from File: Name and custom fields are followed by email address.

You may be asked a few questions to verify your email list’s validity and check whether it has been created legitimately.

Export Contacts

Someday you might want to migrate your email lists from GetResponse to other email marketing services or CRM software like Gist.

For that, you can use the ‘GetResponse Export tool’ to download contact details in three formats: CSV, XML, and XLS.

Contact Details

It is better off sometimes to analyze subscriber activities on your email marketing campaigns manually to understand whether your marketing funnels work as you wanted and identify subscriber behaviors in certain niches. Ex: Internet Marketing vs. Weight Loss

Email Marketing

GetResponse is an email marketing service. Literally, their service is tied to email marketing.

Like most other email marketing tools online, GetResponse also offers unlimited autoresponders, unlimited broadcasts, and awesome yet significant features like responsive email designs.

In this section, I am going to review the GetResponse email marketing facilities I have experienced.

Newsletters

Getresponse email newsletters functionality is very powerful. It comes with handy features and tools like:

Drag-and-drop email newsletter builder

Design email newsletters in minutes with intuitive, easy-to-use newsletter builder.

Custom fields in subject line:

Personalize your email messages with subject lines like “Hey Simon, you haven’t downloaded my latest ebook”

Time Travel

Send email newsletters based on timezones your subscribers are in.

Spam Score

A numeric value ranging from 0 to 5, which indicates the possibility of stopping your email message in the email spam folder.

Test email

See how your message looks like by testing it yourself.

Inbox Preview

See how your messages appear on each ESP and email clients, including mobile devices.

A/B Test

Find out which subject line and message works best according to certain metrics.

Look at the example A/B test’s setting for the message I have sent before for the PixelMe review blog post.

Google Analytics integration

Add UTM tags automatically to link in email messages.

Message Attachments

Send small files to your subscribers. (up to 400 KB)

Re-use email messages

Duplicate and send email messages.

Message Types

Basically, there are two email message types:

1. Plain​​​​​
2. HTML (or Rich)

The uses of each message type differ from niche to niche and from time to time. If you want to send a happy birthday wish to your customer, it is better off to send a message in an HTML-rich template.

However, for occasions like more-clicked-needed, you would be using a plain text message type as statistics have shown that plain text messages generally tend to get high CTR and HTML-rich messages.

Or you can build your own email template from scratch.

You can take a step further by importing own HTML email template in three ways.

1. Paste Code: copy and paste the HTML source code into your HTML email template.
2. From ZIP: install the custom HTML template you received from your developer.
3. From URL: import customized HTML template to GetResponse by the web address.

Autoresponders

Before Marketing Automation comes into play, Autoresponders was the favorite and most used. And still, email autoresponders are very effective in most scenarios. GetResponse Autoresponder works like other autoresponder programs; Email messages will be sent upon the dates and times you specify.

However, email autoresponders are not as effective as automation messages or action-based messages. So, you may not find it as a tool that you should use regularly.

RSS-to-Email

If you’re running a blog and want to notify newsletter subscribers of the latest blog posts, you can utilize RSS-to-email in GetResponse. 

I haven’t used RSS-to-email (like in forever!) because I want to send personalized emails to my subscribers.

Marketing Automation

These days, there is every other automation tool for every aspect we expect to get done fast, automatically.

When it comes to modern email marketing, we couldn’t forget marketing automation. It is as important as your social media strategy.

Action-based emails or automation emails are generally used for lesser target subscribers and increase emails — Ex: more open rates, less compliant rates, etc.

So, in this GetResponse review, if I couldn’t mention my experiences with GetResponse Automation features, it will be a BIG miss for the review of GetResponse.

Visual Drag-and-Drop Workflow Builder

Generally, automation campaigns are based upon conditional functions such as If THIS, then do THIS. Hence, it would sometimes take some serious trouble to build a marketing automation campaign without a visual appearance.

However, with the use of ‘GetResponse Visual Workflow Builder, you can make marketing automation campaigns easily.

GetResponse also shows how many current email list subscribers have completed each step, so it gives you a rough idea of what are the common behaviors of average subscribers. (ex: interested in ABC topic or not.)

That’s why you can tag them based on each movement for targeting people on later campaigns. (ex: it doesn’t make sense to follow up with WordPress website building email automation sequence if your subscriber also has WordPress sites.)

Automation Conditions, Filters, and Actions

Currently, GetResponse has a few automation triggers and actions. However, a few of them are not allowed to use according to the monthly GetResponse plan you have subscribed to.

Loops

You may be wanting to run an evergreen campaign (ex: send popular blog posts), but don’t know how to do it by using an email marketing software.Well, with ‘GetResponse Marketing Automation’, you can run a certain automation multiple times. Just toggle the “Run multiple times” option in “Properties” tab.

Forms & Surveys

Increase your email list’s size is one of the top priorities you should have in your to-do list of online marketing. Because statistics have repeatedly shown that marketing scape in the digital age has revolutionized a lot during the past decade. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you could receive an averagely of $40 back at the end of the year. Or in other words, ROI for email marketing is 4,000%!

I’m blown away by the hundreds of attractive email signup forms in GetResponse. So, here I review GetResponse forms and surveys and their main features.

Email Sign up forms library

GetResponse has 100’s of pre-made email signup forms in their library. You can filter them by form type and form format.

Form Types	Form Formats
General	Side column 220px x 300px
Newsletter Sign-up	Wide 460px x 250px
Free Course Sign-up	Wider 700px x 200px
Free download	Max 940px x 150px
Leave Feedback	Square 460px x 460 px
Facebook
Even Sign-up
Blank
Order
Seasonal
Ask a Question

And you can do a magic!

Either way, you’re going to find dozens of beautiful email signup forms.

They are 100% mobile-friendly (or, in other words, responsive email sign-up forms), so they will look as beautiful in all device types.

Webform Creator

GetResponse has its own web form creator, in which you can design email sign-up forms by yourself. The best part is you don’t have to know HTML or CSS languages. Drag-and-drop email signup form builder makes creating web forms easier.

You can add more fields to email signup form.

​Split test email signup forms by adding different variants to each form. (ex: change headings, colors, font-sizes etc.)Set custom thank you page and enable reCAPTCHA to decrease spam sign-ups.

Plain HTML Form Builder

Do you have an app that doesn’t support API integration with GetResponse? And you want to send subscriber data to GetResponse? Then you can use plain HTML form builder to generate HTML code for your list and embed it in your app.

List Builder Apps

Nowadays, you see many web forms such as exit pop-ups (appear when the visitor tries to exit from a page) and fixed bars (generally appear on top of web page).

Here is the list of list builder apps in GetResponse.

You can edit email signup forms easily.

Integrations

GetResponse supports direct integration to a few popular services. They are;

For example, you can add a signup tab to your facebook fan page.

Basic Surveys

You can create basic surveys inside your GetResponse account and collect subscriber opinions.

Survey Statistics

Once people have completed the survey, you can analyze the data by checking survey statistics.

Integrations & API

GetResponse is one of the most popular and old email marketing services. Therefore, many web applications and services already have direct integration with GetResponse. And with API, you can even do more tasks by connecting other SaaS tools you’re currently using. (ex: tagging, lead scoring, removing from the list)

Here is the list of Integrations.

You can generate a GetResponse API key to connect with tools such as ConvertBox (It’s currently running a lifetime offer) and Convertful (Find out more in this review of Convertful).

If your software doesn’t support any integrations with GetRespose, use a tool like Integrately to connect many apps effortlessly. Learn more in this review of Integrately.

Statistics

Statistics is essential for your business to calculate certain metrics and know benchmarks. Luckily, GetResponse provides comprehensive statistics. Ex: list growth, subscribers’ locations.

And email broadcast statistics.

Compare with a previous message to see engagement per each newsletter.

You can even set goals to see how well your email marketing campaigns convert on your website. To name a few goals — trial sign-ups, coupon activations, sales, renewals, re-subscription, referral signups.

Multimedia Studio

If you’re sending visual content like photos and videos and attach documents along with your newsletters, you can find all of them in Multimedia Studio of GetResponse.

Also, you can use free images by iStock in your email campaigns and landing pages.

Mobile Apps

If you want to use GetResponse prominently for marketing stuff, having a mobile application would be really helpful.

GetResponse provides mobile apps for both iOS and Android operating systems. You can download them directly from the Apple Store and Android Play Store.

After login to GetResponse account, you can see statistics for email campaigns and send newsletters.

Tutorials and Guides

If you’re starting as an online marketer and want to build an email list from scratch with GetResponse, you might want to learn more about GetResponse features, tools, and how to use them effectively to grow your business faster.

I have used MailChimp before migrating to GetResponse. So, I had a basic knowledge of using an email marketing service.

However, I needed to learn more advanced stuff like marketing automation myself. In those cases, GetResponse supportive guides and tutorials helped me a lot.

You can learn more about GetResponse and how to use it better by,

Customer Support

I have contacted GetResponse customer support a few times so far, and I have given them “Thumb-ups” after every conversation as the customer feedback. You can contact GetResponse representatives through,

1. Starting a live chat conversation on their website.
2. Sending an email message to them. Use sales@getresponse.com (only for sales inquiries) or their Feedback page (recommended).

GetResponse customer support agents are friendly, nice, and answer questions in seconds. Also, they are available 24X7. So you know you can contact them at any moment,

Pricing

GetResponse has four subscription-based packages which change to each other from the features allowed and the list size. For example, the basic paid package allows 1,000 contacts, and it costs $15 per month (when billed monthly).

Their subscription packages have changed since I signed up, so as of now, you might see different prices. So, I recommend visiting their pricing page to see the packages they offer currently.

GetResponse Free Trial

The good news is they offer a 30-day free trial, in which, unfortunately, you can’t have more than 1,000 subscribers and only one landing page available. But, you can test-drive ALL GetResponse features for 30 days and get used to it pretty easily without hassle.

I signed up for the GetResponse 30-days trial first and then subscribed to a paid plan. No credit card is required to sign up for GetResponse. That is a wow-that’s-good moment for those who are just starting.

On your account & billing page, you would find add-ons such as Multi-user, landing pages, and webinar attendees.

GetResponse Review in Brief

Key Takeaways

GetResponse Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

Should you sign up for GetResponse?

When I first started a blog on BlogSpot, honestly, I didn’t know the importance of building an email list. However, somehow I used Feedburner for my blog.

Then, after coming to know the specialties of email marketing software, I used MailChimp’s free plan.

Although MailChimp is a good email marketing tool, it didn’t make me happy because of reasons like the inability to use a single Opt-in (now they support single opt-in). Therefore, I researched information on the Internet and found GetResponse as a viable option.

To be honest, GetResponse’s 30-day free trial without a credit card impacted me a LOT in those times because I was comparing GetResponse vs. Aweber. In those days, Aweber only had a 30-day $1 trial.

GetResponse is one of those rare email marketing tools that support Solo Advertising. So, if you intend to use Solo ads traffic to build your list, promote affiliate products, or even become a Solo ad seller, GetResponse would be an ideal choice.

Conclusion on GetResponse Review

I have been using GetResponse for over a year now and didn’t face any issue sending messages. Contact support is responsive, and GetResponse has an Android app that eases my life.

However, when your email list becomes a big one, you will understand that ALL traditional email marketing tools are pricey. That’s when I decided to move from GetResponse over to the Gist marketing automation platform. Click here to learn more about Gist.

If you’re just starting and building your audience from scratch, GetResponse is a good email marketing tool.

The only downsides are the ones I have mentioned under “Don’t Like.” Else, it would be a great email marketing software for you to start your online marketing journey.

You can give GetResponse a try by signing up for a 30-day free trial by this link. You have 30 days (a month) to decide whether you should continue using it or not.

So, this is my reviews on GetResponse. What are your thoughts about GetResponse? Which email marketing software do you use? Share your comments below.