GetResponse Review: Here’s Why I Left GetResponse After 2 Years

When it comes to email marketing, there are literally hundreds of email marketing services out there you can sign up today and start building your email list. 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 with you my experience on using GetResponse email marketing software and pros and cons.

At the end of this GetResponse review, I have also released 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, then let’s dive into GetResponse and find out whether it fits nicely for your marketing plan in 2019.

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.

One major thing every marketer 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.

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 emails messages per month, however unlimited contacts lists based on certain contacts are the most popular and populated pricing model.

If you’re intending to use GetResponse for transactional emails, you would be glad to have an option to change email subscription setting from Double Opt-in which is 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 current email list (or contact list). It is not limited to subscriptions based on web contact forms (the HTML forms method), but also for subscriptions which are made through API or direct application integration.

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 in 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 a positive attention out of your new subscribers.

Fortunately, GetResponse provides almost all facilities to customize your list’s confirmation message and confirmation page.

By default, by all means, most marketers would want to only have name and email address fields under contacts 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 in order to customize them. Else you have to customize your tags)

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 is very good concerning they support almost most-wanted fields and you can create custom fields easily.

List Hygiene is a life-saver tool.

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

And a few may have subscribed to multiple email lists which distribute same marketing messages or have 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 email client or email service provider they had used.

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.

Well, you might have used an in-house email marketing software like Mailster ($59), MailWizz ($54) prior to 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 prior moving to GetResponse.

Or a case like you’ve run a viral marketing campaign using an external tool and want to import contact details collected from viral campaign to your email marketing service.

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

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

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

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

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

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 have awesome, yet very important features like responsive email designs.

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

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

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

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

Send email newsletters based on timezones your subscribers are in.

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

See how your message looks like by testing it yourself.

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

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.

Add UTM tags automatically to link in email messages.

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

Duplicate and send email messages.

Basically, there are two email message types:

The uses of each message types differ from niche to niche and time to time.

If you want to send a happy birthday wish for 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 tend to get high CTR and HTML-rich messages generally.

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.

Before Marketing Automation comes into play, Autoresponders was favorite and most used. and still, email autoresponders are very effective in most scenarios.

GetResponse Autoresponder works just 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 should be used regularly.

If you’re running a blog, and want to notify newsletter subscribers of 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.

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 engagements in emails. Ex: more open rates, less compliant rates etc.

GetResponse recently introduced their brand-new tool, Marketing Automation.

Since they released it, I moved my autoresponder messages to "Marketing Automation" and guess what…

...I got high open rates such as 78.90% (unique numbers!)

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

Generally, automation campaigns are based upon conditional functions such as If THIS, then do THIS. Hence, it would take some serious trouble sometimes to build a marketing automation campaign, if there wasn’t 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.)

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.

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.

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 shown repeatedly that marketing scape in digital age has revolutionized a lot during past decade and every $1 you spend on email marketing, you could receive averagely $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 form in GetResponse. So, here I review GetResponse forms and surveys and their main features.

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

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.

GetResponse has its own webform 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 webforms 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.

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.

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

Here is the list of list builder apps in GetResponse.

You can edit email signup forms easily.

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

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

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

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

GetResponse is one of 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 list)

Here is the list of Integrations.

You can generate GetResponse API key to connect with services like ConvertBar(or ConvertBox) and to use with WordPress plugins like Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads.

Most services like ThriveCart uses authentications to directly connect with your GetResponse account.

Functions you can do with API depend on the API integration level and how deep the integration between GetResponse and software or app is.

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-subscriptions, referral signups

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.

If you want to use GetResponse prominently for marketing stuff, then 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 Apple store, and Android Play Store.

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

If you’re just starting out 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 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,

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,

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

GetResponse has four subscription-based packages which change to each other from the features allowed and the list size.

For example, the very basic package allows total 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 to ​visit their pricing page to see packages they offer currently.

The good news is they offer 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 GetResponse 30-days trial first and then subscribed to a paid plan. Unlike SEMrush free trial, no credit card is required to sign up for GetResponse. That is a wow-that’s-good moment for those who are just starting out.

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

Here is a brief comparison between GetResponse, Aweber, ConvertKit, Gist, MailChimp, and ActiveCampaign.

Note: I have not used ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign personally. So, let me know your experiences about them in the comments below and I would add them to this review of GetResponse.

When I first started blogging 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 an email marketing software, I used MailChimp’s free plan.

Although MailChimp is a good email marketing tool, it didn’t make me happy because for some reasons like the inability of using 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 30-day free trial without a credit card impacted me a LOT in those times because I was comparing GetResponse vs Aweber, however, in those days Aweber only had 30-day $1 trial.

I have been using GetResponse for over a year now and didn’t face any issue sending messages, contact support is responsive and have an Android app which 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 Gist marketing automation platform. Click here to learn more about Gist.

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

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 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 in below.