GetResponse Review
From the time I got into Internet marketing and blogging, I have always heard that your (email) list is the most important thing in your business. But until the past year or so, I’d never put much stock into paying for an email service.
That is until I read that, “Email newsletters are the best way to maintain customer relationships on the Internet.” – Jakob Nielsen When Jakob Nielsen, the king of usability, says that email is important, you’d better take notice.
Base Features
GetResponse offers many features that are common in email services, such as:
- Visual email editor
- Email deliverability in the high 90%
- Follow-up messages
- Broadcast messages
- Statistics
- Rss-to-email
- Web form creator
- and more.
I could keep adding features here, but it’d just be a waste of time. GetResponse is a solid email newsletter offering 99.5% deliverability, which is right at the top of the industry. This alone makes them a serious competitor. But, GetResponse throws in a whole slew of other features that are not common with email newsletter services.
Where GetResponse Excels
GetResponse is not just another email service. Not only do they offer all of the features that you’d expect from an email service that you pay for, but they also go above and beyond with the following:
1000+ Stock Images from iStockphoto
Yea, you read that right. GetResponse includes access to a library of stock images that are free for you to include in your emails. You don’t even have to leave the drag-n-drop email editor now to add great images to your email.
Single Opt-in List Import
When we were looking into moving away from Aweber and Mailchimp, this was one of our biggest concerns. We didn’t want to lose a decent portion of our email list due to them not subscribing again. GetResponse made this process easy and headache-free for us.
Inbox Preview
This is one of my favorite features that GetResponse has. You get to see how your emails will look (with and without images) in many of the most popular email clients as well as on mobile devices. And they don’t charge you any extra for this service.
Time Zone Segmentation
There are many things that you can tweak to get the best opens from your emails. One of these is finding the best delivery time during the day for your emails. Well, that’s not an easy task when you have subscribers all over the world.
GetResponse has a feature called Time Travel that lets you set a time for your email to be delivered in your time zone, and then it’ll automatically deliver your email at the same time in all of the other time zones. Pretty awesome? I think so.
Mobile Apps
I don’t know about you, but I spend so much of my day mobile – Shuttling my son around, going to and from school, and doing all of the other necessities of “life”- that I consider having a mobile app a necessity for any service I am paying for. GetResponse has a very solid mobile app for both iOS and Android devices.
Social Sharing with Metrics
Not only does GetResponse give you the ability to easily add social sharing buttons to your emails, but they also include metrics so you can know how many likes, retweets, and comments you get.
Most powerful of these features would have to be the inbox preview and the 1000+ stock images that come included in your account. I also like how I don’t have to worry about paying extra for features, such as statistics, like I had to do at Aweber.
GetResponse also has amazing support. When I had an issue integrating a website with the GetResponse API, the DevZone support team was able to tell me exactly where my issue was within 1 day through email. This on top of the learning center which includes live webinars and video tutorials.
Bottom Line
I consider GetResponse to be #1 in the email newsletter service, tied with Mailchimp. But, at Art of Blog, we do not recommend Mailchimp for bloggers as their terms of service do not allow affiliate marketing. For these reasons, I highly recommend GetResponse to be used by any business for their email marketing needs.
Special Offer
For a limited time, GetResponse is giving all upgrading all Art of Blog readers from a 1,000 subscribers account to a 5,000 subscribers account at just $24.75 per month. That’s a savings of $180 over 6 months! Whether you’re just starting your email list, or you have an established list, this is a deal and service you don’t want to miss.
You can only get this special offer from Art of Blog by clicking the image below!
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Eric Binnion is a computer science student at Midwestern State University. When Eric is not online, he is usually volunteering in his community or enjoying time with his family. You can find Eric on Twitter.
Haa Eric,this pretty awesome i really don’t know what to say.But the truth is i have had an account with getresponse but never use their services for a single day.this post just remind of something very vital to my online success.thank you.
Hi Shamsudeen,
If you already have an account, be sure to take advantage of it ;)
Thanks for the thumbs up Eric! We really appreciate the review. I would like to say that there is nothing common about our drag and drop email creator (editor). It’s completley unique in the email marketing industry…personally, I’d describe it as amazing! :)
Drop me an email, I’d love to chat about what we have planned — might make for another good post for you.
Regards,
Jim Ducharme
Community Manager
GetResponse
Hi Jim,
You’ve got a good point. I love the editor in GetResponse. My favorites are the snippets and user created templates. I’ve basically created one template for each of the websites I run and it works golden! ;)
Thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment!
Can you get the deal when you have need for a larger list? Say, 20,000?
Hey Melanie,
GetResponse only set up the offer for the 5,000 subscriber list.
Hi Eric, I wonder if you have some time to send me an email to the address that I left on this forum. I have a couple of questions and if you could contact me it would be great. Thank you!
Hey George,
I’ll definitely answer any questions that you have. Visit the contact page and shoot me a message through there.
Thanks for this great review, Eric! I recently signed up for a free trial with GR…but would love to use your special offer! Would it be possible to do that if I already signed up for a free trial?
Great writeup.
The free stock photos and time zone segmentation are a nice touch, but the ability to preview the email in browsers and especially mobile is just awesome.
Look forward to using their service.
Great info as I am comparison shopping for an email service! Your info on MailChimp may need an update; their TOS still says no affiliate marketing but elsewhere on their site they say affiliates ARE okay as long as you don’t engage in certain practices.
Also – Getresponse has some features MailChimp doesn’t (you don’t have to worry about monkeys in your emails!) but their templates and webforms are UGLY!!! I would want to import my own.
Hey Cathy,
Thanks for dropping by and leaving comment. I do see that it looks like Mailchimp has updated their TOS to reflect that affiliate marketing is allowed. Getresponse does allow you to import your own html templates, although I do agree that Mailchimps’s design do win out!
We signed up for the 30 day free trial. 6 days into it, they sent us an email telling us we needed to import our contacts. We did, and immediately they BEGAN CHARGING the credit card we had to enter in order to get the 30 days FREE.
We had never built a template, never sent an email, never done anything with their program. We had used Constant Contact, and they never charged us in the first 30 days until we actually used their service.
In addition, there are real problems with this program so BEWARE! They do not have the ability for subscribers to join more than one list at a time – or to UNSUBSCRIBE to more than one list at a time. This means that you will be reported as SPAM by your customer, b/c if they are on more than one list, and unsubscribe – they will STILL CONTINUE receiving your emails and think that you are spamming them.
LOVE their autoresponder program – but the rest is just a SCAM. We requested an immediate refund 5 days later when we saw they charged our card and we had not yet used the service – but they refused. MORE INTERESTED IN TAKING YOUR MONEY than providing a good service!
BUYER BEWARE!!
Hey Catherine,
I took some time to talk to someone at GetResponse before I commented, that way I could try to fully understand what might’ve happend with your bad experience. This is what we discussed.
First, I do understand where the confusion may be have been with you being charged when you signed up for a trial. This was because GetResponse’s trial is free for 30-days and up to 250 contacts. When you imported your list, you likely went over 250 contacts, which forced you to upgrade. Also, many services do start your trial period from the day you sign up, not from the day you begin using your services. For example, I pay for Netflix and Hulu monthly, even though I rarely ever use the service.
Second, I do not know of any way to sign up for multiple lists with one subscription form. For customers that do need this, GetResponse does provide a robust API, which I have worked with on several projects. GetResponse development support has always been receptive to any of my needs as a developer as well. So, while GetResponse may not provide signing up for multiple lists, there is a way to accomplish it.
Third, you are incorrect about GetResponse not allowing someone to unsubscribe from multiple lists. Attached is a screenshot from when I just tried it.
GetResponse may not have been perfect for you, and I understand that… But warning others to “beware” is not fair assessment in this case.