GetResponse Marketing Automation Platform Review

GetResponse started out as an email marketing software provider in 1997, and currently boasts 350 000 customers, who are served by more than 300 staff members.

The GetResponse marketing automation platform is geared specifically for small businesses who want to grow, and your entire marketing strategy can be implemented from one dashboard.

The following review goes a long way to helping you choose the best tool for your business.

Why businesses invest in marketing automation platforms

Before you can understand the benefits of marketing automation platforms, it’s necessary to understand the basic tasks around online marketing.

For every business it’s different, but you’ll find that at the core of most initiatives, is email marketing.

When you first begin marketing your business online, chances are that you’ll start with basic email marketing (and that’s always a good place to start), and as you become more familiar with it, you’ll begin to think up more advanced, better ways of doing things.

Image Credit: VirtualBusinessSolutions.Biz

When you get to that point, it’s time to consider marketing automation tools like GetResponse, which takes the core of digital marketing to a whole new level.

It’s at this stage that you may feel overwhelmed from all the tasks needed to be done, and if you were to do them all manually, you’d have to dedicate the entire day, every day, just to marketing.

When you see a visual representation of what I’m referring to, you’ll get the picture:

During the next phase of your business, you’d need to integrate various other elements, so that your marketing initiatives don’t become stagnant. For example, you could use webinars as a way to get more subscribers, and then you’d need webinar landing pages and registration forms. You may also want a picture of the behavior of your website visitors, to understand more about their needs.

You might want to conduct surveys, so that you know how to improve your marketing activities. If you own an online store, you may want to know what makes people abandon shopping carts, and how you can get them back to your website.

Perhaps a consideration may be that you get better results from your email marketing because of segmentation and scoring.

By utilizing marketing automation platforms, businesses:

Save time (because everything is automated)
Save money (when the features of a marketing automation tool are purchased from other vendors separately, the layout is huge. A marketing automation tool cuts the cost down by about at least ¾)
Improves the reputation of your brand (because the design work of the templates provided is done for you, by professionals)
Guides and educates you as you go, so that you don’t need to actually learn how to do online marketing, although knowledge about it is highly beneficial
Streamline their processes, to create a better customer experience

Levels of marketing automation platforms

No two marketing automation platforms are the same, but all revolve around email marketing.

There are three levels of tools available:

Level 1: beginner’s marketing – these tools only offer email marketing as a service.
Level 2: professional marketing by entrepreneurs – these platforms have advanced features that plug in to email marketing efforts.
Level 3: professional marketing by teams of people – these tools are developed for teams, not one-man businesses. Most of them include additional services like CRM and sales teams notifications.

GetResponse sits on level 2 of the triangle. It was created for small businesses that want to grow.

GetResponse features

Email marketing planning

Planning is made simple with the workflow planner which works with a “if this, then that” principle, using triggers, conditions and filters. The thing about the planner, is that so long as you have set up your emails and their content, as you create processes in the planner, the system updates the entire tool, so that you don’t have to go and physically make any changes anywhere else.

An example of workflow planning is that you can create a process that instructs the software to send a specific email to someone who abandons their shopping cart. The planner is highly intelligent, simplifies your life and GetResponse is the only tool on it’s level that offers this feature.

Automated email marketing

It goes without saying that GetResponse, just as all the other tools do, includes automated email marketing, email templates and analytics. What’s different about their email marketing software is:

It comes with 1000+ free stock images.
It has advanced functionality, like segmentation, tagging and scoring, in order to produce better results.
GetResponse provides sign-up form templates and makes it easy to add them to websites. Most platforms do not offer this, and it can make life a lot more difficult because you’d need to use 3rd party plugins to make it all work.

Landing page builder

The landing page builder is what saves the most time, because the templates are designed by professional marketers who understand all the elements of good design. That doesn’t guarantee high conversions though, because you would still need a good copywriter to write the copy, which is the most important part of a landing page.

Most marketing automation platforms offer this feature, so there’s not too much different about this, although you can choose from a variety of categories.

Webinar software

Many entrepreneurs choose not to host webinars, probably because there’s still too much “mystery” surrounding them. But GetResponse completely removes the mystery and webinars can be set up in a matter of minutes, provided you already have the content for one.

GetResponse provides a start-to-end webinar process which was designed specifically for marketing purposes.

What is especially great about this feature, is that when the webinar is done ‘n dusted, it can be saved to YouTube, so it doubles up in value, as extra content for your business.

As part of their start-to-end webinar process, GetResponse offers landing page and registration templates.

Website traffic tracking

Get an exact overall picture of the behavior of your website visitors, whether yours is an ecommerce store, or information website. When you understand their behaviour, you can do great things, like make website improvements and maximize pages for higher conversions. You can also plan email marketing workflows, based on user behavior.

For example, from the tracking software, you can see that when a visitor gets to a certain page, they tend to hang around it more than on other pages of your website. This allows analyzation to ascertain what’s making them stay on that page longer. Maybe that page has an element that other pages don’t have. Knowing that, you can add that same element to other pages.

Using the planner, decide how best to use the information you find out from the web tracker.

Survey service

Surveys are a powerful way of extracting precious information from your customers, that you can use for higher conversions. Included in the GetResponse marketing automation platform, is a survey service.

Added to the fact that the software makes it so easy to set up, is that when you’ve collected the data, the system puts it into nice, understandable graphs, so that there’s no need to wade through numbers and text trying to interpret participant feedback.

A/B testing

Online marketing can be a tricky business, and requires constant testing, tweaking and improving. GetResponse offers A/B testing, to easily produce different versions of emails and landing pages, to find out which ones work best.

Integrations

Choose between 137 applications to integrate with, and if you can’t find one in the list, submit your app to GetResponse for consideration.

Ease of use

GetResponse has been known for years as the world’s easiest marketing software. Now that they’ve added a ton more features to make it a complete marketing automation tool, it still is the easiest of all the tools to use. The logic they use just works.

For instance, this is the dashboard:

It can’t get much easier than this…

Pricing

Marketing automation tools in the same range as GetResponse, vary in price between $45 and $49 per month. GetResponse charges $49 for their pro package which includes all the features (and more) that are listed in this review.