'Net Features : getresponse

Autoresponders 2.0 from GetResponse

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Email marketing provider GetResponse has released several enhancements to its Autoresponders feature.

The new product, aptly named AutoResponders 2.0, actually replaces GetResponse's previous “Follow-Ups” feature. The new feature includes two categories (different types of autoresponders) – time-based autoresponders (also known as drip campaigns) and event-based autoreponders.

GetResponse’s time-based autoresponders enable marketers to create unlimited messages per cycle, schedule delivery of multiple messages on single days, schedule messages for immediate delivery or with a delay, specify the number of hours to delay, specify the day of the week and more.

The event-based autoresponders mimic the logic of one-to-one email correspondence as they can be triggered in response to user behavior. Some of those behaviors include clicking a link, opening an email, changing a custom field, completion of a goal, even birthday messages.

“To be successful online, SMBs need to build customer relationship with consistent, relevant and regular communications,” said GetResponse Founder and CEO Simon Grabowski. “With Autoresponders 2.0 marketers can use automation to maintain ongoing 1-to-1 communication effortlessly.”

Delivering Email on Time

Allison Howen — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:00:00 GMT

While email remains the king of online marketing, the success of a campaign can only be measured through subscriber engagement.

This means that marketers need to closely monitor and analyze their consumers’ habits in order to give their campaigns the greatest chance of achieving success. Luckily for the time-strapped, a recent study from GetResponse is shedding some light on this subject.

The email marketing provider’s study analyzed 21 million messages sent from US accounts in the 1st quarter of 2012 to determine email’s top open, click-through and engagement times among consumers. One of the most important data points of the study revealed that sending newsletters during the top engagement times of 8 a.m. – 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. – 4 p.m. can increase the average open rates and click-through rates (CTR) of messages by 6 percent.

The study also found that messages receive the best results within the first hour after delivery, with 23.63 percent of emails being opened during that time frame. Conversely, 24 hours after delivery the average open rate is close to zero. This means that if you send your email at the wrong time, such as during the typical 5 p.m. commute home from work, you are dramatically decreasing the chances of your message actually being opened because your subscribers will most likely not even see the message for a few hours.

Other findings showed that almost 40 percent of all messages are sent between 6 a.m. and noon. This means that even though one of the peak engagement times falls within this period, marketers should be careful when sending during these times so that their messages don’t become a part of inbox clutter and remain unopened. One way to avoid having your messages go unnoticed is by scheduling emails to arrive in the inbox no later than one hour before the top open times.

However, while timing is certainly significant, marketers must also remember that all of their subscribers might not live in the same time zone. This is why it is important to segment lists or use tools, such as GetResponse Time Travel, to directly target time zones across the globe. It is also important to note that the best way to determine the optimal open, click-through and engagement times for your specific consumers is to monitor your campaign’s own analytics. In fact, this is the only way that your brand's campaign can achieve true perfect timing.

Check out this snapshot from GetResponse's infographic below:

Create a Social Impact with Email

Allison Howen — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 10:00:00 GMT

Although email still might be the king of marketing, a little help from social media could turn a newsletter into viral, must share content.

This is why small business email marketing provider GetResponse released new enhancements to its services, which allow email marketers to encourage social sharing as well as monitor the buzz of their campaign messages.

“Our vision was to take the guesswork out of social sharing,” says Simon Grabowski, GetResponse founder and CEO. “Now marketers can easily add social share buttons to their newsletters, then track social reactions and engagement.”

The social sharing buttons are available in the Email Creator interface, and include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. The buttons can be added to newsletters via drag and drop functionality, and require no additional configuration from marketers.

Once emails are sent out, marketers can track the social interactions of their campaigns through social sharing statistics – which are located in a tab inside of the Email Analytics. The sharing metrics include graphs and charts that provide insights into the level of engagement in each social channel. Reader reactions are also measured, such as tweets, likes, pins, +1’s, LinkedIn shares, retweets, re-likes and comments.

These new social sharing features enable email marketers to identify and target their brand's most engaged social networks, so that they can optimize future marketing campaigns to these channels. Additionally, the Social Sharing tools are currently available for all GetResponse accounts.

“Email marketers have an ongoing need to expand into new, profitable markets,” says Grabowski. “Social Sharing enables them to identify and target those markets with pinpoint accuracy.”

GetResponse Launches App for Email Marketers

Allison Howen — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:50:00 GMT

A new Android app from email marketing provider GetResponse provides email marketers with the ability to control their campaigns, marketing lists and email reports from their mobile devices.

The app offers marketers immediate and continuous monitoring and management of email campaigns. Authorized users of the app will be able to create and send plain-text emails to marketing-list contacts, preview HTML versions of newsletters and follow up messages, send and schedule newsletters, add new contacts to lists, import contacts from a smartphone address book, search database lists, view contact details, track new subscribers and view charts that display open rates, clicks, bounces and other valuable metrics.

And although the web-based desktop version of GetResponse should still be used for more complex functions like design, the mobile app presents a way for marketers to monitor their campaigns at all times.

“Our objective is to deliver progressive SaaS solutions to help our customers develop and expand their business,” says Simon Grabowski, GetResponse founder and CEO. “We constantly update the functionality of GetResponse to increase the effectiveness of email marketing. The new Android App is yet another innovation to make lives of busy customers easier."

Check out some screenshots of the app:

Power of Social Sharing in Email

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:30:00 GMT

Social sharing is an important element of successful email campaigns, according to recent data from email marketing service provider GetResponse.

Despite the positive effect that results from including social sharing buttons within email, only 18.3 percent actually integrate them within their designs. That's actually a 40-percent increase year over year so the practice is picking up momentum.

The reason for the greater usage, according to GetResponse, is pretty straightforward in that it works towards generating a higher click-through-rate (CTR). In fact, 115 percent higher.

GetResponse put together this nice infographic of the Share is Power effect, but a few of the highlights include the following:

- Facebook, included in 91 percent of social email, is the most popular sharing option.

- LinkedIn sharing buttons are less popular. The number of email including LinkedIn actually dropped 25 percent. Twitter dropped too, but just 10 percent.

- The number of shares per 10,000 emails was still comparatively small - Facebook (23), Twitter (7) and LinkedIn (4) does emphasize the virtual impact, however.

Via: GetResponse Email Marketing

Find the ROI of Email with GetResponse

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:30:00 GMT

Email marketing service GetResponse has focused more of its attention on analytics, launching a solution which aims to bring some much needed intelligence about email ROI by providing "one-chart" comparisons of different messages to help marketers identify trends.

The tool, dubbed Email Intelligence, is able to track sales and conversions occuring on the website without the need for integration with other software. How that actually happens is not addressed in the announcement, but the platform is showing number of visits, sales, sign-ups or downloads coming from email campaign links.

Email Intelligence calculates averages for each metric to identify the weakest and best-performing elements of a campaign, reporting patterns, and providing email marketers the ability to segment and email specific groups in a few clicks from the insights generated directly on the report.

Many of the features will be appealing to Web workers. For example, marketers can pinpoint the time of day certain groups open and click; ideal for those scheduling their emails.

With 44 percent of marketers rating email marketing ROI as the most significant challenge to email marketing effectiveness in 2011, and 68 percent mention targeting recipients with highly relevant content, the Get REsponse solution seems to come at an important time. (MarketingSherpa, 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark)

Email Service Providers Become Social-Ready

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:00:00 GMT

One of the benefits of using an email service provider is that the best vendors help support your subscriber acquisition efforts.

ESP’s typically do this by providing Web forms. Content submitted through this forms is then piped from the website collecting the information into the database being stored at the ESP. With the influx of attention around social media however, email service providers are increasingly offering their clients a means to do at least some of this necessary acquisition legwork on popular social media sites – namely Facebook.

To date, most of the work done with “social” on the part of email service providers has revolved around SWYN (Share With Your Network) features which give the ability to post a notice on Facebook and Twitter about the most recent newsletter/email sent, and hope that it gets shared by users. That’s useful but there are other ways to use social media for the sake of email – again, in terms of recipient acquisition.

Email marketing software provider AWeber has been the most recent entrant in the cause to leverage social for the good of email. Users of the service can now enable the Facebook registration feature which automatically prefills a prospective subscriber’s information (name and email) into a Web form, as long as they are logged into the social network.

While the Aweber feature could lower the barriers to acquisition marketers should consider the trust and privacy implications for users who may question the rather aggressive approach.

Website Magazine looked into what other email marketing software and service vendors are doing to support the increasing interest in using social to drive acquisition with email. iContact offers an integrated set of social media tools, including customizable, Facebook-ready sign-up forms, a means to add sharing buttons to emails and Facebook and Twitter publishing. ConstantContact is another that obviously recognizes the role social is playing in email success. It’s Join My Mailing List application, which was launched in late 2009, enables marketers to collect email addresses on their Facebook brand pages. Another of my recommended ESP’s, GetResponse, doesn't offer a Facebook form for subscriptions but does provide an import tool dubbed List Booster which enables email marketers to upload email lists from mail clients or other services, including LinkedIn.

There are of course many others email marketing service providers which offer social sharing features – too many to mention. Collecting subscribers through is only one benefit from being at the intersection of email and social. With the rich data that comes from social interaction, email marketers are also now empowered with an ability to approach those most influential to their success.

One of the problems email marketers have encountered is in understanding who their most influential subscribers are – something which could prove very useful. A new solution from email marketing provider BlueHortnet Networks, dubbed Social Influencers Strategy Blueprint, could be the answer. The solution offers marketers the ability to identify members of their subscriber email list who actively share email content across their personal social networks, segment those subscriber based on their social sharing behavior, and send them targeted email to further motivate social sharing activity. By being able to connect with “influencers”, marketers also have an ability to attract more loyal users, buyers, and subscribers.

What other innovations as an email marketers are you seeing today? And what social media features does your email service provider offer? Share your comments below with other Website Magazine readers!

Email Marketing Services for Non-Profits

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:56:00 GMT

Online marketing solution provider Implix announced today it will give non-profits a discount of 50% on its GetResponse email marketing services. If you're a non-profit (particuarly one with a larger list) this is a great opportunity to save a few dollars and get on board with a top tier ESP.

“Times are especially difficult for non-profits,” explained Simon Grabowski, Implix CEO and founder of GetResponse. "Individual and corporate contributors are tightening their purse strings, while government funding has all but disappeared. But what we are discovering at GetResponse is that this economic pressure is leading many agencies and companies to invest in email marketing and, increasingly, wean themselves off more expensive, lower-ROI tactics. At GetResponse, we have enthusiastically supported non-profits for over a decade and hope this new incentive will allow them to not only survive, but thrive for years to come.”

The only application requirement is to provide Implix/GetResponse the required contact information and 501(c) (3) documentation. Once approved, non-profit teams can begin using the service.

GetResponse Users Get Access to iStockPhoto Images

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 16:48:00 GMT

Email marketing service provider GetResponse is seperating itself from the competition in a rather unique and user-centric manner - images.

The ESP just announced that it is offering 1000 email ready graphics and pictures free - available from within GetResponse accounts - thanks to a partnership with iStockPhoto.

“When it comes to competing for attention in today’s overcrowded inboxes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and iStockphoto is the 'go to' site for high-quality media. Based on our latest GetResponse study, media-rich HTML emails can deliver up to 59% higher CTRs than plain text messages. So we wanted to make it easy for SMB marketers to boost their email marketing response rates all year long – without spending a dime of their 2011 budgets.”

Multimedia Storage at Your ESP

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:23:00 GMT

Multimedia marketers are going to love this one. Email marketing provider GetResponse announced that it is increasing (a 100-fold increase mind you) the storage it provides.

GetResponse Free Accounts can use up to 100 MB and GetResponse Pro Accounts up to 1 GB of rich media storage. As far as I know, this is the most storage any email service provider offers.

“Rich media email marketing can help small businesses overcome inbox fatigue, increase subscriber engagement, and attract high-value social media audiences,” said Simon Grabowski, Implix CEO and founder of GetResponse. “We hope this increase in media storage will encourage small businesses to increase their email marketing ROI with rich media -- and we’re delighted to be able to provide it at no additional cost.”

Email-Social Segmentation Simplified

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:51:00 GMT

Kudos to email and social media mavens for realizing that two great mediums work perfectly well together and that one will not (or should not) entirely replace the other.

There seems to be lots of evidence to support this. GetResponse.com's "Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report" showed that e-mail marketing messages with a social sharing option generate 30 percent higher click-through rates. According to an aWeber survey (also released this week) a majority (77%) of small businesses indicate that integrating email marketing and social media is either "very important" or "somewhat important".

There is clearly a lot of activity happening in the space and you would be wise to jump on the bandwagon. Fortunately, some very savvy ESPs are providing resources and tools to make the leap less scary and more beneficial.

Email marketing service provider iContact announced a partnership with social marketing platform FlowTown today. The integration will allow iContact users to segment their subscribers based on their social web use. iContact users can now segment any subscriber list by age group, gender, location and social network.

“In the past, sending targeted email was very expensive and only available to the Fortune 500,” commented Ethan Bloch, co-founder of Flowtown. “The Flowtown and iContact integration will enable anyone to segment their lists more effectively and increase open and click rates by sending more targeted email.”

Email-to-Speech Arrives at GetResponse

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:10:00 GMT

Being different is good – and this Website Magazine reader’s is different (in a good way). Email marketing platform GetResponse has released what amounts to the first integrated text-to-speech email capability. The best part? It actually sounds authentic.

Email-to-speech is unique and innovative enough that it could give marketers a way to improve response rates and differentiate their brands. The feature requires no formal set up or installation and the integration is as simple as point and click.

If you’re familiar with text-to-speech you probably have not been terribly impressed thus far – but again, this is different. The audio end product (provided through an integration with IVONA Text-To-Speech) is one of the most natural sounding voices I have come across, with both mail and female voices.

“GetResponse Email-to-Speech takes us one step closer to transforming email into a rich media experience, similar to listening to satellite radio or watching TV,” explained Simon Grabowski, CEO of Implix and founder of GetResponse. “Today’s Internet users are media-savvy multi-taskers, with almost 35 percent using the Web and watching TV, while juggling work, social networking, online shopping and, unfortunately, inbox clutter. GetResponse Email-to-Speech lets SMB marketers deliver a more personal, “human-like” email experience, providing a real competitive edge.

Video Email Marketing Study 2010

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:30:00 GMT

Email service provider GetResponse released some interesting data related to video and email marketing today.

While I personally am not entirely sold on the notion of including video in email as it stands today, I am confident it will have its place in the future and that seems to be a shared sentiment among Web professionals. The survey revealed that 80% of respondents plan to use video emails in 2010, even though just 15.7% did so in 2009.

It's the lift in conversion that is attractive to many Web/email marketers. According to the study, 65% of marketers believe that video email marketing can have a moderate or significant influence on conversion rate. 64% of those already using video email claim significant rate increases.

When it comes to the different uses of video email by small businesses, 28.8% of SMB marketers consider training courses as most effective use of video email, with Product Demos, Product Offers, and Customer Testimonials taking the next 3 places respectively. Branding came in at the 5th position.

The study is a rather interesting look at a trend that is still struggling to gain a foothold. Review the report at GetResponse for additional insights into video email marketing.

GetResponse 6.0 - You Need This

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:02:00 GMT

Online marketing solution provider Implix just announced the launch of GetResponse 6.0 - and it's got some newy features that should not (or will not) go unnoticed.

This release of the popular email marketing platform is the first that I've ever come across to offer audio and video recording capabilities, and Twitter integration (if you're an iPhone user there's even an app just for you available in the Apple App Store).

Website Magazine was fortunate enough to speak with Simon Grabowski of Implix and demo the GetResponse 6.0 release last week. In addition to those features listed above, other platform enhancements which really impressed us within this release are online surveys and Web forms, email analytics, split testing (test up to five messages simultaneously), dynamic content, and 300-plus new email design templates.

While split testing, analytics and templates are great, by adding video/audio features GetResponse has seperated themselves from the ESP (email service provider) pack.

“In email marketing, message frequency is good – but when it’s uncoordinated and impersonal, prospects respond by hitting the delete key with equal frequency,” noted Gartner Research Director Richard Fouts. “Moreover, the current generation of IT buyers have little time and a short attention span, so marketers are getting above the email clutter with audio-video, mobile and social media components in their campaigns. Vendors like Implix that not only help companies implement email and video marketing solutions, but also offer insights and advice on current best practices, could play a central role in this evolution. Being able to click on a one-minute video vs. reading a page of text is already proving to be an effective strategy for online marketers, and a welcome relief for consumers.”