December 05, 2013

Vertical Response Review: "Small Business Friendly, Lacking Tools for Growth"

Aubrey Blankenship

Sr. Editor & Art Director

24truPublishing, 11-50 employees

Score 6 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Software Version
Vertical Response is a low-cost

Pros and Cons

VR has great templates that do not require HTML skills to use.
Easy to upload and manage contacts.
Provides a simple user interface that makes it easy to learn.
They offer a great product for the price.

To keep up with the competition, Vertical Response should add a marketing automation feature.
Vertical Response should enhance its product to offer list segmentation.
It's been a few years since I last used Vertical Response but I remember it was a little more clunky than some other email marketing platforms.

Return on Investment

VR gave us a better picture of who was opening our emails and what caught their attention.
We were able to determine what topics and headlines got the highest response and were able to craft future messaging that was more effective.
It helped us manage our unsubscribes in an easy and timely manner.

Vertical Response would not be my first choice of email marketing platforms but there is little out there that has the type of quality platform for the price that you pay. I no longer use Vertical Response since I transitioned to a different job. I am evaluating email marketing platforms right now and have identified platforms I like more. If I start using Vertical Response again it will only be because I could not get a budget approved for something better.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend Vertical Response to companies or individuals who have a small amount of contacts and a low budget. It is a great platform for starting out. When you don't have many contacts you don't have a need for all the bells and whistles other programs offer. Marketing automation is only necessary if you have a lot of contacts and responses you wish to manage. However, if you want to keep leads separate i.e. trade show leads, webinar leads, Vertical Response does not do a good job of helping you filter through new leads automatically, you would have to add them manually to the specific list you want within the platform. However, if you just want to send out some emails to your list of email contacts and see some basic analytics like open and click through rates, this is a great platform for the price.