VerticalResponse

• Generous Free Plan
• Mobile-Responsive Design Templates
• Email Automation
• Social Media Integration
• Customer support

Generous Free Plan 

One of the best things about VerticalResponse is its generous free plan. Where most competitors offer a free limited trial, VerticalResponse's doesn't expire. Their free plan allows for 300 contacts, 4,000 emails per month, and lets you link to a Facebook and Twitter account. If you need more than what the free plan offers, VerticalResponse has a variety of plans-both per-month plans and per-email plans-so it's easy to find a plan to fit your needs. They also offer high-volume plans, as well, and can offer pricing if you call for a quote.

Mobile-Responsive Design Templates 

VerticalResponse provides free professionally designed templates on all of their plans. Their templates adhere to a "responsive design" principle which means that they will adjust no matter how your customers view their email-on a phone, tablet, or PC. After selecting a template, you can add fully customizable content blocks for images and text, and position them wherever you'd like. Easily adjust colors, sizes, patterns, and add customized buttons and links.The company also offers libraries of free images and photos to use in your emails. 

Email Automation

Another feature, email automation, is designed to help your business and save you time. It allows you to set up automatic email commands, for example an auto-generated email when a new customer joins your list. With a paid plan, you can also create a series of emails and set them to be automatically sent to a specific contact list based on any time interval you desire. Automated Follow-up Emails can also automatically resend an email message to those contacts who didn't open the original email.

Social Media Integration

Since 60% of time online is spent on social media, VerticalResponse has placed a big emphasis on everything converting seamlessly to sites like Facebook and Twitter. That means not only is your entire customer list getting your emails, followers can easily share the message with their friends online.

Customer Support

VerticalResponse's support community and email support are available to all users, and users with a paid plan can take advantage of phone and live chat if they have questions, with several more answers posted on the VerticalResponse blog.

• Difficulty Importing Contacts
• Lack of Pricing Transparency
• Response Time

Difficulty Importing Contacts 

Despite claims on their website that VerticalResponse offers contact management tools to upload your existing contact lists, users have experienced glitches when it came time to actually do so. And while there are some nice pre-designed templates, these templates are relatively limited in number and diversity.

Lack of Pricing Transparency

If you're interested in finding out pricing on high volume plans, you will not find that information online. Likewise, you can't simply email to find out pricing. Instead, a representative will email you back to set up a phone call.

Response Time

Despite offering a live-chat support for paid users, they're often busy or unavailable requiring you to email your question instead, which can then cost you even more time to find your answer. Their phone and chat services are not 24/7, and are only available for paid users Monday through Friday, 6am-5pm PST.