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Best GetReponse Alternatives: Aweber vs Constant Contact Vs ActiveCampaign

Here are my best GetResponse Alternatives recommendations after testing several email marketing services: Aweber, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, and others.

Okay Guys, the reason I have to move away from GetResponse is due to the high bounce rates and because of the GetResponse blacklisted problems.

For selecting my new email marketing service; I’ve only tested companies that are “affiliate marketing friendly” and allow importing email list with NO re-optin confirmation, and must integrate with WarriorPlus as this is the main marketplace I use to sell my products and services. I also sell products on JVZOO, but unfortunately, only Aweber works with JVZOO, and the others don’t.

My Top 3 GetResponse Alternatives
(ALL Have Free Trials So Test Them Out!)

  1. Constant Contact
  2. Active Campaign
  3. Aweber

At Getresponse, I would normally get 1% or less open rates with 30% bounce rates from both my high quality buyer list and freebie list.

getresponse-high-bounce-rates-3

To test out the new email services, I imported only my “Freebie seeker” email list to see the results I would get from a lower quality list. Since the majority of my list, about 65% is made up of freebie seeker subscribers anyways.

But so far, I’m seeing results of 9%+ open rates with bounce rates way below 1%, which is SOOO MUCH better than GetResponse’s less than 1% open rates with 30% bounce rates.

getresponse-alternative-constantcontact

 

Here’s a more in-dept look at each of the 3 email services…

Constant Contact
constant contact

My #1 choice, I am moving my list from GetResponse to Constant Contact. It’s fast and easy to setup, importing my list went smoothly. Sending emails was quick and easy. The open rate is awesome at 9% even for a freebie seeker list! They offer a FREE TRIAL with no credit card required, 100 contacts, unlimited sending,  click here to see this Constant Contact deal and sign up.

ActiveCampaign
activecampaign

My #2 choice, ActiveCampaign is another well known reliable email marketing service. This service is very similar to Constant Contact. Everything was quick and easy to setup and importing my list went smoothly as well. The only thing is that it took about a day to verify my list before I can send it out. They also offer a FREE TRIAL with no credit card required. However it is only for 100 contacts and only 100 sendings per month, which sucks for testing. But definitely a quality service to try out, click here to check out ActiveCampaign.

AWeber
aweber

My #3 choice, Aweber is undoubtly the king of email marketing service providers. However, I place Aweber as my #3 choice, because they disapproved my email list import of 500 subscribers. I guess my freebie list is not good enough for Aweber. However, this may be a good thing I suppose… meaning Aweber value their members, and won’t just let anyone join and import a lower quality list. So if you have a good quality list, give em a try! Aweber offers 30 day free trial (credit card required), 500 contacts, and unlimited sending. Click here to see this Aweber deal.

The Best GetResponse Alternative Solution

What I suggest for you and your list is to sign up at all 3 email marketing services, IT’S FREE! Test them out for yourself, import your lists, send some test emails, see how it works with YOUR LIST. You be the judge, and select the email service you feel is right for your list. For me I will use multiple services from now on. I do not want to ever be in the situation of relying on just 1 email marketing service. Again I highly recommend to check out all 3 email services, test them out: Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, and Aweber

I also want to mention that I’ve used Sendinblue for sending out my emergency “backup” newsletters while testing out these new email services. It is a good backup to have for sending out emergency newsletters in case your main email service goes down or something. Read my full Sendinblue review.

Lastly, there were also some other recommendations from people about using self-hosted mass mailing software.  I cannot recommend this solution, because the startup cost is too high, the learning curve is too high, the headaches is too much to handle (Server failures, IP bans, etc). So I cannot recommend this solution to you guys.

*Please note, I am an affiliate with these email services recommendations. But I have signed up to each one and have tested them out, and these are my honest recommendations.

Thanks for reading.

Please share your comments and results below if you’ve switched from getresponse to another email marketing service. I’d love to hear from you!


23 Comments

  1. Hi Leon, thanks for the heads up! I’m trying Activecampaign.com Right Now. I just started today. The transition was smooth. I imported my list from Getresponse. I heard good reviews about Activecampaign.com. So I figure I’ll give them a shot. Thanks again and keep up the good work!

  2. Hi Leon,

    Thanks for the update. What do you use to measure bounce rates? Does that show up within your email marketing service dashboard?

    1. The bounces are measured by the system that you’re using i.e getresponse or aweber etc, and the hard bounces are automatically removed.
      And yes the bounces can be seen from your reports.
      Now, if you’re using some other email services, they may handle bounces differently.

  3. I’m wondering why no one is using rocketresponder as it’s build by marketers for marketers.

    $20 flat rate for unlimited lists & subscribers

    1. I don’t know about this one. Sending email is expensive, and if someone offers truly unlimited sendings, I’m not sure how they can keep up a business model like that. Even Getresponse, a multi-million dollar company is failing to send emails properly.
      But if its working for you, keep using it 🙂

  4. Just a heads up for people experiencing high bounce rates … look at your delivery report and determine if one or more tld’s are bouncing mail more than others. This will reduce your bounce rate straight away. For example, Hotmail tightened up their services a little while back causing a lot of mail to be blocked. It was hotmail addresses alone that caused the bounce rate % to skyrocket. Segmenting your list and extracting all Hotmail accounts and taken them to an ESP that inboxed hotmail better solved the problem. What Im saying is dont look at the overall aggregated percentage and accept that as gospel … Dig into each TLD (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) and identify which domain is causing the issue. You then have a better understanding of the problem and can make a decision to accept it, extract and move it, or just not mail to it. All you metrics should be based per domain – not aggregated.

    1. I see what you mean about the different email address domains (yahoo, hotmail, etc) have different bounce rates.
      But still, that does not explain how the bounce rate keeps rising from 10% to 30% randomly in mere days or weeks. There’s a real problem with Getresponse, and even with segmenting the list, it can help, but won’t fix the real issue here.

      Thanks for the recommendation though. I really appreciate it 🙂

  5. It sounds like you’ve come up with a good solution, but how do you send via 3 different ESP’s? Import your entire list to all 3 and alternate your mailings… mail to your list on Monday via Constant Contact, Tuesday via Active, Wed. via Aweber etc?

    It sounds like a lot of work, but over time you’d probably really get to see which service is doing the better job and probably do most of you mailing with them.

    Very helpful suggestions here for GR alternatives, which I’m definitely looking into.

    1. Hey Leon,

      Could you please let me know if Active Campaign lists can be integrated with Warrior Plus and JV Zoo?

      Thanks

      1. Active campaign works with warriorplus but not JVZOO.
        From my top 3 choices, only aweber works with both Warriorplus and jvzoo.

  6. Did you get in touch with the support team. I can’t agree with you. I have been running my Email campaign quite well with Getresponse and I don’t see any bounce rate such as yours. The last newsletter I sent to my 10k+ subscribers had an open rate of 16.84% and the bounce rate is 0.00%.
    Thank you for sharing, I need to keep a close eye with them.

    1. You are the lucky few that are somehow still getting good results with GR. Whereas, many others like myself are disappointed with the current results for some time now, and without any hope left, have moved to other email service providers.

      Ever since moving my lists to just about any other email service providers, I’m seeing MUCH better results.

      At the moment, I am on the cheapest plan with GR, and I still hope someday, things will get better for GR:)

  7. Thanx for your honest review.Does Active Campaign and Constant Contact allow Single Optin list?also, are they good for affiliate marketing?.I was looking in Aweber,but they have disabled SOI option in their email,you need to call them before this feature can be enabled in your account.

    1. Both Constant Contact and ActiceCampaign allows for single optin and are good for affiliate marketing, at least from what I’ve seen so far.
      Thank you.

        1. Interesting they would say that as many marketers including affiliate marketers use them.

          Anyhow, if you’re not spamming people, and sending quality promos, I believe they would be okay with it.

          Give Constant Contact a try as well.

  8. My requirements for service provider functionalities aren’t anywhere close to yours. Probably because I started with a small e-shop, didn’t have much experience and at first chose Getresponse because of decent recommendations. However, after a few months I switched to MailerLite purely because of the pricing. As my e-mail list is very small, paying 10$ a month still adds up. It also seems that it has all the functionality Getresponse has. Have you had a chance to run into MailerLite? What’s your opinion about it?

    1. I have not used mailerlite, but they actually look really good.
      I will test out the free plan and see how it goes. Thanks

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