GetResponse IP Blacklisted? Very High Bounce Rate Problems!
I’ve been a member of GetResponse for about 3+ years, and I’ve always recommended GR to everyone. I was a very happy customer, things were working great! Then suddenly about 6 months ago, GetResponse got hacked, and then these high bounce rates started happening when sending out email newsletters. I am not sure if the hacking has anything to do with the high bounce rates, but coincidentally, it was around that time when the high bounce % started occurring.
Now, I am not the only one experiencing this problem. MANY other email marketers have posted about their high bounce rates problems ever since 6 months ago.
It has truly devastated my email marketing campaigns. Back then, I was getting a bounce rate of 1%, and within just 24 hours, it jumped to 10+% bounce rate. After 6 months, now my bounce rate is around 30%.
This means that if I send my email to 100 people, 30 of them will not receive my emails. On top of that my open rate used to be around the 10%, and now it’s less than 1%. This could mean that my emails are being sent to people’s spam folder.
A screenshot of back in the good ol days…
Also, I do not track clicks, because the links from my email newsletters are converted into a getresponse tracking link; and sometimes those links are reported as malware links or infected links based on users’ google chrome browser. Yet another problem with GetResponse!
Again, I am not the only one experiencing this. But many other internet marketers. Here’re some screenshots I’ve found from warriorforum.
Many have said that Getresponse service ip addresses are blacklisted or blocked by many major email services like hotmail or yahoo.
When contacting GetResponse customer support, they never give me direct solutions, they always give me cookie-cutter responses such as telling me to work on building a high quality list.
Well duh! Who doesn’t want to build the best list as possible. BUT how do you explain your service going from 1% bounce to 10+% bounce rate overnight!
Something is wrong with GetResponse, and it’s getting worse! I keep seeing more and more complaints about GetResponse.
I think the only solution for me is to move my list of around 15k over to another service.
As of right now, I am still deciding on which service to use. I will post updates on finding a new service and see if its any better.
But before that, I want to ask you guys something, do you use GetResponse? How is it going for you?
Do you use another email marketing service? How’s that working out for you?
Thanks for viewing guys!
***I am currently testing multiple email marketing services and will report back my results soon!
Here’s my best Getreponse alternative solutions, click here!
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Hi,
I never liked GR support when I tried them and I too left them for Active Campaign:
https://onlinebeginnershub.com/go/activecampaign
Can’t recommend Active Campaign highly enough – their support is terrific and their service is fantastic. It is like Infusionsoft with tagging controls but way, way cheaper and more integrations with other services. Starts around $10 per month.
Thrive uses AC now also because of the power of tagging.
Dale.
Thanks for responding. I am also considering AC or Aweber.
I am experiencing the same at first i thought it was my list problem i did some clean ups and still it continued after doing some research i discovered that it was GR fault.It is so frustrating
Thanks for commenting. Have you move your list to another provider?
Hows that working for you?
Interesting. I still think self hosted solutions will be more mainstream soon, and using your own VPS so you have your own IP address. It seems without confirmed optin, aweber and all of them are really struggling to get to inboxes.
Thanks for the advice Mike. I have also considered using my own VPS server for doing email marketing.
Do you have any recommendations of which software and hosting companies that allows bulk email sending?
(feel free to post affiliate links of your recommendations 🙂
This is nothing new. This started happening with GR in late 2014 when a bunch of their ips got blacklisted. Sounds like you have been luckier than most up until now.
I have seen no further degradation of GR since then though but it has only been delivering about 33% of what AW was until AWs recent problems.
I do self hosting as well for years and it has no where near the deliverability of AW or GR even in their current condition. 0.1% open rate is very high with self hosting.
Most self hosting cannot inbox gmail unless very small list (<5K) emailed only a few times a week with very low spam complaints.
Thanks for your insights.
I seriously thought about going the self hosted route, but dang….1% open rate is extremely low. Seems like if you send from 1 ip too much, you gonna get blocked. I’m not sure how rotating the ip works exactly, but do you think that’s an option to increase inbox and open rate?
I’m doing a few mass emailing tests with multiple services, and will be updating my results soon.
As long as you have full optin data on your list (optin date, IP address, etc), most AR providers will allow you to import your list, although many providers (Aweber being one) will require a “re-optin” by each of your list members before you’ll be able to send emails to them (essentially treating them as new double-optins).
I believe that sending emails directly from your own server will be the best solution, provided you’re not using shared hosting, since any of the other users sharing the same server could screw things up for you by sending spam from THEIR accounts, causing YOUR server to be blacklisted due to the shared IP.
Personally, I use GVO’s autoresponder, which is automatically included when subscribing to most of their other services, such as web hosting, cloud storage, web conferencing, video sharing, etc. GVO has a good reputation for being “marketer-friendly” and having high deliverability rate. I’d provide you with an affiliate link, but I’m only a user and not an affiliate (which requires “owning” any of their services you wish to resell, along with paying an additional monthly affiliate fee). Details can be found at http://www.gogvo.com/email-marketing-service.php.
Hope this helps…
Thanks Don! For dropping the link for GVO. I’ve never heard about them, but it looks like good service for $45/month for 20,000 subscribers.
Is it a desktop software? Are there any split-testing features?
I just contacted Aweber, and they say that I can import my list without re-optin. Which is really nice!
Agreed, email marketing with shared hosting is not ideal.
It may not be all GetResponse fault as I have to continually pull, not only your emails, but many others out of my SPAM folder in Gmail. No matter what I have tried to keep these from going to SPAM, my efforts have been futile with Gmail not putting them there. I first noticed this when I got a Warrior Alert for a new product and never saw anything in my email.
The problems I have had with both Aweber and GetResponse is being SPAMMED to death from both. Getting a TON of emails I never signed up for through their services. This has been across several of my email accounts. Neither service has a very good way to report SPAM since there is no “Report SPAM” button anywhere I could find in the manage subscription area.
And dude, this comment box is VERY hard to see being light grey on white….
Hey Leonard, thanks for commenting.
When you got my email with the subject line: GetResponse is Blacklisted…!???
Was this in your spam folder or inbox?
Thank you 🙂
Thanks.
I noticed that you also have Hostgator for hosting, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I was forced to drop them months ago because of poor service.
I have 2 reseller accounts with hostgator for 5+ years.
I honestly LOVE them! Maybe just lucky, but I’ve never experienced anything majorly wrong with them.
Also, maybe because I have reseller accounts vs shared hosting accounts which will contain A LOT more users.
Thanks Curtis!
I have had the same problem with GetResponse. I only used it because it was integrated with another program and did not have much choice. About six months ago my open rates, click through rates, complaints about the emails going into spam etc got terrible.
Contacting GetResponse to see what they were doing to get their IP out of Internet Jail did no good all I got back was that it was my fault, not theirs. Even when as you pointed out there was a drastic change with the response rate on the same email list.
I have used several of the mainstream autoresponder services. Aweber is good and an old reliable autoresponder. Personally, I am using Traffic Wave http://www.trafficwave.net/members/btipton and moving my list from GetResponse to there. I have used them all most since Brian introduced the service and even though I have use GVO, Rocket Responder, and others I always come back to what works.
Another vote for Aweber.
I have never tried Trafficwave, but have heard about them for sure. Usually bad reviews about them.
But I will definitely test them out for myself.
I am testing out multiple services, and I will report back my results with you guys.
Thanks Bo!
Hi Leon,
I too have been experiencing High bounce rates with Get Response and when I sought the help of GR support, they said that I should probably clean my list and delete inactive subscribers.I don’t have an alarming inactive susbcriber ratio and hence I was not convinced. Aweber seems to be the only affordable alternative for the time being. Let me knwo if you come across any other suitable AR
Thanks
Tom
I am testing multiple services and will post my results soon. Thanks Tom!
I’ve been having GR issues, too, Leon.
I’m thinking of MailChimp, AcitiveCampaign and I even have a lifetime SendReach account that I wasn’t happy with a while back… might be worth looking at again.
Meanwhile… Autoreponders are only part of the problem, the inboxes like Gmail are also a big part of the problem. Bottom line is to always encourage folks to open your emails and give them the value that will have them do so. That always makes everything else work better and is, I suspect, what’s behind some folks loving a certain ESP, while others hate the very same one. Value, engagement, even retargeting your list elsewhere… all help.
I look forward to hearing your test results of some other services.
Good to hear from you David! I heard MailChimp is really good, but not affiliate marketing friendly. So I’m not sure about them.
At the moment ActiveCampaign and Aweber are good alternatives.
Lifetime account at sendreach? That sounds too good! What’s the deal with that?
I bought a lifetime account when they first started up but wasn’t crazy about it. So I ignored it. Forgot I had it 🙂 I just looked into my account and not only did I miss v.2 but now they’re up to v.3. So I guess I’ll re-activate and give it a second chance.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I am having the same problem with Get Response and thought I was the only one. I’ve used them for several years and never had any problems. Suddenly my bounce rate is up to 10%. I have never had that problem. Your post has confirmed it for me. I’m going to look for another email provider.
Hi Candance, when did you start noticing the high bounce rates?
I’m testing multiple services now and will post an update soon. Thank you,
I am also using my own VPS.. Cost is damn low and results are great
May I ask how long you’ve been running the VPS for email marketing?
Thanks for commenting!
Self hosting is a very technical game. I have setup many mailservers on VPSs and can first hand tell you its very difficult to get right. You need fully understand the different requirements for each mailing domain – Yahoo is different to Gmail, Hotmail is different – they all treat mail differently and prioritise different factors into the inbox equation. At the most basic level you need to fully understand DKIM, SPF. Do this wrong and you will not inbox. Don’t expect to inbox to every domain. Gmail is easy, Yahoo second, Hotmail for me has been the most difficult and still is. The easiest way to get started is to buy a vps and install postfix (free MTA) then be prepared to spend many months learning how it all works. Otherwise pay someone to do it for you. Personally I would stick to with ESP that has whitelisted contracts with the domains you send mail to. You can also split your lists into TLDs (gmail, yahoo, hotmail) and use a different ESP for each TLD … GR may be good for gmail, AW might be better for yahoo, Constant Contact might be better for Hotmail – just an example …
My experience has been this – a brand new mailserver on a brand new ip with a brand new domain setup correctly will get me a 10-20% open rate in Gmail and Yahoo. Subsequent sends will get less depending on engagement until you gain reputation. IF you already have a responsive list then your reputation will warm much faster. If you are getting really low open rate I guarantee its not your IP – your technical setup (mailserver config) is flawed.
The slightest incorrect setting with send your mail to junk.
Running your own mailserver is not easy which is why you pay ESPs to handle the tech detail you dont really want to. But if you like a challenge I would say go for it. I would not recommend using Interspire as your mailing platform either … its slow, expensive plugins, and contains footprints in templates that can send your email to junk.
Thanks for the detailed technical comment. Do you have a website? I would love to use your comment as a new blog post, and I will credit you back 🙂
I have used interspire in the past, it was okay and easy to use. It just didn’t have the A/B split testing feature that I really needed, but maybe now they have it.
Anyhow, I have thought about running my own mailing VPS, but with all of the technical things I need to learn and setup, I am not sure its worth the time and money.
And it’s also probably something I can’t recommend others to do.
So yeah, I’m definitely going with an ESP (Email Service Provider) or several ESPs at this point.
I’ll keep you guys updated once I’ve joined and run some email tests.
Thanks Mystery Person!
My GR statistics are similar to yours. I’m going to move my list soon. If you find a great solution, please do a follow up article.
I am currently testing a few different services and will post updates soon.
Thank you Sarge!
Great post! I would have posted on it myself, but several others have. I would not recommend Aweber. They have blacklisted IPs as well. As of about 2 months ago, and the problem is still not fixed. How in the world do these big companies that we pay all this money to, not have the ability to fix issues like this. Get response sucks worse than aweber. I have a list of 25k and aweber devastated my business and income overnight. They used to be the best before the blacklisted IPs!! I’ve heard of redcappi and a few others….I think I might end up being self hosted, but I must find someone I trust to set it all up for me. This is my problem right now! I had a friend with a large list get ripped off by a guy who was supposed to set up his self hosting….they stole his list and his emails all ended up in spam folder. Anyway, I’m following this post, can’t wait to hear which service you decide on. Have a great day.
It’s certainly a tough choice to make when deciding where to move your list to.
I definitely would rather learn to do the setup on the mailing server myself than risk my list being stolen by having another person do the setup.
I’ll be making some videos and posting my results soon.
Thanks for commenting Kay.
Hi there,
I’m incredibly sorry to hear that this is the deliverability you’ve been facing while using GetResponse. I would like to offer you a personal look and investigation into your account (and any others reporting here) to confirm what is causing this issue.
While I am not at all discounting your experience, I do want to confirm that we do not currently have any overall service deliverability blockages. However I can see 100% from your report that you are experiencing real issues, and that’s what we want to help you with.
If you’d be willing to reach out with your account’s email address to me directly: abigal.hehemann@getresponse.com, I would 100% personally ensure your account (and again, any others willing to report this to us), would become a top priority in the Deliverability Department to ensure this issue is investigated and resolved.
I appreciate the time you took to report this and understand how truly important reliable deliverability is to your business.
Look forward to hearing from you,
Abby Hehemann
GetResponse Community Manager
I do appreciate your customer support, but I have already tried contacting without any real solutions.
I have already sent some test emails with other email services and the results at the moment are A LOT better.
Let me ask you this though, you’ve mentioned that at the moment there is no deliverability blockages, but has there been any blockages in the recent past?
Such as GetResponse IP being blacklisted?
Thank you Abby!
Hi there,
I do understand that you’ve been in touch before, but in this instance we’d like to escalate your account to our management team to ensure a 100% thorough look, if you’d be willing.
And sorry for any confusion on my use of the word “currently” — we’ve not had such overall blockages in the recent past, I was just using it to clarify the current state of our deliverability status.
Hope you’ll consider letting us have another look. 🙂
Best,
I was actually on someone’s GetResponse list and I found that I was blacklisted and never got their email from something I ordered. I don’t know why my email address was blacklisted. I had to write to customer support to start getting emails again from getresponse. Come think of it, I can’t remember the last time I received an email from getresponse server even after I asked not to be blacklisted. Good luck to all who use this service.
Interesting to hear from a subscriber’s perspective.
Maybe your email service blacklisted Getresponse, and that’s why you’re not receiving the email?
Thanks for posting your experience Linda! Much Appreciated!
Yeah I noticed the exact same thing. Probably a few months back now. Almost exactly like you said it. My bounce rate was nearly zero. I clean my list of inactives and unopens regularly. Then the next day it was around 26%. And I seem to have that number on almost every email I send now. Upsetting, but kind of glad to see this and that it is not just me. I was going to go back to self hosted. I only keep GR because certain sites (like warriorplus) only link to the major AR’s like Aweber and getresponse. Not all of them have the “custom” option. So I keep it for those reasons. So I don’t have to slap an optin page in front of a new buyer before they can access a purchase. But looks like it may not even be worth it if what you say is true.
Hey Coach Comeback!
Fortunately, there are several quality services that integrate with Warriorplus.
I am testing them out now and will post soon with my results. Thanks
-Leon
I’ll throw in my 2c. GetResponse has always been worse in terms of deliverability when compared to Aweber (at least for me). I lost my Aweber account about two years ago and haven’t been back. I went down the self-hosted route and to be honest, it’s not worth the effort or cost. I hired people to set-up, manage and mail for me, here’s the downsides:
1). Even with correct IP Warmup, you get a few spam complaints and say good-bye to the inbox.
2). Deliverability is simply not comparable.
3). For people with big lists (myself) it’s ridiculously expensive and confusing
4). Continuing from above, obtaining clean IP’s in bulk is extremely hard (most places wont issue them to you).
5). Again continuing from above, once you obtain your IP’s, you will eventually get shut-down (even when in full compliance).
If you’ve got a small list, self hosted is probably the best solution it’s a massive headache. Setting up mailing servers is a skill within itself, so you’ll most likely need to hire someone.
As someone said above, I mail to a clean list of more than 200K (scrubbed and verified). 1% open rate is lucky to get. When you factor in the cost of setting up the server and maintaining, you need really good conversions to make it worth while.
Personally I think it all went downhill once Aweber started to allow importing of non-confirmed subscribers. It’s getting abused on a mass scale which is leading to bad deliverability.
Josh! Thanks for sharing your experience with the self-hosted mass emailing route.
I agree with you, going self-hosted is not ideal for most email marketer.
I’ve made a new post recommending some getresponse alternatives, and also mentioned that I do not recommend going self-hosted when there are plenty of cheaper and reliable email marketing solutions out there.
http://www.howtowebmaster.com/best-getreponse-alternatives-aweber-vs-constant-contact-vs-activecampaign/
Thanks!
Despite my ongoing dissatisfaction with GetResponses customer service over the past 3 years and experiencing the high bounce rates for the last year or so … I have noticed my last few email campaigns have had a normal and acceptable bounce rate of under 1% now. They were in the 20% range and had popped up that way one day over night and was like that for a long time. Just happy to report that MAYBE? they got the issue resolved?
Hey Victoria. I have since moved my list, but still have an account with Getresponse. I will run some tests and see if indeed things are better now. Thank you for reporting in 🙂
As of today, I am still getting 20% bounce rate with GR. With other email marketing services, I am getting less than 0.5% .
Getresponse definitely has deliverability issues – just look at their sender scores which gives you the reputation of their IPs – most of them are between 60-70 which means they have issues, and not the high 90s youd expect from an email deliverability company. Some of their IPs are sub 50! Its a total lie their getting 99% deliverability which they claim – and the high bounce rates prove it too. Ive had numerous top marketers complain to me about Getresponse (including those with sizeable email lists). Ive been with Getresponse since 2007 and noticed much better deliverability with Aweber, Mailchimp, Amazon SES and even Mandrill (last 2 are sending from via SMTP). Sending from my own server even gets better deliverability than getresponse. I have contacted them today to ask for an explanation. For all of their marketing, they’ve really made a big major hash of their deliverability that they seem to be ignoring, and people need to know about it…
Thanks for commending Kads! I really want to give GR another chance, since I still have an account with them (I have a lot of web forms and API connections that I just cannot move all at once yet).
But recently, I sent out another email with GR just to test them out, 30% bounced emails again. Nothing improved.
Surprisingly though, there are still some top marketers using GR. I’m guessing they are paying more for dedicated email sendings.
Not sure if this is relevant here. But, curious to know if you have any ideas on this. I’m experiencing a different problem… I’m not sure if the statistics that they are NOW reporting are actually correct. My opens and clicks look awesome (90% open rate! 188% click-through, 4% bounce with an 800 person list). Yet, the traffic on my website does not confirm this! I’m showing no traffic coming from GetResponse.
Reached out to support, and they’re really frustrating to email back and forth with. I’m at my wits-end. I’m just wondering if their overall response to complaints was to just deliver false stats. Either way, I’m convinced that GetResponse is terrible.
90% open rates is super high and 188% CTR. Definitely something fishy here.
I am curious to see if you send a couple more emails to your list and see what the stats are.
Thanks for reporting.
I haven’t been able to land one email from Getresponse in the inbox in the last 6 months. No matter what I do, they all go to spam. The reason listed is not my domains, either, it’s always the GetResponse “send” email.
For example, here is the reason I got from Gmail yesterday:
“We’ve found that lots of messages from bounce.mail-46as6.getresponse.com are spam.”
That means that it’s a problem with GetResponse and NOT me!
I always make sure that none of my domains are blacklisted or even greylisted, and that my spam score on the emails I send are less than 1. Most of the time they are 0/5.
So WHY do they end up in the spam folder?
I’ve asked support and they always turn it back on me and say it has something to do with my domain or the content of my emails, etc.
I’m also subscribed to the lists of many really successful marketers, and all of their emails that they send from GR are all going straight to my spam folder, even AFTER I have marked them “not spam” several times!
I’m giving it one more month, and then I’m finding a replacement.
I have accounts at other ARs and they work great, so I’m not even sure why I am holding on to this account.
I guess I’m hoping that maybe they’ll fix the problem…
Thanks for sharing CJ.
I just did a test today on my getresponse optin form, and after 8 hours, I still didn’t get my welcome email in my yahoo account (Did yahoo and GMAIL blacklist getresponse?). The contact appeared on my GR dashboard but I have not receive my welcome email.
SO MANY THINGS WRONG WITH GETRESPONSE!
Here are my recommended alternatives:
http://www.howtowebmaster.com/best-getreponse-alternatives-aweber-vs-constant-contact-vs-activecampaign/