How GetResponse Built U.S. Brand Credibility in a Crowded ESP Market.

A 25-year-old European platform competing for U.S. mindshare against newer, louder, U.S.-headquartered brands.

GetResponse is one of the longest-running email marketing platforms in the industry. Founded in Poland in 1998, the company predates most of today’s market leaders by a decade or more. They’ve built a feature-deep platform serving hundreds of thousands of customers across 180+ countries.

But in the United States — the largest single market for email marketing software — GetResponse faced a structural challenge no amount of product investment could solve on its own. The U.S. ESP landscape in 2024 was crowded with well-funded, U.S.-headquartered competitors:

• —Klaviyo owned DTC and ecommerce.
• —Kit (formerly ConvertKit) owned creator economy.
• —Beehiiv captured newsletter operators.
• —Mailchimp still dominated small business mindshare.
• —ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Brevo, MailerLite, Constant Contact, Drip, Customer.io, Omnisend, and dozens more competed in every sub-segment.

For a European company without a U.S. marketing team on the ground, breaking through this noise required more than feature parity or pricing. It required a credible U.S. voice — someone who could represent the brand at American conferences, build relationships with American creators and influencers, modernize the U.S. social presence, and bridge the cultural gap between European product execution and American market expectations.

A hybrid brand evangelist role spanning content, partnerships, events, spokesperson work, and customer success.

I joined GetResponse in early 2024 as a Contracted Brand Evangelist. The role was hybrid by design — equal parts content creator, thought leader, partnership strategist, public spokesperson, and demand generation marketer. The mandate was clear: increase brand awareness, credibility, and growth in the U.S. market.

Over the engagement, I led seven coordinated workstreams:

1. 1.U.S. content strategy and social modernization. Modernized the brand’s U.S. social presence through educational short-form video and creator-focused content. Repositioned GetResponse from a traditional, feature-led ESP voice to a modern marketer voice that competed for attention in the same feeds as Klaviyo, Kit, and Beehiiv.
2. 2.Thought leadership content production. Authored long-form articles and educational content on the GetResponse blog, contributing a distinct American voice to a blog that had historically been written from a European perspective.
3. 3.Partnership development and co-marketing. Built relationships with creators, influencers, podcasters, and industry thought leaders. Coordinated co-marketing initiatives, webinars, and joint content — bringing GetResponse into conversations and audiences where the brand had previously been invisible.
4. 4.Public spokesperson and event representation. Represented GetResponse at major industry conferences and speaking engagements across the U.S. Spoke about email marketing, creator economy strategy, and modern marketing tactics — always positioned through the GetResponse lens.
5. 5.Industry event content creation. Attended events as a content creator, conducting interviews with influential business leaders and creators that were then distributed across GetResponse’s social channels.
6. 6.Creator monetization platform launch support. Helped position and promote GetResponse’s creator monetization features through partnerships, education content, and creator outreach.
7. 7.U.S. customer success story program. Built a U.S.-customer success story program from scratch — something that didn’t exist before I joined. Critical gap: U.S. buyers expect U.S. proof points before they trust a European platform with their email program.

Modernized U.S. brand voice, new partnership infrastructure, and a customer success program built from zero.

The work delivered against the original mandate of increasing U.S. brand awareness, credibility, and growth.

Quantitative outcomes: multiple new co-marketing partnerships and webinar collaborations launched. New U.S. customer success story program built from zero. Modernized social content output and creator-relevant brand voice. Featured speaking engagements representing the brand at U.S. conferences. Increased content output authored from a U.S. perspective.

Qualitative outcomes: brand transitioned from a European voice to an American-relevant voice in U.S. social and content channels. Visibility increased in conversations where competitors had previously dominated unchallenged. Established a relationship-driven distribution layer (creators, podcasters, influencers, conferences) that didn’t exist before the engagement. Created repeatable content infrastructure that outlasts the engagement itself.