How to use GetResponse as an online teacher: 10 ways

Imagine a trial math class in the form of a webinar. As many as 568 people attended this online event. The result? 50 attendees decided to purchase an online course on the same day!

Sounds like a dream? But it’s a real success story from one of GetResponse’s customers, Matematma, proving how online teaching can turn into a thriving business.

This wasn’t a miracle or an overnight success caused by a single action. Instead, it was part of a broader marketing strategy and a sales funnel designed to attract leads and convert them into paying students.

If you’re an online teacher or if you run an education platform, you need a rock-solid marketing program. And to make it happen, you need the right software.

GetResponse — your one-stop marketing shop for selling knowledge

“I would encourage people to use GetResponse because it’s a one-stop-shop, wherein you will get all your marketing needs met“

— says Juanita Miracel, the founder of an English writing online boot camp.

Yes, there are thousands of marketing tools in the world, each of them serving a different purpose. But instead of building a complicated tech stack, jumping from one platform to another, and overpaying at the end of the day, you can handle all your marketing with just one software — GetResponse.

Let’s break it down.

Establish a strong base to attract students

Whether you’re a Montessori educator, a mathematician, or a musician who wants to run online piano classes, you have to make your potential students see you in the first place.

And apart from your presence on social media, you need to establish your operational core that will be responsible for capturing leads, proving your credibility, and running email and content marketing campaigns down the line.

But first things first:

1. Craft your online teaching website

There’s no online business without a website. Period. If you have already created one, then congrats! You can skip to the next subchapter. But if this step is still ahead of you, we’re more than happy to help!

GetResponse comes with an array of tools, and Website Builder is among them. Without hiring a designer and a front-end developer, you can easily create your website with a mug of coffee in your other hand! You can either choose to design it yourself or prompt our AI tool to handle it for you:

• If you’re more into experimenting with AI, you will have to go through a few-step process of instructing the AI builder to deliver a website that matches your instructions.
• However, if you want more control over the design and copywriting, then choosing a compelling website template and using a single drag-and-drop editor sounds like a better plan!

2. Build landing pages for any campaign

The website you already have — or you’re about to create with our Website Builder — is the foundation of your online brand and teaching business. It has the home page, and a bunch of subpages like “services”, “about”, “resources”, “blog”, and “contact”.

Beyond that, there is always room for some additional landing pages dedicated to your specific marketing activities:

• Webinars: A page with a signup form and benefits of joining your online event.
• Book launches: A dedicated page for your paid campaign ads to direct potential buyers.
• New services or promotions: A page linked to your call-to-action buttons for booking calls.

The good news is — you can build your landing pages with GetResponse! And it gets better because the creation part is super intuitive. Just like with the Website Builder, you can leverage the AI tool or double-down on predesigned and blank templates.

3. Set up forms and popups

InfoShare Academy, an educational platform offering programming courses for beginners, gained 1,200 new contacts in a single month! They used an ebook as a powerful lead magnet and increased their email list exponentially to further nurture their leads and convert them to paying students.

Here are the main conclusions:

• Email marketing remains one of the most robust marketing programs for online teaching.
• To kick it off, online educators must be super active in populating their contact lists.
• The acquisition cost of a contact can be surprisingly low — in the case of infoShare Academy, it was only 1.31 PLN per contact!

Now back to the operational side. Technically, to make people sign up for your email list, you need forms and popups, and lead ads if you’re running paid campaigns.

Luckily, GetResponse is here to take the heavy lifting!

On your website, you can embed signup forms and popups created inside GetResponse. With numerous templates and 30+ targeting options to choose from, you can ensure that your popups appear at the optimal time to capture your audience’s attention.

And if you want to scale your list-building efforts by investing in paid campaigns, you’ll be happy to hear that you can build Google Lead Form Extension ads inside GetResponse and integrate Facebook Lead Ads via Zapier, Make, and other similar tools.

4. Grow your email list by leveraging integrated tools

Embedding signup forms and popups all over your website is a must, but if you want to reinforce your online teaching business, you’re going to love this part!

GetResponse integrates with more than 170 tools and applications! While each is interesting, we will highlight just a few that will help you establish your website and generate leads.

1. WordPress

There’s a high chance that you created your website on one of the most popular site builders in the world. 

If so, you can go ahead and install and activate a GetResponse plugin in WordPress. As a result, each contact that opts in on your website will land in your email list in GetResponse. Plus, you can adjust your marketing campaigns based on how users interact with your website.

2. GroupLeads and Groupboss

Let’s say your core mission is to teach other people how to establish their online businesses. For this, you create a Facebook group called “From Idea to Income”, where you inspire others.

Now, this community is your natural pool of prospects. And yes, you want each of them to become a contact in your email list. Luckily, you can do that on autopilot with tools like GroupLeads or Groupboss, saving you hours of manual and mundane work!

3. Wishlist Member and Memberpress

Another growth hacking tactic that capitalizes on building a closed community is creating a membership site. By providing exclusive and valuable content for members, you increase the likelihood of them becoming your future students.

While you can create a membership site using the GetResponse Website Builder, you might be using another tool for that solution. Some of the most popular ones that integrate with us include Wishlist Member and Memberpress.

4. Zapier and Make

Educators often use very specific tools that help them grow their audience faster or engage their students better.

Whether you’re using standalone landing page builders, running lead ads, or conducting surveys, you want to ensure that your data is in sync.

While native integrations are best, Zapier and Make are the next best options. They let you connect the apps you’re using so that your campaigns are working 24/7 and you can focus on things that really matter, like creating the best content for your students!

Build relationships with your contacts

With a stunning website, a set of landing pages, contact forms, and a combo of tools that will help you grow your email list, you’re now ready for the next step. It’s time to launch your email marketing program that will take your subscribers from the “maybe” to the “YES!” stage.

5. Set up ongoing newsletters

Newsletters are the heart and soul of email marketing, and GetResponse proudly shines a spotlight on them year after year. Online teachers who use our platform confirm that this time investment pays off. For example, Jeanne-Marie Paynel’s newsletters have stunningly high open rates, between 38 and 51%, and as she says:

I am pleased with the engagement, with the fact that people are opening my weekly newsletter. And I’m actually quite proud that I have been consistent the past two years in sending it out.

Jeanne-Marie Paynel M. Ed., the founder of Your Parenting Mentor

Here’s a winning recipe: Valuable Content + Consistency + Solid Email Marketing Software.

Let’s focus on the last element. Creating newsletters in GetResponse is both fun and easy, even if you decide to do it without the help of an AI email generator.

Ready to build your newsletter from scratch? Great! It’s time to:

• Come up with a catchy subject line
• Add your recipients
• Design your email

The design part is also a breeze because you can choose from dozens of customizable, eye-catching templates.

And if you really want to flex your creative muscles, you can always design something unique with our blank templates.

After you polish your newsletter in terms of structure, content, and imagery, there’s the final part — sending it to your contacts:

• Immediately
• At a predefined time (e.g. 10 AM according to your or their time zone)
• Or with the help of the “perfect timing” feature.

6. Launch drip campaigns

“This is really good” — if your subscribers think that each time they open your weekly newsletter, then you’re on the right track.

But to increase the impact on your audience, you need to consider a broader strategy. This is where drip campaigns come into play.

What could be the starting point of that journey for your subscribers? A warm welcome autoresponder that goes beyond saying “hi.” And what could be the finish line? Conversion from a subscriber to a paying student.

Great! So now it’s time to build everything in between! Think of a sequence of automated emails that land in your audience’s inboxes at a specific time or are triggered by a specific action.

A successful drip campaign can come down to a short email course:

1. Welcome email
2. Getting started
3. First lesson reminder
4. Progress check-in
5. Mid-course motivation
6. Practice opportunity
7. Course completion approaching
8. Congratulations and next steps

And the best part? You can set it all up in GetResponse!

7. Engineer advanced automation sequences

If implementing drip campaigns earns you a PhD in email marketing, then mastering marketing automation workflows will make you a Distinguished Professor in the field.

Don’t worry — you won’t have to spend years perfecting this skill. In fact, with GetResponse, creating automation scenarios is both intuitive and exciting!

But before we get to the nitty-gritty, let’s clarify the idea of marketing automation. Manually deciding what kind of email to send and to which type of subscribers would consume all your time, even with a relatively small email list. And if you have hundreds or thousands of subscribers, this becomes physically impossible.

Luckily, with marketing automation, you can design an architecture of triggers and actions with predefined content. The second piece of good news is that you can leverage workflow templates depending on your goal and use case.

You can easily set up an automation workflow for each purpose and for every part of your customer journey map using the prebuilt flows or by connecting the dots yourself.

Does it actually work? A Brazilian online learning platform, Responde Aí by Driven, proves that automation, apart from obvious time savings, delivers tangible results:

In a matter of a few minutes we created an automation for triggering emails to contacts who visited our sales page and did not make a subscription. And in a few days, this brought us a financial return of a few thousand reais (BRL).

Thiago Osório – Performance Lead at Responde Aí by Driven

Educate, engage, and monetize

So far, we’ve gone through the foundations and tools for growing your email list and further nurturing your subscribers with email sequences.

Now, it’s time to introduce three marketing channels that will help you stand out from the online teaching crowd, produce high-quality content, and earn money from your expertise.

8. Run live and on-demand webinars

You’ve probably heard it a lot: “People don’t read, they skim.” Or — “People have the attention span of a goldfish.” Yes, it’s not easy to create content in an oversaturated environment.

But webinars prove otherwise. If you deliver high-quality value that solves your audience’s problems, you can make them watch and listen to your online event that lasts an hour or even two! And if you run a proper promo campaign before the event, you can gather even hundreds of attendees — just like Matematma did.

You know what’s the real power behind webinars? They can serve multiple purposes:

• Grow your email list. Let’s say you run an online software development school. You want to host a webinar that will capture new subscribers, so you come up with a controversial topic: “Will AI Replace Software Developers?” Boom — over 600 attendees who left their email to sign up for your event.
• Nurture your leads. Let’s stick to the above example. To establish a relationship between your school and your prospects, you organize a webinar called “Mastering the Top Software Languages in the AI Era: Why Human Developers Are More Crucial Than Ever”.
• Convert leads into paying students. Finally, you can use webinars to create the “OK, I’m in!” moment in the minds of your subscribers. The topic could be: “From Code to Career: How to Launch Your Six-Figure Software Development Journey in 2024”.
• Earn money directly from webinars. These events are called paid webinars — events with a paid gateway. Let’s say it’s a 5-hour Python bootcamp, where each ticket costs $49. Multiply that by 230 attendees. How about earning $11,270 on a single event?

How can you make this happen? There are dozens of stand-alone webinar tools out there. But there is also GetResponse, where you can host webinars and make them part of a complete Conversion Funnel!

To master this activity, tune into our webinar blueprint:

9. Sell online courses

Online courses are a natural revenue source for online teachers.

Until recently, you had to juggle multiple tools to get an online course off the ground and connect it with your email campaigns, landing pages, or webinars. But that’s changed as of now!

With the fresh online courses toolkit from GetResponse, you can build your online course from scratch on one platform!

Here’s a glimpse of the course navigator dashboard:

As you can see, you can ask the AI assistant to be your co-pilot in the process, but we will explore the self-made option. What happens after clicking “Add module”? You can name and save the first module:

Next, you can create your first lesson by uploading your content in any format: text, audio, video, PDF, or a webinar! Plus, you can set up a quiz for your students to check what they’ve learned.

Then you add one lesson after another, with the option to use different content formats and add quizzes, until you wrap it up with a completion page, where you customize the message to your students and set up a certificate.

As soon as you complete the creation part, you navigate to the settings page, where you:

• Add a relevant and catchy course title
• Set up your pricing — either a one-time payment or a subscription fee, allowing you to integrate with Stripe or PayPal.

Create a course page with a page link, and even an option to manage the SEO aspects!

And finally, each new student who enrolls in your online course can automatically subscribe to your mailing list! If that’s not time-saving, I don’t know what is 🙂

10. Send premium newsletters

The last content format that hits two targets with one arrow is premium newsletters. Why two targets? Because with this marketing channel, you can do both — build your audience’s trust and earn money (directly).

You may ask — why would anyone pay for a newsletter since newsletters are free content by definition? Well, they are, and they aren’t. There are numerous content creators who successfully monetize their knowledge with paid newsletters. It all comes down to the value. If you deliver insights that come directly from your experience and trial and error, it might be better to hide them behind a paid gateway.

Here’s an example of how George Chasiotis, the author of the GrowthWaves newsletter, does it:

So, how can you implement this? Well, we have the answer to that, too! Our premium newsletter toolkit has just arrived, transforming GetResponse into a complete solution for content creators and online educators!

OK, let’s see what happens after you click the ‘Add premium newsletter’ button. First, you need to choose your newsletter’s name, brand it with your logo, add a relevant description, and assign it to a category.

Next, you set up which contact list will receive your newsletter, what kind of subscription offers you want your audience to see (free and premium versions), and finally, the URL of your newsletter.

After completing this part, you’ll be able to generate your first email, in the same way we walked through earlier in this article, i.e. through the Email Marketig tab. Win!

Your turn

And that’s a wrap! As you can see, there’s absolutely no need to purchase a dozen tools to cover all your marketing activities as an online teacher! You can sort it all out with just one end-to-end platform — GetResponse!

To sum up, within one software, you can:

• Create a website, landing pages, and sign-up forms & popups
• Grow your email lists, send regular newsletters, drip campaigns, and create advanced marketing automation workflows
• Earn money with premium content formats, such as webinars, online courses, and paid newsletters

And that’s just the beginning! We’ll be adding new features soon 🙂

If any of this sounds interesting to you, then wait no longer and start testing all these tools with our brand-new Content Monetization plan!