Is Respona Worth It? – My Verdict
Having familiarized myself with the ins and outs of Respona, I can confidently argue that it is a highly competent and proficient outreach management system explicitly designed for link builders.
My comprehensive testing period, spanning a few weeks, gave me the opportunity to explore the depths of what Respona has to offer - from using its search engine to personalized outreach email templates to detailed campaign management, visual content creation tool, promotion, precision contact information filtering, and beyond.
I want to equip you with the understanding necessary to harness Respona’s full capability with this Respona review, thus empowering you to execute outreach campaigns and build relationships that not only meet but exceed your objectives.
The bottom line?
With a proper setup and understanding, I have found Respona worth the investment.
What is Respona?
Respona is a sophisticated digital outreach tool designed specifically for link builders.
It provides a comprehensive set of features that streamline and optimize outreach efforts, including advanced personalization, an integrated email finder, automated follow-up sequences, and extensive campaign management capabilities.
Respona Outreach Process
The entire email outreach process in Respona can be summed up into six steps, four of which take place in the campaign editor.
Let’s take a closer look.
1. Selecting a Campaign Template (Or Creating a Custom Campaign)
Respona comes with a bunch of pre-made campaign templates - not just email templates but entire campaign templates for different purposes: link building, guest posting, digital PR, blogger outreach, etc.
When you use one of these templates, it pre-configures the search criteria for you. All you need to do is fill out the template fields.
It also pre-writes the email template for you based on your input.
It is a good timesaver and an extra bit of guidance for beginners, but I found myself creating custom campaigns past the first couple of days of using the tool.
In my experience, I was able to get things done faster with custom campaigns.
2. Finding Prospects
Respona has its own search engine for users finding content, podcasts, and extracting backlinks.
The first is powered by Google and Bing, the second - by Listen Notes, and the third - by Moz (although you can connect your Ahrefs or Semrush account and use that instead).
Every type of search has two modes: manual and automatic.
While I appreciate the option to find prospects manually, there’s very little reason to do it since the automatic search can also run several queries simultaneously.
So, you type in your searches (or paste pages whose links you’d like to extract), and Respona does all of them at the same time.
So, for example, you can paste 50 competitor links in a single search bar and run massive competitor backlink and outreach campaign all in one place.
All you have to do is check the results when they’re ready.
You can also set additional SEO filters to narrow down the results.
The speed of the search automation depends on how many queries you input.
One or two will take a couple of minutes, but a few dozen will naturally take longer.
And, of course, you can also import a CSV with your list of prospects if you have one already.
3. Finding Contact Information
Once your prospects are found or imported, you need to find their contact information.
According to Respona, their email finder has over 24 data sources where they are pulled from.
The process is also automated, but manual searches are possible too.
There are three main modes for contact search automation:
- Find the author and X people at the company
- Ignore the author and only find X people at the company
- Only find the author regardless of the company they work for
The first mode is best used for link building, the second - for marketing and sales, and the last for PR outreach.
Next, there are the job title and seniority fields. These essentially tell the tool who to look for.
For link building, just enter things like “SEO,” “link building,” “outreach,” etc., at all seniority levels.
Again, the time it takes to complete the contact search depends entirely on the size of your campaign,
A couple of dozen emails will only take ten minutes or so, but a list of several hundred people to find can leave you waiting for hours.
4. Reviewing your Email Sequence
If you use a campaign template, you’ll already have an email template pre-made.
But it’s still a good idea to use your own template.
Respona has everything you need for this - starting with auto-populating fields and automatic follow-ups and ending with a reply chance estimator.
It takes into account your email length, question count, and spam words.
I won’t list all the templates Respona provides, as they are all available in their outreach strategy hub.
5. Personalization
The last step before launching your Respona campaign is to personalize each pitch.
You can skip this step if you’re working on generalized mass blasts, but if your strategy requires personalization, Respona has a neat AI article summarizer that may help you with it.
While it’s not always useful for marketing and sales emails, it’s pretty good at pulling snippets of information for link-building and digital PR emails.
This way, you don’t need to open the person’s article and still make it look like you read it.
Before launching your campaign, Respona also verifies all emails to ensure they don’t have unpopulated fields, don’t have placeholders, and the recipients aren’t in your unsubscribe list.
6. Monitoring Responses
After the campaign is launched, all that’s left to do is to wait for responses.
Respona has a shared inbox that you can use to manage all of your inboxes in a single place.
This is great if you have a large team or use several outreach accounts like me.
Respona Pricing
Respona has two plans: Standard ($99/month) and Unlimited ($399/month, billed annually).
Both plans grant access to the full set of features - the only difference here is scale.
With the starter plan, you can only connect one sender email account ($49/month for an additional email) and receive 5000 monthly credits that do not roll over.
Finding one email with Respona costs five credits, so this is only enough for a thousand emails.
If you’re planning to run personalized outreach campaigns at scale, then the Unlimited plan is the way to go, as Standard is a bit limiting.
Respona Pros
- Advanced Personalization Options
- Integrated Email Finder
- Automated Follow-up Sequences
- Detailed Outreach Analytics and Reporting
- Comprehensive Campaign Management
- Collaborative Workspace
- Extensive Integrations
- High Deliverability Rate
- User-Friendly Interface
- Live Chat Customer Support
Respona Cons
- Fairly expensive for small businesses and freelancers
- It might be complex for beginners
- Limited export options
- No direct LinkedIn integration
- Performance can be slow at times
- A limited selection of default outreach templates
Respona Review Conclusion
Respona stands out as a specialized, user-friendly, and feature-rich tool for link builders.
Despite certain drawbacks, such as the steep pricing for small businesses, complexity for beginners, and a few other minor issues, its many pros decidedly outweigh its cons.
Respona offers a well-rounded suite of features, including advanced personalization, comprehensive campaign management, and extensive integrations.
Its automated follow-up sequences, detailed analytics and reporting, and high deliverability rate make your outreach campaigns highly effective and efficient.
The personalization of pitches, robust campaign templates, and prospect search capabilities facilitate an unparalleled user experience.
In the grand scheme of things, the benefits of using Respona justify the cost, especially for those planning to scale their outreach efforts.
Regardless of your level of link-building expertise, Respona can become an invaluable part of your toolkit with a bit of practice and patience.
Thank you for reading my Respona Review.
