Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

Switching To Aweber – Part 1

January 23, 2008 | Traffic

Perhaps it is about time. But, I am going to attempt to make a promotional platform switch to Aweber. For those who may not know, Aweber is a company which allows you to host managed email lists. They are very well known and admired among my peers and primarily for one reason: reliable deliverability. Here are some reviews from some of my blogging peers:

Currently, I am managing all of my email lists through 1-2-All, put out by ActiveCampaign. It is very good software and will continue to use it when needed. The problem is that it is tied to my domain. That means that any spam filters out there who flag my emails are going to essentially blacklist PCMech as a domain name.

Not good.

Now, I am not spamming anybody. Everybody is opt in. But, you have two things at work here:

  1. Spam filtering systems are on computers, and computers don’t judge.
  2. Even legit, opt-in subscribers sometimes get itchy trigger fingers and report you as spam. It pisses me off, but it happens.

On a list of around 26,000 subscribers, I might get around 4,000 reading the thing. That means well over 20,000 emails are being sent, not bouncing, but not really arriving either. That is not a good stat.

So, switching to Aweber is an attractive option. It means paying for my email lists again, but your email list is gold and it is worth it. Also, by having somebody managing my lists whose entire job it is to make sure my email gets to the recipient, I am quite sure my emails will be more effective.

The Catch

In order to safeguard their systems, Aweber puts some pretty serious restrictions on importing existing lists. Namely,

  1. Every subscriber is going to have to reconfirm themselves to my list
  2. Aweber is going to limit me to 2,000 imported addresses per day for the first 5 days. On each import, they are going to scan the addresses for verification. If Aweber determines the list if of low quality, they may deny the import. If the list passes verification, then they will permit me to import the remaining addresses without hassle.

So, the fact of the matter is that, while my list is going to be much higher quality after this import is done, it is very likely to be a much smaller list than I went in with. And, there is no guarantee that they will import them at all. It is all up to their internal quality control.

So, what I am doing is signing up for a 30-day trial. I am going to start this process and see how it goes. If I end up having problems, I can always cancel.

If it does work, then from there on out I know that I am building a much higher quality list.

I will report how it goes. I’m sure this import process is going to be tedious. Part 2 will come later, as I report how the import went.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

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  2. Aweber and Apple MobileMe Emails Being Banned
  3. How To Pause The Aweber Autoresponder
  4. Using Multiple Opt-Ins To Track What Works [Aweber]
  5. Search For Email Mailing List Solution
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  • I am currently working with Aweber right now. I have a mailing list of 30K names. I spoke with aweber.com and they said I can post 2K names each day for 5 days, if everything is ok, they will upload the whole list for me.
  • Chris, I have been using Aweber for awhile now and am 100% happy that I made the switch. Yes, I did lose probably at least half my subscribers when I switch (I forgot the actual #), however the way I look at it, if they don't re-confirm, they probably aren't worth having on the list anyway because they aren't interested or responsive.

    You'll be happy with Aweber.
  • David, I realize this post is now a little dated, but I wanted to see the follow-up (part 2, Part 3,etc.) articles of how this turned out for you.

    I too am now in the same situation to where I need to import a pretty large list into aweber and take this away from my home-grown auto-responder series and one that offers so many more features.

    I was thinking of send a message to my list giving away a free gift if they reconfirmed onto the new list. Then I will know that the ones that reconfirm actually want to continue to be on the list, otherwise, they would have passed on the free gift or deleted the email.

    Thanks for any follow-up you may have.
  • I use http://www.omnistarmailer.com to send my email list and I have a list of around 30,000 and I have never been flagged spam, they have a lot of built-in tools to help fight this type of thing. I think it is worth a look.
  • Congrats on your decision to make the switch. Hope it goes as smoothly as it did for me (although I opted to go with iContact instead of Aweber). Yes, you will lose subscribers, but it will grow again. And, as you say, it will be a quality list!

    Thanks for the link. Good luck!
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