Switching To Aweber - Part 1

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:

• Aweber - a First Impression. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger
• Aweber Review. Yaro Starak of Entrepreneur’s Journey.
• The Switch. Christina Favreau of Savvy Entrepreneur.
• 5 Reasons Why I Love Aweber. Marketing With Miles.

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.

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