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I use a lot of different companies for various business functions, and when there is one that really does a nice job, I like to call them out on it.
One company that I’ve been really pleased with for years is AWeber. I use AWeber to send out newsletters and blog updates for Affiliate Summit, Affiliate Tip, and AffiliateManager.net.
In addition to all of the standard features, they have a couple that I really like:
- Blog broadcast: Create broadcast newsletters automatically from existing blog RSS content feeds or other sources of RSS and XML content.
- Spam Score Analyzer: A popular spam filtering tool called SpamAssassin is used to check your message and display any key areas that are being caught by the filter.
Not to mention the attractive pricing structure and great support from the folks at AWeber. If you’re looking for a company to enable you to collect opt-ins, manage your lists, and send newsletters, I’d enthusiastically recommend AWeber.
See http://tv.affiliatetip.com/item/L72DJ6NPJZZV07FZ for a brief explanation of why AWeber is my preferred vendor for sending out e-mail.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Stephen Pratley // Jun 15, 2007 at 5:12 am
Hi Shawn,
I looked at Aweber a while ago and whilst it looks like an excellent system, and has great recommendations from many people I know, there is one big problem.
You can’t bring existing lists into the system
It looks great for starting a new list, but to move to Aweber you need to get every member of your list to re-subscribe. Pretty much the kiss of death even for the best of lists.
I’ve a couple of new projects I’ll put their way, but for my existing stuff it seems I’m stuck with another supplier or using my own scripts.
If there’s a way round this, I’d love to know!
2 Shawn Collins // Jun 15, 2007 at 8:33 am
Hi Stephen -
That’s correct that you can’t directly import lists - they have to re-opt-in to the version of the list on AWeber.
That really bothered me when I first went there, because it greatly slimmed down my lists.
While that part can be frustrating, the system is very beneficial in the end.
Since they are so harsh on importing lists, they’ve got a really good reputation with ISPs, and more effective delivery than other e-mail providers I’ve used.
3 Carsten Cumbrowski // Jun 16, 2007 at 11:12 am
I have to look at them again. The RSS feature was something I was looking for. You have little to no control over the stuff with Feedburner or Feedblitz and transferring an email list is either virtually impossible or a pain that not only costs time, but also makes you end up losing a bunch of subscribers during the switch, because of additional emails, re-opt in and other crap like that.
Are you able to add multiple feed sources and hook them up to the same email list? I use Google Reader today to merge multiple feeds, then run it through Feedburner for stats, formatting and email subscriptions.
If I could hook the original feeds to the email list directly, that would be great, because it can’t happen that things are being sent more than once if you have to remove (because you can’t pause) a feed source from the merged feed and re-add it later. Google Reader must assign all the items of a feed new ID’s when it is being re-included in the merged feed and Feedburner thinks that those posts are new and re-sends them again to everybody. It’s a pain.
If I could remove Feedburner and Google reader out of the equation for the the email subscribers, that would be good. I would lose the Feedburner stats, but get AWeber stats instead. Do they provide automated access to stats via an API or web service or something like that?
4 Shawn Collins // Jun 16, 2007 at 4:17 pm
I’m not clear what you’re asking here - you think people would want to subscribe through you to get multiple feeds aggregated via e-mail?
If so, you could always pull them all into Tumblr and use the RSS feed there to trigger the e-mails in AWeber.
No clue on that - I just login regularly. You can get a notification via e-mail for each opt-in, but that gets annoying.
Here is an FAQ for the Blog Broadcast feature, but I don’t see anything about stats via an API or web service: http://www.aweber.com/faq/categories/Customers/Messages/Blog+Broadcasts/
I’ve found their tech support to be very helpful - you should definitely ask them.
5 » Flavor Flav on AWeber - AWeber Blog // Jun 19, 2007 at 11:59 am
[...] threw together a video that’s entirely too funny to not share. His impersonation of Flavor Flav, reasons he uses AWeber, and “AWeber Time” at the end of the video are an entertaining [...]
6 Steve // Aug 3, 2007 at 12:18 pm
aweber.com states that you can import lists into their system. Go there and check out their video of the process.
Thanks,
Steve
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