While cleaning up my mailing lists using Awebers interface the other week, I spotted a bug which caused me to delete about 100 real subscribers from my blog notify list. I’m sorry about that if you’re one of them, and if you haven’t received an email from me in the last week or so, that’s why.
The bug arises after you select to view unsubscribed leads, and then click to view 100 at a time. You then click the button to mark all in view as deleted, and then save. All fine up to then.
When the list comes back for the next lot of unsubscribed leads, instead of remembering you were viewing 100, it goes back to the default of 20. So you click the button to view 100 again, and instead of it showing you 100 unsubscribed leads, it shows you 100 leads of any status.
Erk!
So I didn’t notice that the first time I did it, and deleted 100 email addresses which were a mix of subscribed and unsubscribed, mostly subscribed.
I can’t be the only person who this has happened to, so just be a bit careful if you go through the same clean up exercise.
(BTW, did you know that the average email address on your mail list has a lifespan of 18 months? People get fed up of all the spam and instead of dealing with it, they just open another email account.)
At this point I would usually promote Aweber and place my affiliate link here but in good conscience I’m afraid I can’t do that any more since they put their prices up.
Every cloud has a silver lining though.
Because Aweber have effectively removed themselves from the mass market, it opens the door for a really good self-hosted autoresponder.
Now Aweber have always said their deliverability rate is the best, and I’ve always agreed with them on that. But there’s a new kid in town called AuthSMTP.com – I’ve mentioned them a few times on this blog already.
The service that AuthSMTP.com provide is email deliverability by using their SMTP servers. And they’re cheap.
Like Aweber, they also work with ISPs to ensure email sent from their servers gets through network filters, and the nice thing is you can use their service either with your own email address, or with any script that uses SMTP.
SmartDD, TicketDesk Pro, the Instant Survey Script and the Nickel Script for instance.
Putting two and two together, if you have a really nice autoresponder script which does open rate and click tracking, why do you need an autoresponder service any more?
This is something I’ll be investigating over the next few weeks, and if I find a php based autoresponder script that pushes all my hot buttons, I’ll let you know. If I don’t, then you can bet I’ll be adding that to my list of products.
-Frank Haywood
Frank, please contact our support team. They can generally restore leads that you may have deleted by accident from your account. Can’t guarantee it, but we do maintain them in the background for a while.
I completely respect your decision to use any product that provides the features you need, but you should be aware that no off the shelf installed software has the advanced analytics features that AWeber does. Just yesterday actually, Yaro Starak made a great post on his blog about using our new analytics segmentation features allowed him to make his list $31,940 more profitable than before.
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/1003/email-marketing-tips/
It’s a great case study on further segmenting and engaging only those subscribers who’ve shown specific content to be relevant to them.
Just to let you know, yes Aweber got expensive, but Mike Filsaime has a Black label version of it called Prosender, that is still $19.95/month unlimited.
As for producing an autoresponder product, there are already lots of them out there for free.
Even worst, you are going to get a lot of people’s hosting accounts banned. Foolishly I let my business partner run an autoresponder from one of my domains – it was mail outs for a legitimate business. It ook him less than a week to get my account shut down. Running your own autoresponder is a really bad idea.
Frank,
Can you provide a link to a comparison of AuthSMTP and AWeber? I think I am sold on this recommendation, like many of your recommendations, but I would like to know more about how the two services differ.
Thanks,
Glenn
Tom:
Will do, although I guess it’s no great shakes to me in the big scheme of things. 😉
Darren:
Yes I know about Prosender, Mike is one of my mentors. 😉
I agree with your comment about running your own autoresponder if you’re…
a) Running your site on a shared server, and / or
b) Using the standard php sendmail to send emails rather than SMTP.
Most web hosts will only allow you to send a limited amount of emails a day on shared hosting, and you ideally need a dedicated server to be able to send large amounts of emails. Even then you may be on dodgy ground until you’ve explained and cleared it with your host that you’re 100% legit.
The nice thing about AuthSMTP though is you can use their SMTP server to send your email. So they don’t originate from your domain, they originate from the AuthSMTP servers.
And my experience is they make sure your mail gets through.
So if you have a smoky self-hosted autoresponder script that has CRM like capabilities, you can safely send emails until the cows come home, and know all sorts of things about your customers, like who clicked what and when without paying a lot of money for it.
If the growth of a particular list later warrants it, you can then shift to a service like Aweber or Prosender at a later date. They’ll happily migrate your list for you.
Glenn:
AuthSMTP is only an SMTP service. They provide a transport service for you, but they don’t provide an autoresponder.
You’d need to either do some research yourself, or wait until I’ve done it for you.
Oh what the heck, go do some research! 😉
I’ll tell you what I find AuthSMTP invaluable for. Making sure my support desk ticket notification emails get through to my customers. I also use it on a couple of email accounts too where I need to make sure my emails get past spam filters when writing to people.
-Frank
FYI, ProSender moved over to the new plan! 😉
This topic, about self-hosted autoresponder, or a 3rd party autoresponder was recently brought up in a video I watched! – To star with, their product launch brought the servers down, so if you had a self hosted autoresponder, then guess what?!… You’d then lose the ability to send any important emails.
Whereas using a company such as AWeber, you still have access to that, meaning that it’s still possible to communicate with your list.
I mean, if you do decide to have something created Frank, then there’s a good chance I’ll take a look at it. For the simple reason, that I check out most things. :P:P
Thanks
Mark
Mark:
Ah, thanks for the info on Prosender, it makes sense of course.
And if you’re doing a product launch with a self-hosted autoresponder, then yes it’s likely that you’re going to run into problems. 😉
So yes, use a service in those cases.
However, I believe there are a few suitable self-hosted autoresponders that are perfectly aimed at the niche markets. I can certainly think of at least one case where a self-hosted autoresponder would be preferable, and I’ll be letting that out of the bag at a later date. 😉
And… you know SmartDD sends out a follow up email 24 hours later? I’ve had a lot of people ask for that to be built up into a simple autoresponder, and I’ve refused to do it so far.
Again I’ll let my plans for that out of the bag another time. I’ve got some BIG things coming.
-Frank