How to get Aweber to bend the rules

Rules are made to be broken – well at least bent.

Email is the life-blood of an Internet business. You will have heard many times “the money is in the list” and it is true. Every time I send out my newsletter (which takes many hours to write) I make money. Good money. But what is the use of a large responsive list and a valuable ezine (newsletter) if the email never actually makes it to the subscriber’s in-box?

So let’s change the mantra to “The money is in the list which gets delivered”.

THE PROBLEM WE HAD & YOU MAY HAVE TOO

Big problem: Why our email deliverability dropped

Our Wonderful Web Women list is managed through the software that runs our membership site. We love this software (now we have worked with the developers to iron out all the bugs). The problem with managing your email list from your own hosting account is twofold:

1. You look like a spammer: the ISPs (like AOL, bigpond, tpg etc, you know, the company you get your Internet connection through) don’t know you. They don’t know if you are a spammer or not. They don’t have a special relationship with you because you don’t call every one of them and let them know you are good etc (this is what companies like Aweber do). So if you send an email to thousands of people, and a few hundred of those are using the same ISP, the ISP will see a stack of emails coming from the one address to hundreds of different people and think you are a spammer. So your email can be marked as spam and in the worst case, doesn’t even get delivered.

2. Email takes hours to get delivered: To get around this, software that sends your email from your your own server (from your own website) will send out your emails in small batches every 10 minutes or so. This is in the hope that the ISP’s won’t notice you. The problem with this is as your list grows and gets into the thousands it can take HOURS for your email to go out. (600 per hour. So if you have a list of 6000, that’s 10 hours!)

Our list takes HOURs for us to send an email out but I could cope with that. But when some of our staff reported they were no longer receiving our email I started to worry. When my Mum stopped getting our newsletter I knew I had to do something!

THE RULES THAT SPOIL THE SOLUTION

Why Aweber ROCKS

We have used Aweber for years to manage our other lists and I love them.

They are easy to use, economical and most importantly they have the best deliverability rate on the Internet. We didn’t use them for Wonderful Web Women because at the time we launched, our software didn’t work easily with Aweber. Now it works seamlessly but we had a HUGE problem. If we transferred our list of thousands over to Aweber we had to follow their rules. These rules meant we would probably lose thousands of subscribers.

Every one must follow these rules (it is all automated) so if you want to move your list, you will have the same problem. First let me tell you the rules and then let me tell you how to bend them…..

Aweber’s rule: all subscribers to a mailing list MUST double opt-in. This means they sign up on your web site, then they receive an email that asks them to click on a link to confirm they want to receive email from you. This means it is impossible to add people to your mailing list who didn’t give you permission. It is impossible to spam. That is one of the reasons why Aweber has one of the best deliverability rates on the Internet – no mail from them is spam.

The Problem: If you are transferring an existing database of email contacts to Aweber, every person on that list MUST confirm they want to be on your list. They will all receive the “subscription confirmation” email, even if they have been on your email mailing list for years.

This requires your subscribers to take action. They need to open the email and click. This may not seem a huge problem but it is. Your email will be one in possibly hundreds received that day. If you average a 40% open rate on your email for great content, you will average even less for a confirmation email. You run the risk of losing way more than half of your subscribers. You only get one chance as you can not resend the confirmation email. Sure you can send an email before letting them know, and offering a bribe but like it or not, you will still probably lose half.

THE SOLUTION

You can see this is a tough decision to make and I know that many of you are facing the same dilemma. But then I got to thinking… Rules are made by people aren’t they? That means rules can be broken (or at least bent) by the people who created them. We often forget that Internet businesses have people behind the screens! So why not ask?

They said YES!!

But I had to prove to them that I had obeyed all their other rules and could prove I had permission to email the people on my list. So, if this is the solution you are looking for, here are the steps below.

Step-by-step How to Transfer your email list to Aweber WITHOUT each person having to opt-in again

1. You must already have a list that people have double opted-in. If you don’t, forget about it. You will need to bribe and cajole your list to confirm after you have added them to Aweber.

2. Create a list name in aweber ready to receive your contact list (make sure you create some great auto-responder follow up messages so people will get great content immediately. This will make sure they stay subscribed)

3. Make sure your house is in order before you ring Aweber (yep, that’s right you’ll have to speak to someone!): Here is what you will need to show them:

• the form people fill out explicitly says they are agreeing to receive email from you (It’s ok to say fill in the form below to receive our weekly newsletter, or similar)
• After people subscribe, they receive an email asking them to confirm they want to receive email from you
• There must be a way for people to unsubscribe. In our case, people can click through the link we put on each newsletter saying they don’t want to receive member updates

4. Ring Aweber (they are available for 12 hours per day so you should be able to find a time that suits you) and tell them what you want to do.

5. Aweber staff will check through the sign up process and they will also need to log into the backend of wherever you manage your list now so they can see that people have been able to unsubscribe in the past. You can only upload the list of people who are still subscribed.

6. If everything is approved by Aweber, they will turn off the confirmation email for THAT LIST ONLY while you import your leads.

Things you need to know when you import

1. You can only import 2000 leads per day. This means you need to split your list into groups of 2000. You will also need to ring them each day you are going to upload your next batch so they can disable the confirmation email again.

2. Follow the instructions to import under the leads tab at the top when you log into your Aweber account.

3. You will need to create an excel file with the columns “name” and “email”

4. They say to cut and paste the TAB or csv file but I found I just had to copy and paste the 2 columns from the excel file and paste it in.

Handy hint

1. You may end up splitting your list into multiple lists (eg gold members, free, purchased product x etc) you can still only import 2000 in total.

2. If you divide your list into multiple lists you can make it so they are all automatically subscribed to another “newsletter” list. You do this using automation rules which are explained under, you guessed it, the automation tab at the top. You need to create the automation rule in the “newsletter” list, not the other one you have just created.

So, there it is. How to bend the rules.

One last step

The staff on the phone at Aweber were fantastic. Sure they have a new customer now but they went out of their way to help. Tell them how grateful you are, send them a thank you email and maybe even send them a card. After all, you know real people will be reading it.