Aweber’s Queer Little Accounting Method

While Aweber is the flagship of email marketing and list management, particularly among Internet marketers, there are some peculiarities about their mindset that can make them a very annoying business partner. Here are the two that bug me the most.

Long know for their extreme, some say fanatical, adherence to every scintilla of the Can-Spam act, Aweber has been the most stringent about uploading an existing email list to their servers without sending out “ye olde confirmation email.”

Anyone who knows anything about email marketing knows that if you send any existing list a confirmation email your list is going to shrink up like a grape in the sun, and you’ll end up with a raisin in the morning. Now, some will say that you SHOULD prune the list (interesting dried fruit thing going on here – purely unintentional) and that the folks who didn’t want to keep getting email from you who don’t confirm when you move the list are good riddance.

I think that’s stupid and at best willful ignorance.

Email Marketing is All About Timing

Everybody has had the experience of being on a list that you’d ignored for weeks or months – just deleting the updates or the ubiquitous and dirt-stupid “This Won’t Last Long!” obvious affiliate offer subject lines driven by false scarcity IMHBAO. Then one day you happen to see a subject line that sounds interesting or catches your eye. You open the message, are moved to click a link, and voila – you bought something!

And everyone who sends email to their list, whether a newsletter, blog update, or pure offers, has seen someone rise from the dead like Count Dracula and make a purchase. Holy cow, I didn’t know you were even still ALIVE Mr. Used to Be a Happy Blog Commenter / Twitter Chirpster / Facebooke Friendly – and here you are buying my schwag again! Yippie!

Money From Prunes

If you’d have pruned this customer based on open rates, or click-thru statistics you’d have never made the sale, and the buyer would have missed out on the opportunity to get something they wanted. (Ok, I’ll give you that the buyer isn’t really losing out if they never see a particular offer – or are they?) I’m primarily writing this for you and me from the marketer’s perspective.

Everything that happens online is driven by timing. Why do you think a sales letter that at best converts at 2% – 3% loses 98% of the people sho see it. You can run all your Taguchi Split Testing data by me and I’ll continue to insist that anecdotal evidence is that most people online have the attention span of a house fly and that 1000 things can take you away from clicking that buy button.

What Can Distract Someone Online?

• An inbound text message on their Iphone or cell.
• A Facebook alert that someone they don’t know just had tuna for lunch.
• Twitter and all it’s sick and twisted reindeer game apps like Hootsuite.
• Someone yelling – “come and eat this or I’m throwing it out to the dog!”
• The dog making a series of “urp-urp-urp” pre-wretching “I’m fixing to vomit” throat sound that can wake even the soundest sleeping human blot upright.
• Blue screen of death (see Microsoft Windows Support) – Mac users can skip this one.
• An actual phone call.
• An actual human visit.

Which brings me in a poorly structured transition to:

The Whole Aweber Stats Obsession Thing

Tom Kulzer - Boy Wonder Founder and CEO of Aweber

Tom Kulzer, founder of Aweber, admitted in an interview that he created the basic sequential autoresponder business at age 12 (okay he was a little older but not much) and it turned into a successful business pretty straightaway. Tom has never had any other business. Tom is brilliant and a super nice young man, but not having had trenchworthy experience in any other business has made him a bit myopic about what his company ought to do/be for the everyday customer.

Their fixation on statistical data and super drill down reports is so thorough and amazing that seriously, I suspect Obama should hire Tom to fix the economy – or at least find out where the $700 Billion Schtimulus money went. But then, Tom has far too much business experience to get a shot at that gig.

But, almost no one I know uses any of that statistical data – ever. Most of us operate Aweber for what we want from it, something to capture emails and let us send broadcast emails when we think up something to send. Frankly, I’ll bet most Aweber accounts don’t even have more than 1 follow up message – failing to use even the auto-responder feature. We know we should use them, but most don’t.

Aweber Bills You For Unsubscribes!

This article began, like most of my rants, on me noticing a disturbance in The Force. My Aweber monthly bill has edged up from $29 to $49 without me doing any major listbuilding activity and I wondered why. Turns out I am being billed for 950 unsubscribes! I called the sales department guy and asked how my tab went up – and he told me I had a list on this account about 1000 people higher than I knew I had.

Why would Aweber charge me for the people who are unsubscribed? Easy, they are getting high on the fumes of the whole statistical thing. The guy actually told me that “some people like to look at that data and figure out which message in their autoresponder got the most unsubscribes.”

Are you kidding me? First, that never even occurred to me and I’ve been making money online for 14 years. Second – I DON’T EVER “like to look at data” and if I ever wrote something that sent the list into an unsubscribe frenzy – prunes away! Good riddance to those people! LOL

Now, THAT’S an unsubscribe – not someone who didn’t even see the new shiny “I’ve moved my list – please please please God click the confirmation link so I can be an Aweber customer too like Ryan Deiss or Perry Belcher?”

Perhaps You Could Tell Me Why You are Charging Me Extra Every Month – Forever?

I asked Mr Helpful if he could delete these deadbeats – repeating my snort that I would never go look at who unsubscribed – much less “enjoy looking at the data.” He said he could and that would save me $20 a month.

But, as for knocking that $20 off my existing bill. No freakin’ way cowboy! We stored that data for you (without asking you or telling you – but charging you) and will that be Visa or Mastercard?

Agree Disagree? Tweet – Facebook and comment below – I’ll reply!