Since Graywolf posted review of Constant Contact, I thought readers of this blog might interested in a review of a competing service, AWeber. Both services let you create and manage mailing lists.
Why Mailing Lists?
You might wonder why I use a mailing list provider in the first place. Well, there are three reasons mailing lists are useful:
- Email is everywhere. Everyone who has a computer these days has an email address. Often multiple addresses. Even people without a computer — they might use a public access terminal at a library — have email addresses. With the plethora of free email providers out there it's trivial to get an email address. Not everyone reads blogs, but everyone reads their email.
- Email is pushed, not pulled. If you've been around technology long enough, you'll know that the “push vs. pull” debate has been raging for a long time. Email has always been considered as “push” technology — when you send an email, you are “pushing” it out to the recipient. It shows up in the recipient's inbox almost immediately, without any work on their part. This is how RIM built its BlackBerry empire, after all, by extending the push metaphor to a wireless device — send an email to a BlackBerry user and they get it almost instantly (well, there are exceptions, but for the most part this is true). On the other hand, blogs and web pages are “pull” technology — you have to remember to visit them to see what's new, unless of course you use tools like Bloglines to do the pulling for you automatically.
- Email is personal. You can personalize email, tailor it to the person behind the email address. Even if you're sending out the same email to a thousand people, it's still a one-to-one connection between you and each individual recipient. Blogs and web pages are one-to-many connections — you can't control or track who reads them, so you can't personalize them.
Although I run multiple mailing lists (more on this later), my main one so far is the Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense newsletter, which I send out every two or three weeks (on average). This is a targeted list, because you have to explicitly sign-up for the list and confirm that you want to receive the newsletter, so I know for a fact that the people on this list are very interested in all things relating to AdSense and contextual advertising in general. And because they're on a list, I've been able to tell them about special deals and other interesting time-limited tidbits that I find from time to time, things that wouldn't make sense to talk about on the blog — or things I want to give just to them because they were nice enough to sign up for my list. Take note: if you run a list, be good to the people on that list, they've done you the courtesy of giving you their email address and permission to have conversations with them. So sending them “bonuses” that you don't give anyone else is just good marketing.
AWeber
Alright, let's get on with the review. So why did I choose AWeber in the first place? Two things, really: reputation and pricing.
AWeber has a good reputation. I knew that a number of mailing lists that I'm subscribed to use AWeber. I also saw AWeber mentioned in most books and articles about email marketing — which is, after all, the main reason mailing lists are created. Another often-mentioned service is GetResponse. Check it out as well. In fact, check out the providers used by all the mailing lists you're currently subscribed to.
Pricing is probably what sold me the most, though. All the mailing list providers seem to offer the same basic feature sets. At the time I was looking, though, AWeber seemed to offer the best deal: for $20/month I could create and manage an unlimited number of mailing lists, with the price only increasing once I'd reached 10,000 subscribers. I like flat fee pricing, especially with mailing lists, and having the ability to create as many lists as I wanted was particularly appealing.
Which brings us to discussing what an “autoresponder” is.
Autoresponders
A lot of mailing list providers don't actually talk about mailing lists, but about autoresponders. An autoresponder is basically an email address that automatically responds to inquiries from external parties. They're usually used to send marketing, sales or educational materials. For example, if you're interested in learning about “Topic X”, you can often find a free email-based course. All you do is signup with the autoresponder (just send it a blank email) and it'll send you the first lesson automatically in response. You'll then get the subsequent lessons at predefined intervals. The mailing list provider manages the whole process, all you do (!) is write the lessons and add them to the autoresponder queue.
Of course, an autoresponder is just a special kind of mailing list. In AWeber, everything's an autoresponder, but you don't have to set a sequence of messages for each autoresponder. You can just create a simple “thank you for subscribing” message as the first and only message in the sequence, and use AWeber's “broadcast message” capability to send emails out to the people who signed up for that autoresponder.
Blogs By Mail
One recently introduced AWeber feature that I really like is the ability to automatically send out blog postings as broadcast messages. I've used this feature to create a separate mailing list, memwg-blog, that automatically scans the RSS feed for this blog and sends out any news postings it finds as emails to the list. A perfect way for people who don't usually read blogs to keep up-to-date with my postings.
SpamAssassin Testing
Sending email is easy, but these days it's also easy for your emails to be blocked by spam and virus prevention software at the receiving end. Another AWeber feature I really like is its built-in SpamAssassin email scoring. Any message I place into an AWeber mailing list gets run through a copy of SpamAssassin, a popular spam blocker, and given a “spam score”. Using this, I can easily determine if the message I'm sending is likely to be blocked. It'll also tell me why it might be blocked, which gives me the chance to fix things up.
Of course, when you ask someone to signup for one of your mailing lists, you should also ask them to place your email address in their whitelist so that it doesn't get blocked by their spam software. But not everyone does that, so the built-in SpamAssassin integration is great to have.
Hmm… this is getting longer than I'd expected! I'll stop now and continue this review later.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.