Is Aweber just THAT much better?

I don't see that deliverability on Aweber is better than any others (other than that the emails they send don't seem to end up in the spam box as often.)

You make a good point, but what comes to mind with this thought, how big of a difference is the white-listing? Cause if Aweber can dominate Profollow, and gets 10x better results, it could be worth it to bite the bullet and churn out the extra few bucks for the best.

How did you go about verifying this information before making such a statement?

Autoresponder threads are some of the most entertaining to read because of inaccurate statements made like the one above. I'm a mostly happy Aweber user myself and have been with them almost since their inception, but after testing and tracking millions of e-mails through their system (among other services like Getresponse, Constant Contact, etc.) among a wide variety of ISPs and domain names I've learned that "deliverability" rates are a moving target. No one ever stays "#1" permanently since it probably changes every nanosecond (I'm not kidding either). I've always been suspect of Aweber's own findings and studies over the years so I began doing my testing at the turn of the millennium.

It's completely untrue that Aweber's delivery rates have no competition. Have you tested this versus other services or higher end self-hosted scripts where the company does have a staff to work on establishing relationships with large ISPs and the 101 other things one has to do to keep delivery rates high?

I've only met a small handful of marketers who have tested delivery rates to the extent that we have and if any of them are being straight up honest with you they would never say XYZ company has the best delivery rates. For example, we sent out an e-mail broadcast a couple of days ago and in it there were over 1,000 test e-mails. We compared the data from those e-mails with our autoresponder test e-mails across a wide spectrum of niches.

In SOME of the e-mails Aweber had better delivery rates. In SOME of the e-mails Getresponse performed better. In SOME of the e-mails Email Aces performed better (yep, still got my test account there baby!).

While the preceding paragraph is a gross oversimplification of what goes into the testing we do, it does point out that there are MANY factors that are outside of the control of ANY autoresponder company you use or self-hosted software.

Bottom line: if you ever want to find out which autoresponder service suits your business needs and budget, go out and TEST out a couple of services. Call / e-mail their customer service department (or sales depending on the company) and ask them questions. READ their entire website to find out what functionality they provide and their pricing structure.

Does the company count unverified leads as a count in their database? What is their stance / policies regarding spam complaints?

I could go on and on, but hopefully you get the point I'm trying to make. This is a great forum and you'll find some good advice here, but over the years I've learned that when it comes to autoresponder threads, hardly anyone has the facts because most marketers just don't do exhaustive testing of systems like Aweber and the like. You're better off asking people what company they are happy with and WHY and then do your own diligence.

Happy Freaking Holidays!

RoD "Too-much-coffee-and-Baileys-Makes-My-DNS-Go-Faster" Cortez

I know, it's just not worth the hassle of switching and losing subscribers in the process, especially if it's just to save a few dollars per month. In my opinion, your autoresponder is the last thing you'd want to skimp on with your IM resources/tools.

Hi, I was following this thread and spotted your post in ref to your own autoresponder service.

We have an autoresponder service, but it is just one part of the list building tools we provide.

We have a partnership program why by we can block off our own autoresponder and in place have yours.

Advantage is that we provide the tools to build the lists so your customer remain customers foir longer.

This is only a brief off the cuff introduction, if you want to see what we do PM me and i'll set you up with an account.

Hmmmmm, something is not adding up here. You've "tested" many services and you came to the conclusion that it's better to self host? Were your self-hosted delivery rates really that much better than, lets say, Getresponse's?

Another point, you've only mentioned about 2-5% of what goes into ensuring high delivery rates. Do you have your business / domain name white listed with major ISPs? Do you attend industry seminars and conferences to ensure you're on top of any changes in technology or even politics that might impact delivery? What system do you have in place to deal with bounce backs and undeliverables?

By the way, doing all these things requires staff and expertise, something most marketers don't have. I've heard very good arguments on both sides, but for most of our online endeavors we use a service.

RoD

Actually, there are companies out there, like Constant Contact or Getresponse who have far more users than Aweber does, so it's far from the "most famous".

Also the private labels of Aweber do not have the EXACT same features of the actual Aweber. But if you want the same BASIC features and are on a tight budget, it's not a bad idea.

Another private label of Aweber is Prosender.com.

RoD