Questions for guys with a HUGE.....

PS: How many complaints on average do you personally get with each broadcast?

Do you notice more complaints during certain broadcasts?

I appreciate any dialogue about this topic.

Actually, they use the industry standard, and it's not absolute number of complaints. To avoid problems with them, you have to keep your complaint ratio at or below .1%.

Bigger lists are, all other things being equal, LESS likely to be affected by the occasional spike in complaints.

That said, they don't "seize" your list. They could close your account, but you'd only lose the list in that case if you failed to make regular backups. And that could kill you even if you were self-hosted.


Paul

Well - I don't have a huge list but I appreciate this topic, because this is something I need to be aware of as my list grows.

Would you say a solution would be to get in contact with AWeber once your list gets to a certain amount?

I'm thinking if you build a relationship with AWeber, they may be able to help you along the way, and they probably won't be so quick to terminate your acct if they know they are dealing with a legitimate marketer that cares about their business

I wouldn't recommend that personally.

As James Schramko says, if you are on so many email lists, you are being controlled, which leads to losing focus and overwhelm. How much time do you spend clicking every interesting offer you are recommended?

I used to do this, and now I've culled it down to only a handful of respected marketers. Did my productivity a world of good.

Ouch. What do you do with the hour left in your day after you're done going through all those e-mails for hours on end? lol

Only because I wanted to see if I'd guessed the right ending word. I had. Unlikely, at least with most providers. The larger receiving systems don't care what the content is, really. Just how many complaints it generates.


Paul

Aweber might shut you down if you decide to get all crazy, but this is really a business and you need to protect your asset. You certainly need to back up your list manually and really segment your most active subscribers in a safe place, especially your buyers. So if anything happened, you could open up shop again with your core list members safe.

Another thing I would suggest doing is moving your best subscribers either to your own email marketing system or another email marketing system other than aweber. I don't trust 3rd party providers one bit. Protect your asset as best you could.

Sarevok, I bet I am on more IM lists than you are. I average getting over 400 messages from IMers a day. They are all filtered of course, but it works great for my own personal "better than google" search directory for marketing stuff.

As for aweber, I am not in the IM niche, but i do have a nice size list with aweber.

I have talked with aweber reps at a few trade shows and such. From what i have put together, it works much like any other risk management situation. They have some automated triggers that start the alerts and then manual reviews follow.

I think it was frank bauer (a long time IMer) who had his account locked in 2010ish. He made a detailed post on his blog that i bet is still around. He was using some dark grey viral marketing tactics though.

They do look at many factors once an automated review is triggered.

I know they have locked accounts for using refer a friend scripts. They have some trigger to alert on the lead source.

I also know of a few accounts being permanently locked (after human reviews) once the automated systems are triggered for promoting (as an affiliate) non-ftc compliant sites in the health niches and also the credit and finance niche. 2 niches i operated in.

That stuff could certainly have carry over to the IM niche. I would bet if your account triggered an automated lock down, they could easily find a way to keep it closed.


backup often

Obviously I can't speak for any other AR, but since our name came up here too, I wanted to just answer this question. We're committed to IMers. The fact that you do IM is not a consideration when dealing with spam complaints. Regardless of what you do, the same rules and consideration apply. IMers have helped build GetResponse and we appreciate that.

David summed it up pretty well -- it's like any other risk managment situation and you assess each situation on it's own. Some ESPs/ARs may well decide they don't want to work with some elements of the IM community (affilliates for example), but I don't think you need to be too concerned.

I think the question about building a relationship is interesting. Is this the responsibility of the AR or the IMer? Well relationships take effort from both parties obviously, but the AR has to open the door to building them and that's a big part of what I do and probably the coolest part of my job as a community manager.

Regards,
jim