Is NOW The Right Time To Jump?

Kim,

I'm working hard on getting into a new niche
market right now and that gives me an ideal
opportunity to test ImnicaMail.

I've had a look under the hood and I'm very
impressed.

I'm on Skype if you have any questions.

John

Marian,

A BIG part of the past 2 years working on Imnica Mail, has been spent working with all the major ISP's to ensure the highest possible delivery rate.

We have done everything they asked us to... Setup SPF, DomainKeys, DKIM, reverese dsn, FBL, etc, etc, etc...

We have joined as many whitelisting programs as we could find. Some paid, some free.

We have dedicated people who's sole job is to keep up the relationships with the ISP, and continually work on bettering our deliverability rate.

These same people also work on any problems that might crop up, like blacklisting etc.

We know people will want to try us out 1st, which is why we are offering a 14 day free trial.

John,

Richelo offers up to 10,000 leads for $15 a month.

Am I right in thinking that one of the reasons for the big price rise at Aweber (in terms of cost per subscriber) was they found a similar pricing scheme to Richelo's unsustainable?

Not knocking imnicamail, I'd just be interested to hear Richelo's answer.

Martin

We don't steal customers. We entice them with a great offer.

We will NOT get into a mud slinging contest with any competitor. That is NOT the proper way to do business, and compete. We have a huge amount of respect for our competitors.

Each customer who joins us, automatically becomes an affiliate. Our affiliate program pays 30% recurring commissions for as long as the customer stays with us. It's a single tier program due to the limitations enforced by PayPal.

Make it as easy for people to implement this service as possible. Provide code snippets and instructions for integrating the signup form with shopping/payment software like Rapid Action Profits etc. Consider a customization of certain texts like "click here to unsubscribe" etc, or if that is too risky, maybe offer several choices in different languages (yes, there are people out there selling to non-English speaking customers! ). Listen to the complaints, especially to the ones about features. E.g. people keep complaining that they can't move somebody from a prospect list to a buyer list in aweber without them opting in again. While I'm all for double opt-in, this might be a handy feature.

Yeah, or that, of course...

milkyway

Hi Antonio,

Firstly I would like to say thank you for joining Imnica Mail! We are very happy to have you.

Secondly, thank you for all the kind words and positive comments. Much appreciated!

Commenting on you negatives...

1. We are working on finding a way to reactivate a subscriber in a autoresponder series. Although this SOUNDS like something that is easy to do, it's not as easy as it sounds. It is doable, but, the system overhead is enormous. We have to basically track in the database what email has been sent to what user, so that when new messages are added to a sequence, they can start from where they left off. Now, that does not sound too bad, but, imagine having to do that for MILLIONS of subscribers, and THOUSANDS of autoresponder sequences. The database gets HUGE! Again, we ARE working on a way to do this, WITHOUT impacting the performance of the system.
2. This was a "tactical" decision. We REALLY wanted to offer the ability to import subscriber lists, without having them re-confirm. The only way we could do that without having our system filled with unendless number of bad addresses, or addresses which were harvested in a non-ethical manner, was to import the lists ourselves. We check for subscription IP as well as subscription date. Not only that, we look for some other things to ensure the list is legitimate, and not some bought or purchased list. We can never 100% guarantee the list will be good and clean, but, we do go out of our way to make sure it is. This benefits everyone using the system. We hope you will see the benefit in us doing it this way.
3. We DO plan to stick around.

Hi Ken,

Yes, we offer 30% recurring commission for as long as the referred customer stays active. It's on 1 tier only due to PayPal's TOS.

The information on the affiliate link is provided on the thank you page. We are in the process of building out our affiliate tools to make it easier for all customer to promote the service.

Hi Richelo,

Regarding foreign language support, do you have a rollout timetable for each language? Very interested in Turkish.

Martin

John,

No disrespect meant, but are these kinds of threads even allowed?

By the way, after PM'ing Richelo, I am signing up for an account as it looks like a great service.

OK, back on track.

1. Why isn't Richelo's WSO in his sig file? He's a long time member and there's no need for him to be shy about pushing it hard.

2. He should be in all the Aweber/Getresponse sucks threads DEFENDING the two companies.

"I've spent the last two years setting up a rival autoresponder company and, believe me, to get where they have takes an incredible amount of hard work, investment and knowhow."

3. Get quoted by big B2B authority websites like MarketingSherpa Home
Martin

Firstly, let me state that John is in no way involved with Imnica Mail. As we launched a WSO about the same time this post came out, we would have gotten the attention in any way. For that matter, the WSO has driven WAY more traffic than this post.

I think John came and asked the questions he did here, as I asked him those exact questions. Yes, I know John, and trust his marketing experience. I did not ask him to post this thread!

So, going back to the OP.

Yes, we are the new kid on the block, and although only 2 major competitors gets most of the recommendations in this forum, there are WAY more than 2 we are competing with.

Most of our major competitors has been around for several years, and has built up a great reputation. (Mostly)

So, even if we have superior everything to the competitors, how do we convince people to give us a try in the 1st place. We are in the business of making money at the end of the day. No customers = no money for infrastructure, which includes technology and people.

We can only offer so much for free to get people to try our service, before we kill ourselves by giving stuff away.

Yes, we will use all the normal channels for promotion, like press releases, PPC, etc, BUT, how do we get the customer to give the service a try, WITHOUT giving away the farm?

We will NOT attack weaknesses in our competitors! We can highlight things we offer, but, we can not state outright that our competitor does NOT offer it.

Getting into a mud slinging competition with any competitor just makes both sides look bad.

Here I will say that I have HUGE respect for the CEO of Aweber. I have seen Tom attacked left, right and center, and he NEVER flung anything negative back. He ALWAYS remains calm, collected, and most importantly, professional. We are taking a leaf out of his play book, and doing the same.

SO, then...... How do we attract new customer, many from our competitors, without giving away the farm, and without mud slinging?

To break into a market like this, you have to offer something substantially better than the current offerings. If that can be proven, and customers with a well rounded experience of autoresponder services can try it out and say "Yes, that's just what I wanted." then the PRICE becomes secondary.

If the VALUE of the service is high, then price is always going to be secondary anyway. If you can make $5,000 / month from your autoresponder, then $200 / month for the service is piddling in comparison.

But price is always one of the first things you should test of course. Start low and creep it up, you have to be careful not to wreck your business model, especially if you're new. In this case, the price has already been set by the market leaders, so it's a little easier to decide where to start.

The big issue for a new service like this isn't going to be getting new customers who don't already have a service they're paying for. If they're at the point where they're past the self-inflicted "newbie" stigma and they now know what they're doing, then the price and feature set is likely going to be something that sways them.

The harder bit is going to be getting established, existing customers like myself to move from their existing service to the new one.

Let's get this straight. It's going to be a PAIN.

As an example, I segment all my lists for all my products into prospects and customers. So I don't have one big list to migrate, I have lots of smaller ones that all together make a decent sized list. I have to be careful to test each one out before I go changing sign up code. Then migration comes afterwards.

So I have to go through the slog of gradually testing and migrating each list. For many established marketers they're too busy making money to be bothered about moving their mailing lists.

UNLESS they're unhappy with what they have. Which is my position. Then the move is worth it.

Let's just make it clear at this point that I'm already a customer of ImnicaMail as I signed up immediately. Also, I personally haven't liked the changes that my current service have been making - interface and features mostly - that's what drove me away.

So I'm an ideal candidate for a move to another service. In fact I've been actively looking for another autoresponder for the last few months, but NONE of the competition to my existing service are making it worth my while. (The feature sets seem pretty much of a muchness wherever you go.)

Part of the list of things I want to be able to do are:-

o Automatically move prospects to a customer list when they purchase so that they don't have to do anything.

o Offer free content on a membership site where the membership only remained active as long as the member remained on the mailing list. Unsubscribe and their membership deactivates.

o Move members remotely to different lists without forcing them through another sign up form. If they've upgraded their membership, then I want them to be on a different list.

And there's a whole slew of other things I wanted to do but couldn't because of the limitations of the AR services out there. I don't want to discuss them publicly as we'll be building those abilities into our scripts for use with ImnicaMail and WE want to retain a market advantage.

So for me, what I wanted was a service with an API.

There's no way that existing services are going to build any of what I want in because:-

#1 - They're already established with a huge customer base.
#2 - They don't need to.

So the only way I was ever going to be able to get what I wanted was to wait for a "new kid on the block".

Okay? That's why I'm jumping ship in this case.

As I've said, pricing for me is secondary, the product had to have substantial advantages for me to overcome my natural resistance to move because of the work involved.

Having such advantages will to a large extent market the product itself, and word will spread naturally.

But in this particular instance a killer marketing technique would be to build the affiliate scheme for the product into the subscriber sign up forms themselves. ie if you get a new subscriber, at the point they sign up (or maybe confirm), they get cookied.

If the new subscriber then later signs up to the same autoresponder service, then the marketer who got the original sign up gets the commission. That's a BIG incentive for marketers in the IM niche to use a new service like this. No extra work, and a good chance of a regular commission. It has a high viral component in it.

You always have to remember the WIIFM right Richelo? Are you listening? :rolleyes:

Okay I think I've pretty much talked myself out for now.

Ah, one last thing. Social proof and "buzz" would be the next big item on the agenda.

The existing services already have truck loads of customers and truck load of social proof working in their favour.

But then on the other hand, they also have truck loads of critics who aren't happy with what they have...

-Frank Haywood

This is the biggest stumbling block I've found with services other than the big two in the past. Some I've tried have had easy interfaces and great prices - but went straight to the junk/spam folders even when I sent them to myself. All the extras in the world will not help if you don't have the deliverability.

I don't have time at the moment to take a close look at Richelo's new service but I am going to do as soon as I can.

The other two items that are big on my own agenda (after deliverability) are these:

Ease of Use - I don't want to spend a week or two learning how to use it. I love quick start guides that give you streamlined start up instructions without having to learn every nut and bolt of extras before I begin sending a basic email series.

Lack of constant upsells - Add-ons such as leads are great. I resent it when I pay for a monthly service and have frequent emails urging me to buy add-ons. At the same time I don't mind being reminded the add-ons are available once in a while (monthly perhaps).

kay

Thank you everyone for your amazing comments! Believe me, I do take every single on to heart!

I will come back tomorrow, and reply to each one individually.

Funky_Budha, we ARE live.

For all the product specific questions, please post those over on the WSO, and I will be more than happy to answer them there. I do not want to hijack John's thread here. He has started what could turn out to be an awesome discussion for anyone wanting to get into a market dominated by some big players.