In Love with AWeber with Eyes Wide Open

Are you wondering how to get the most out of AWeber or how to increase email responsiveness? Here is my step-by-step guide to AWeber and how to improve your email marketing strategy.

I met AWeber and fell in love at first sight when I was an “email newsletter ninja” taking care of campaigns for a client.

You know what I mean. When you’re in love you work on the relationship for its own sake because you know no individual/relationship is perfect; you accept the imperfections and work things out.

Voilà, this is my experience with my beloved AWeber.

Girl

When I was first working for this client, lists were already set up. I only needed to compose attractive newsletters and schedule them in AWeber. I’m still a subscriber now, as I’m happy to receive these familiar yet beautiful newsletters at an almost too frequent 3 times a week.

I never had any issues during the time I was working for the client even though I knew nothing about AWeber when we started. Yes, it’s user-friendly.

What else can you expect when you’re in love and it’s just friendly?

Then I became an AWeber customer for my own website subscribers. I had to set up the lists myself. I did come across a few things I had to deal with during the setup stage.

Yes, there’s no perfection; I accept it and work it out simply because I’m in love!

I will share with you my personal AWeber experiences and the tricks I learned through hours of playing around. I came across them and figured them out either on my own or after communicating with AWeber’s tech support team.

Break the Norm, Send a Poem

Everyone tells you that you should send a confirmation message, but I’m telling you that you shouldn’t. Because the confirmation message from your service provider is very boring so it will result in fewer subscribers. Why would you be interested in subscribing to something like this below? Unless you click that link by accident! Your subscribers will feel the same way.

Boring Confirmation Message

Boring Confirmation Message

Let’s navigate to the Confirmed Opt-In setting.

Confirm Opt In Setting

Confirm Opt In Setting

Scroll down and let’s turn off the Require Opt-In.

Require Optin Off

Require Optin Off

Rather than sending out an unattractive confirmation message with a subscribe link, I send out a poem for my poetry site with an unsubscribe link.

Unsubscribe Message

Unsubscribe Message

Attractive Newsletter

Attractive Newsletter

Get Past All Filters

There are two ways to add subscribers. You can manually add up to 10 subscribers if their email addresses are role-based, or import more than 10 subscribers if they’re not.

Add Subscribers

Add Subscribers

Role-based email addresses (like admin@, help@, sales@, and info@) are email addresses that are not associated with a particular person, but rather with a company, department, position or group of recipients. They are not generally intended for personal use, as they typically include a distribution list of recipients. AWeber and its counterparts do not accept role-based email addresses to be placed on mailing lists via importing.

Role-based email addresses

Role-based email addresses

After import, you can see the Import History; you may see a breakdown link of subscribers with the status “not added”.

Import History

Import History

Why should you check out the “not added ‘ subscribers? The following screenshot says it all –

Misspelled email addresses

Misspelled email addresses

misspelled email addresses. 26% of the total, as well as fake email addresses! You may correct and import them then.

No Opens, No Love

You may check out your subscribers’ status using the search feature rather than the filters on the left. Who unsubscribed via the unsubscribe link? (If you click on the ‘unsubscribed’ filter, the result will include the undeliverable ones as well, which is not practical.)

Stop Method Unsubscribe Link

Stop Method Unsubscribe Link

Who opened the first message but not the second one? And vice versa.

Message Opened and not Opened

Message Opened and not Opened

Who never opened any newsletter?

No Opens

No Opens

Why is No Opens status important? You may consider opting out No Opens after 5-10 newsletters. Why would you do this?

  • You have sent out attractive newsletters with an unsubscribe link instead of a boring confirmation message with a subscribe link.
  • This means it’s time to confirm the subscribers’ opt-out intent naturally based on 5-10 ‘No Opens’ of attractive newsletters.
  • You pay for the service, which means you pay for every subscriber.

Make It Live

If you have a simple and clear question you can either find the answer right away via the Knowledge Base or contact AWeber Support via contact form/email to see whether you can get the right answer in their first response. Otherwise it’s wise to use the Live Chat feature even if it means a long wait time or it’s offline due to time difference and you have to come back later, but it’s worth the wait.

Trust me; it is way more worthwhile than back-and-forth communications because via email you can generally expect to receive one answer a day to one of the issues you inquire about. The Live Chat is more effective when the issue is complex.

Live Support

Live Support

This perhaps happens with all companies, but I would like your AWeber experiences to be smoother, so I suggest you to take advantage of the AWeber Live Chat feature.

My love for AWeber shows between the lines, as you can probably feel, even though this article is about its imperfections rather than the reasons I love it. But I have gone the extra mile to make these negligible obstacles work wonderfully in my favour and I found a few tricks and enjoyment along the way.

By overcoming these small obstacles, you will be able to fully enjoy what you love. What else is more rewarding?


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About Min Min

I am a Search Engine Originality Evangelist, Prudent Strategist and Inspiring Mentor. One of my ultimate missions is to advocate originality. I have strived for it all my life – telling everyone, if possible, please be original. "Search Engine Originality" was coined by Min Min on Oct. 16, 2014. To learn more about me, please read my personal story.