Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

I have come to a cold realization lately. My autoresponder service of choice just wasn't cutting it lately.

In particular some of my ebook autoresponder responses rates had dropped off sales dramatically.

It was easy for me to track the drop off in sales back to the autoresponder newsletters. I had special offers at various points in the newsletters which just weren't converting nearly as many sales as they used to. The other ppc traffic being sent my site was still converting its average for first time visitors.

I decided to take a look at things.

Uncovering the Problem

The first thing I did was double check the messages I was sending out. I put them through several different spam scoring programs to see how "spammy" they looked to filters. They were still scoring very well.

I then signed up for my own newsletters through a variety of accounts I have. I signed up with my yahoo account, my msn, my google gmail and my own ISP email accounts.

What I discovered was pretty shocking. With the exception of one account, every other one filtered my newsletter right to the spam folders on those accounts.

Trying to trouble shoot further, I used my other autoresponder account (yes, I have two to send out the exact same messages. I made sure that everything was the same, the subject line, the "from" address field as well as the text of the article.

Then signing up using the same accounts I discovered the interesting results. All of the emails went through fine without getting filtered.

Conclusion? It was the autoresponder service getting filtered (or blacklisted?), not my messages.

Autoresponder Problems

The autoresponder that was creating problems for me was "Proautoresponder". I did some digging on the subject and found out that some other online marketers were discovering the same situation.

It appears that fairly recently, proautoresponder has made its way onto the blacklists of different email services.

That's not good.

My service of choice is now Aweber. I've been using them all along for the past 3 years. Up until recently, it was one autoresponder campaign per account but that has changed. Now you can have unlimited autoresponders with one account.

If you are wondering why I had two autoresponders, it had to do with that initial limitation of one campaign per account. I had my first account with Aweber for an ebook which sells well to this day (almost 3 years later).

The problem was (at the time) that I wanted more autoresponders. I discovered Proautoresponder with their unlimited number of campaigns and I signed up. Up until a few months ago, I was happy with them but the latest turn of events has encouraged me to move. Since Aweber now has unlimited campaigns, the choice was easy for me.

How To Prevent Getting Blacklisted?

You may wonder what the difference is between the two companies.

One significant difference is that Aweber is pro-actively working successfully with ISP and email providers. They are putting communication channels in place between themselves and the providers. This allows for immediate shutdown of flagrant spamming activity.

They have made agreements with AOL and other service providers to act immediately upon spam complaints.

If someone on AOL reports your Aweber newsletter as spam, that email address is automatically removed from ALL of your Aweber campaigns. They don't take any chances and it happens automatically.

This is the guaranteed way that there will not be repeated complaints from the same email address.

The bottom line? The ISP's learn to trust Aweber and realize that they are very proactive against the fight on spam. In return, emails generated from their autoresponder are recognized as very likely legitimate and therefore make it into the email inboxes where they belong.

My recommendation is to take a look at the results your autoresponders have returning. Do some investigating and see if your results are similar to what I uncovered.

I have no problem at all recommending Aweber as an effective autoresponder service.