Aweber - I’m Disappointed and Angry

Like many internet marketers, I use AWeber.com as my email list provider.  Lately, AWeber has made some huge upgrades in their service offerings and along with it, they have increased their price substantially.

They’re still easily the best value among email distribution companies - until today.

Today, and yesterday, there have been some serious problems with AWeber.  Their confirmation emails have been taking 4-6 hours or more before being sent out.  And anyone who knows about email marketing knows that if you don’t get an email subscriber’s confirmation within a few minutes of their initial subscription, you’ll probably never get it at all.

This is a huge problem for me, because today was the day I had scheduled to run a large subscriber campaign.  That part worked - I got a lot of traffic, and a whole lot of new subscribers… almost none of whom confirmed.

I know from the past that I average 70%+ conversion on confirmations.  But today, my confirmation rate was 17%.  This means that because of a problem at AWeber, I’ll make less than 1/4 of the money I could have made.

The reality is that I’m a technical guy, and so I understand that these types of things happen from time to time.  But what REALLY pisses me off is that they knew this problem existed yesterday, but made no effort to inform me or any other users, as far as I know.  AWeber has both a blog and a “what’s new” area inside of their login area, and neither one has any information about this problem.

I’m enraged at the way I’ve been treated.  Every individual subscriber has tremendous value to me, both financially and as a matter of principle.  If AWeber had merely let me know what was going on, I could have easily put off today’s traffic generating campaign in favor of a day when all systems were “go”.

I hope that Tom Kulzer or some other AWeber muckety-muck sees this.  I’m also an affiliate of AWeber (not a major one, but I have been responsible for the creation of about 15 AWeber accounts in the past few weeks).  In addition, I have a new group of clients with whom I’m now working - 25 of them.  Each one of them will follow my lead in terms of their email solution.  And I’m seriously thinking about selecting a different email provider to recommend to them.

If the problem disappears tomorrow, I will forgive AWeber and move on.  But if this type of problem ever appears again and AWeber does not do the decent thing and notify me about the problem as soon as they are aware of it, I will take more serious action.  I’m not asking for much - just let your customers know when there’s a problem.