The following is a guest post by an individual who wishes to remain anonymous. It is an in-depth look at his experiences with AWeber and the grief it caused him. It’s well written and gives you pretty good insight on how email deliverability works (if you’re unfamiliar with it). If mailing is relevant to your interests, then you should probably read this post.
Editor’s Note: I’d also like to throw in the 6th reason Aweber sucks. They get hacked all the time. Their security must be shit because it happens at least once a year. It’s why I get V14GR4 spam 12 times a day to an email box I never give out. If you’ve ever signed up to a PPC.bz event with a unique email address and wondered why you’re getting spammed, the data wasn’t sold off by me. No. I used Aweber.
My AWeber Rant!
Here’s are some reasons why AWeber sucks. I will delve into these points a bit deeper, but I want to get them out of the way.
1) Deliverability is terrible.
2) Scheduled broadcasts are delayed
3) Randomly, a substantial proportion of an email deployment will bounce
4) The API (and libraries) are pure torture to use, but are still better than…
5) The godawful web interface.
I’m sure you’re thinking that I am some asshole buying coreg leads and slamming them through AWeber, and that any problems I have are caused by my own incompetence. In fact, I am using AWeber to send a daily drop which is short, simple, and virtually identical from day to day, and I am using DOI (double opt-in.)
I delete any user who has no opens or clicks for 10 days, and send about 2,500 mails per day. I also send about 2,000 mails per day using my own mail server, many of them to the same users, so I have a good baseline for comparison. All of these emails I’ve described are more transactional than promotional.
Deliverability is Terrible!
So why is deliverability terrible? I have some theories, but lets acknowledge that even the best in the business cannot guarantee inbox every time. It’s a shades-of-grey game. That said, my extremely consistent emails, sent at the same time every day, generate open and click-through rates above 50%. You’re calling bullshit, but it’s my niche.
So you’d think that with the relatively intelligent mail filters in place at most ISPs, this high engagement (and low bounce/FBL rates) would lead to good delivery. And most days, it does. However, over the past year, I have had hundreds of complaints from users whose mail is deferred/delayed, or simply eaten by junk mail filters (mostly at Hotmail). AWeber’s explanation is that it must be the content of my emails which is triggering these filters. This is bullshit because, as I mentioned, the emails are the same day to day.
Since it’s not so easy for a small guy like me to get reliable data on IP reputation, I have to settle for the less-than-accurate SenderScore. So let’s see what SenderScore has to say about the three IPs AWeber used for sending my emails over the last month:
[images are linked]
Looks like shit. If your broadcast happens to be scheduled when one of these IPs is having a dip, you are fucked. The really fun part is that your emails will often be delayed by the accepting mail server, for as long as 48 hours (greylisting). I’ve never found adequate reporting on deferred/greylisted emails in AWeber, so you just get to listen to your customers complain about missing their email without having any of the tools necessary to diagnose the problem. Oh, and don’t think you can use SenderScore to help schedule your drops: the data is delayed 24-48 hours and is therefore useless for this purpose.
Scheduled Broadcasts Are Delayed
This is an annoying and repeating event for an AWeber user. Here are some of the delays I’ve observed:
- 5.5 hour delay on 1/7/2011
- 7 hour delay on 1/28/2011
- 5 hour delay on 4/13/2011
- Two hour delay on 8/15/2010
- no email sent at all on 8/13/2010
This means over 1% of my deployed newsletters failed to be sent out on time. Considering that email deployment is basically the only thing that AWeber does, this is pretty crappy. I asked their customer support about the outage on 8/13/2010 and they said:
There was a power outage at our data center on 8/13/2010, which caused your feed to not be sent on 8/13/2010. [...] I do apologize for any inconvenience.
AWeber claims they have 48,000 customers. It’s reassuring to know that their email deployment can be knocked out for an entire day by something as routine as a power outage, when so many businesses depend on them.
Big, Random Bounce Party
Now, the fun part: random and exciting bounces, whenever you start to build some momentum on your list! Here’s some data I collected:
- 421 daily broadcasts in dataset, averaging 2612 emails sent per day
- Daily Bounce Counts: Average = 7, median = 2, mode = 0 [for dumbasses out there, this means that I had "0 bounce" days more often than any other # of bounces]
- Highest daily bounce counts:
- 321 on 4/13/2011 (12.5% bounce rate)
- 212 on 4/19/2011 (8%)
- 170 on 2/3/2011 (4.5%)
- 146 on 1/28/2011 (4%)
- And eighteen other days with bounce rates above 1%
April 2011 was a great month, with five days having bounce rates above 3% (13th, 17th, 19th, 20th, 27th) totaling 832 bounces or 1/3rd of my active subscriptions. Fuck!
If you check out the first Senderscore graph above (AWeber’s smtp01), you can see that the biggest bounce days are pretty clearly coinciding with the troughs in AWeber’s SenderScore. Bottom line here is that I get to lose hundreds of subscribers in a day on account of terrible reputation management by AWeber.
They are constantly hitting spam traps and shuffling delivery between their three servers (207.106.200.7, 207.106.200.8, 207.106.200.9). They outright refused to move me to separate or dedicated IPs despite my repeated complaints and even after speaking to a “director” of customer support. All up and down the line the response is consistent: plenty of apologies, but nothing substantial and nothing that leads to any actual improvement in the product.
The Goddamn Piece of Shit API !!!
This section is a bit technical. If you don’t care about APIs, just skip down to the next section.
First, let me say that I’ve been wrestling with APIs of all different types and sizes over the years. I have integrated several dozen different ones spanning ten or so different integration techniques. I’ve even written my own basic webservice. But I have never hit my head against the wall so hard and so much as with AWeber’s API.
Their reference sums up the available functions handily, but that is not the problem. The first problem is that the webservice is balls slow.
From the v1.0.0 to v1.0.4 releases (Nov 17th 2010 through April 20th 2011) I was able to download subscribers from the API at an average rate of 3 records per second. This means 833sec of waiting on their API to deliver just 2500 subscribers. Luckily the April 20th change has increased the rate to 10 records per second; now it takes just 250 seconds to download them all. It took them 5 months and three days in order to improve their API speed from “you’ve gotta be joking” to “slow“.
My favorite part of this is that they had the audacity to “resolve” my support inquiry about the slow API speed once the April 20th revision was released. Good job guys, problem solved.
You may be wondering why I’m downloading all my subscribers. Well, there’s no other way to programmatically check which users are unsubscribed. You cannot search or segment lists from the API, at all, except to find a single user by providing their email address (and this function was only recently added). This is stupid.
Second problem: I count 14 different data types/collections defined in their API specifications. The PHP library they provide has no less than 108 functions declared throughout 9 different files. If you are, inevitably, having trouble implementing the API and you need to dig into the internals, it is a nightmare of abstraction completely lacking in clarity. The most basic requests chain through a dozen or more functions, making it impossible to discover where exactly the request is failing. Also, it seems that their server does not properly support the HTTP PATCH method and so to update even one field on a user’s details, you have to download the entire profile and HTTP PUT it (overwriting the existing profile).
Another stupid choice is OAuth, and even stupider is how they implement it. Every single application that wants to interact with AWeber has to be configured such that ANY AWeber account can theoretically use your application. Unlike Twitter, where you can generate your own OAuth keys for use with private applications, you’re forced to implement AWeber’s entire OAuth authentication flow, even if you are only going to use it once to grab a key from your own damned account and store it somewhere. Fucking stupid.
From November 17th through April 26th, the only “App” in their “Showcase” was the dumb WordPress plugin that they wrote themselves. They finally got a real third party app after a full 5 months and four API revisions. There’s a reason nobody wants to release an app that uses AWeber: it’s impossible.
The most embarrassing part of all this is that AWeber was the last of the big email marketing players to get an API. People were asking for it as far back as 2008, and probably sooner (http://www.nicktemple.com/2008/239/aweber-needs-an-api.html). They took YEARS to finally release an API so full of fail.
The User Interface OR Chinese Water Torture
AWeber’s “web2.no” interface seems to have been designed to drive you crazy.
For one, most every request is executed through super-cool AJAX, but with no indication that an action is in progress or failed. You click, you wait, and most of the time you eventually get what you clicked on. As an example, I just tried to view the newest 100 of my past broadcasts at once. I clicked on the little “100″ icon, and timed how long it took to populate the view. Thirty-five seconds. What kind of web app takes 35 seconds to return 100 out of ~430 rows in a database? Have you motherfuckers heard of an index?
The best part is that I sat there for the entire 35 seconds wondering if my request was in progress, because the browser gives zero indication that it’s processing a request in the background. No status bar changes, no mouse pointer changes, no nothing. I wish that I was cherry picking here, but you will find wait times in excess of 30 seconds for most any request that involves 100 or more rows. Whether you are unsubscribing users or paging through search results, prepare to wait, wait, and then wait some more.
Other deficiencies have been covered before, but I’ll mention them for the sake of completeness:
- The option to use SOI or DOI applies to your entire account – you can’t have one list SOI and another list DOI.
- Blog broadcasts cannot be sent to a list segment, only to your entire list.
- Their default templates look like shit in GMail (at least the one I used did).
- Unsubscribed users count against your “subscriber count” for billing purposes. I recently had a month where my subscribed count was in one billing tier, but it was pushed to the next one by a handful of unsubscribes.
Conclusion
In short, AWeber sucks and I’m firing them.
My last AWeber blast went out yesterday and I couldn’t be happier with my self-built replacement. I hope this post serves as a warning to those using or considering using AWeber: they cannot be counted on or trusted, and their customer service is worthless. The agents with whom I interacted seemed pleasant enough, but it’s obvious that they are not empowered to do or say anything that could actually help. They mostly seem to read back the same data that you can find on your interface. If you are serious about your email marketing efforts, there is no substitute for building your own deployment system and managing your own IP reputation.
And, joy of joys: they do not offer any prorated refunds for monthly clients, so I get to pay them to send zero emails for three weeks.
AWeber’s even joining the ranks of the guru bullshit slingers that are often featured on this blog. Check out this hideous long sell that popped up when I logged in on May 13th:
Hawking a fucking PDF ebook for $47.97. Fuck you again, AWeber! 3800 vertical pixels of time-wasting trash.
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