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.
Juice (8)
Hillary (4)
Robert Hughes (4)
1cent (3)
Steve (3)
TupacsGhost (3)
affended (2)
bry (2)
conv3rsion (2)
Lenin Govea (2)
Interesting…. but unless you give us some better alternatives i just wasted my time.
There are tons of alternatives out there – some better, some comparable, some worst… every person uses an autoresponder for different needs and each service caters to different people.. its all about trying and testing out what suits yourself best
simon, you just responded to a request for alternatives with a totally say-nothing comment offering NO alternatives.
The commenter is clearly not 12 years old. Why state the obvious? “It’s all about trying and testing out what suits yourself best.” Well, DUH.
He’s obviously looking to cut his trial and error time with some specific input. Get it?? Sheesh.
wow Jack and Dino…why such meanness? i thoroughly enjoyed the post and even though alternatives were not suggested, that was not the purpose of the post. title: 5 reasons why aweber sucks. they didn’t study alternatives – they studied aweber and i think did a wonderful job. peace!
jim
Do you have any suggestions on which email marketing company is best suited for your broadcasts? I know tons of people that use Aweber and have not had the problems you’ve experienced.
I assume that there is no affordable email marketing service out there that would work to my satisfaction. I’m aware of services for brands that start at $10k/mo, but that’s out of reach for the moment.
I certainly believe that a lot of small businesses have no issues with AWeber, but that’s likely because they are not doing some of the things that I was doing, namely:
- broadcasting every day
- logging statistics
- also sending emails myself so I can compare deliverability
I bumped up against their limitations and issues because I was a heavy user of their services and the deficiencies were obvious to me. For many less savvy businesses (or ones spending less time and effort on their email marketing) it’s not hard to imagine that AWeber meets their needs.
Wish I could point you towards a superior competitor but I’m pretty sure they all suffer from similar issues with IP reputation from time to time. The point of this post was more that building your own deployment system is the best option in the long run. You can get a VPS and dedicated IP for relatively cheap these days…
you said you built your own system there. i assumed that meant you have some kind of mailing scripts that replace aweber’s functionality.
i tried this a few years back with a custom built autoresponder, and i couldn’t for the life of me get past the Hotmail spam filters. most of the emails ended up in spam (but not all).
played around with the SPF records on the domains as well as the headers and still no luck.
finally switched to a commercial autoresponder service (1shoppingcart till that sucked, then iContact till that got too expensive, and most recently aWeber).
it’s the only way i could get around the junk mail issues.
how do you find the deliverability with your custom solution? do you face some of these issues with hotmail?
if not, how did you solve them?
i’d love to know man. thanks a lot!
I’ve noticed the same thing with delays from only hotmail accounts… costing me money… what company would you recommend?
Personally, I think they force you to do double opt-in confirmation not becuase it’s “best email practice”, but because it helps with their shitty deliverability since they operate you on a bunch of shared servers.
Double opt-in is a bullshit email practice. EVERY SINGLE fucking test I’ve seen and I’ve done with email says otherwise.
Do you see big fucking companies going “oh hai pls double opt-in SO WE SEND U STUFF LOLZ”.
No. Because it’s fucking stupid.
This is truth right here… Fuk double optin, its a joke.
it’s annoying they make your subscribers double optin when you wanna move them from one list to another. wtf is up with that!
seriously that pisses me off. makes no sense whatsoever.
I haven’t heard a whole lot of people having the problems that you had. I guess its hit and miss.
I had Aweber and I quit like you did Barman. Got a letter in the mail just last week offering 2 free months just to come back. It was shitty. I’ve moved on.
Hey
Good rant. But have consider running you email content through all major Spam filters. Sure, you content is the same day to day but you failed to acknowledge that spam filters are constantly evolving.
If you have big list, you need get on a dedicated ip. Your deliverability is dependent on the reputation of your ip. At Aweber you’re using a shared ip which is also used by other marketers too. So if one day, one of these people gets high bounces and/or complaints, IP reputation goes down and so does the deliverebility.
Get it?
You just basically repeated what I said in my post and asked me if I “get it”. Reading comprehension fail?
AWeber runs all messages through SpamAssassin and mine scored 1.2 the vast majority of the time, sometimes as high as 2.4, but even that isn’t enough to trigger a block at any sensible mail server.
“Reading comprehension fail?”
lol – love it.
dude i fucking love this blog!!!!
I cannot believe what Aweber did to me thi smonth. Those assholes had the balls to charge me $49 becauise I went over 2500 leads on the very last day of the billing cycle!
I am new to list building, and my list just topped 2500. However, it topped 2500 on the last day of the billing cycle and Aweber had the nerve to charge me the $49 rate for the month!
That is bullshit! I had less than 2500 all month and the last day I fo over 2500 so instead of charhing me $29 they wack me for $49!!!
And $49 for 2500 leads is highway robbery for the service they provide. Their new interface is terribly slow and clumsy, and I find that a lot of times my scheduled broadcasts will be doubled up or not delivered at all. I’m looking for a new provider immediately.
I hear that Safe Swaps has a very good autoresponder that is much cheaper, and I’m already a member there so maybe I’ll check that or GetResponse out.
You’re right. Aweber SUCKS!
Chris, I’m not insinuating that you are clinically insane or a FUCKING LUNATIC or anything, but the beyond perverse comments you leave on warriorforumsucks.com and the salty droid blog, among others, ARE.
Since you just said you are “new to list building,” (with list building being a cornerstone of marketing), maybe you should edit your comment on the WFS blog from 4 days ago, where you said, “I know since I’m the greatest fucking internet marketer that ever lived!”
I think I am going to tell Nurse Ratchett to check under your tongue and make sure you actually swallow your pills at medication time.
I’ve actually really liked newsberry.com. we use it hand in hand with PostmarkApp.com for transactional emails.
This needs a Part 2 about how they’ve recently starting just randomly shutting off peoples’ accounts without any notice/warnings whatsoever.
And when they shut you down, they don’t even do it like you’re a paying customer, and only turn off sending while giving you a chance to back up your data.
No – they shut off your LIVE forms too – (without even so much as a warning) and tell you to go fuck yourself.
According to their dickbag owner: “Even though you’re paying for an account, you have to actually be mailing the data – NOT just collecting it, so why would we leave your forms on”
Gee fuckstick – hmmm I dunno – maybe because there is still PAID TRAFFIC GOING TO THE FUCKING SITE?
That is his lame ass excuse for shutting all live forms off too instead of just disabling sending when they throw a dart at their board and decide you’re next for the axe.
And before you say “oh he must be mailing cock pills, or running a nigerian email scam” – eat shit.
These were double opt-in leads collected in a perfectly normal niche market that has nothing to do with pills, porn, gambling, or weight loss.
Moral of the story – Go ahead and use them if you trust a company with serious technical issues (as evidenced in this post) and one hell of fucked up definition of “customer service”
Me? I’d rather use a company that actually gives a shit about the people PAYING them for the use of their service
This is not the first I have heard of Aweber’s crappyness.
Over the past 2 weeks I have had three freinds who have had their account closed in Aweber for no reason at all. Some had double optin lists of 50-100k and still not explanation.
It helps with their shitty deliver ability since they operate you on a bunch of shared servers. The force you to do double option confirmation not because its best email practice.
Well aren’t you special sending out 2500 emails a day.
Start bitching when you do 1 million per hour.
Wow – really intelligent comment ace. I’m sure everyone appreciates your input.
However I don’t think he was bragging about how many emails he sends you fucking tool
He’s helping people not make the same mistake many already have by using the sham of a company called aweber
hey dipshit if you are using aweber then you are an idiot int he first place.
Another brilliant one – great job. Really adding value to the discussion.
and what do you say about mailchimp? or getresponse? which one do you prefer insted? or maybe recommend?
iContact is gonna be your best for deliverability although they are a bit pricey for some.
But again, if you’re getting into the inbox, it’s worth it.
those fuckers have a really awful plan. you get 6 times your subscriber limit in emails. meaning you can email 6 times a month. for most REAL marketing you need about 30 times a month. so that means whatever your list size you need to buy the plan that is 5 times its size.
if you have 5,000 subscribers you need the 25,000 subscriber plan to email daily.
if you don’t do that, they will charge you overage charges for every blast. last month i did it for a while cost like $25 PER BLAST. and that’s probably because that list was only little.
i made the dumb move of moving to aweber though lol.
And what service do you recommend, Jim?
LOL at the two girls above pulling hair. :P
Love you, Barman, but you ROYALLY FCKED UP on this one by not offering up any alternatives.
dude..that’s crazy i have been using aweber for at least two years now..the only problem i have with them is import new leads into the list..other than that they work find for me
Simon is a dick whose sister is a whore soliciting customers to pay her rent.
Alternative to AWeber or other such technically paralyzed systems is, like Barman has mentioned, getting your own deployment system built for your mail subscribers. Contact us to get a custom solution developed. We’ll be glad to assist.
Aweber, GetResponse, iContact, etc…are fine for some, and death to on the second paid click to email acquisition roi seekers(cough, I mean hyper-sensitive direct marketers).
IP integrity for ESP services is a battle that Aweber, GetResponse, iContact, etc., earn day in and day out…please keep in mind that most of the target domains for these “sends” are also attempting to control various “marketing” spaces respectively. Try ranting at major ISP first before shitting on Aweber.
If you live and die from direct marketing emails, man-up. If you want a decent tool, pay for it, build it, or play like the pro’s and do both…
If your business model depends on a $49.95 to $495.00 per month email delivery platform, be prepared to get what you pay for…garbage in – garbage out also applies to the ESP customer.
Aweber has delays up to 18 hours on hotmails accounts when sending a Broadcast message.
Aweber sucks, their customer support only says it’s hotmail fault
Very bad service on aweber
And what if it’s really Hotmail fault?
Aweber sucks. Hard. So does infusionsoft. We fired both, and currently use (and have really enjoyed) Office Autopilot, which is more along the lines of Infusionsoft. Their aweber-competitor is a SAAS setup called sendpepper. Competes in the aweber-price range.
I’ll have to agree, the most irritating thing about their interface for me is the AJAX interface like you mentioned… thing is dead set on making you rip your hair out.
Everything is far too clunky and slow to manage lists on it, straight garbage.
I’m looking for alternatives too… will be looking into Icontact and GR.
Ansar
I agree with you about the customer support. I give a pretty detailed explanation of my issue – and they reply back with some generic answer, probably pulled from the Help file – which doesnt help me at all. Did you even read what I wrote??
The user interface is also pretty horrible.
I would have to agree. The API is torture and the speed is just ridiculous, I am opting to use their email subscription methods. I don’t have the luxury of changing to another because I am doing work for a client. Now I know what NOT to use for myself.
Every site has security issues. I don’t see how Aweber could be any worst than any other paid service. I have used self hosted solutions before and I don’t like them as the delivery rate goes way down. I mainly used Aweber and I will be sticking to them.