Michael Gugel

Aweber Autoresponder Fail

Posted on Nov 03, 2010 by Michael Gugel in Email Marketing

Aweber Autoresponder Fail

I work for a company that does marketing consulting and software development.  We’re bound by secrecy (seems cool at first, but the novelty quickly fades), but let me tell you about an Aweber snafu that happened this week. When people register on “Site X”, they automatically get added to an Aweber  list (I’m a big fan of AWeber except for a few annoying quirks) and get sent a series of 6 autoresponders.  A few days ago, I went back to look at the open-rate and click-through-rate of those emails.

The first autoresponder was the “Thank You for Registering” email.  People opened that email over 60% of the time and clicked the links over 30% of the time.  With each additional email, the open-rate and click-through rate dropped.

• The 2nd email had a 26% open rate.
• The 3rd email had a 21% open rate.
• The 4th email had a 13% open rate.
• And the 5th and 6th email had a 11% open rate.

There’s a big decline in the open-rates from the 1st email -> 2nd email and the 3rd email -> 4th email.  Those are the prime targets for some optimization.

I changed the content and reworked the subject lines to improve user engagement.  I also decided to reorder the emails and add a 7th email to the series.  Here’s where the unexpected part comes in.

Aweber stores a number for each person on your email list that represents where he is in the autoresponder process.  If he got the first 3 emails and is waiting for the 4th, he’ll have a “3″.  Now, since I had 6 autoresponders before, the vast majority of the people finished the series and had a “6″.  When I added a 7th autoresponder, it was sent out to everyone with a 6!

Luckily, the email was new and fairly generic, but it’s definitely a serious oversight on Aweber’s end.  And there’s no easy solution.  The only way to avoid sending everyone the 7th autoresponder would be to go to the “Subscribers” tab and manually change the “Last Follow Up” column to a “7″ for each user.  With over 200,000 people on the list, that wouldn’t be possible for me (even if knew about this particular glitch beforehand)…

You’re best bet is probably to contact Aweber customer support directly and ask them to change every user who was a “6″ into a “7″.  Don’t fall into the same trap I did!