Here at The Edge, we despise spam. Anyone who owns an online business knows how frustrating it can be to open your email in the morning to find that you have 200+ emails waiting for you. Of course, you know that about two-thirds of those are spam messages, but your heart sinks for a moment as you roll up your sleeves to separate the wheat from the chaff.
In addition to working on a newsletter for The Edge, I have spent most of the week working on setting up a newsletter for a client of mine. I work with newsletters frequently for other clients, but all of them came to me with a service provider in place, I was excited to get the chance to research other options out there and really find the best possible service provider for this client.
After some digging and asking around among my Virtual Assistant colleagues, AWeber came up tops in the feedback. I put them forward to my client and we got started on setting things up.
Boy oh boy were we in for a shock! We encountered issue after issue, all in the name of CAN Spam compliance. The final straw came when we went to import my client’s contact database — a list of clients and contacts collected over a period of two years — the system rejected the import citing a “Dirty list” as the issue.
I immediately contacted customer support and was informed that this list had not been “cleaned” in two years, so they would not be able to import it. She happily suggested that I send an email to each of the almost 2,000 addresses and check which were still active and then try and import again. I disconnected the conversation and just sat here, staring at the screen in disbelief.
I spoke with the client who was not keen on troubling her clients with a further email just to check if they were still around. She asked me the same question I asked AWeber, “If you can see that there are addresses on the list that are old or outdated, can’t you just reject those and import the rest?” I am afraid not.
While I completely understand and respect the need for CAN Spam compliance, a simple tweak in their system could have saved us a bundle of time and effort, (and would have saved them a client… we moved the newsletter elsewhere pretty quickly.)
We have moved on to greener pastures now… *warning: shameless plug ahead* Vertical
Response. While I had some issues with them in the early days when they first launched, they have recently updated their service offering and I have to admit, I am quite smitten with them. If you have heard me raving about the importance of newsletters and you’re thinking about setting something up, do yourself a favor and check them out!
P.S. They do postcard mailings too!
