Aweber Tutorial #4 Managing Email Subscribers To Save Money

This is an interesting post that is finally here in this on going Aweber tutorials series. Managing email subscribers is pretty important specially when you're paying for every individual subscriber that you have on your email list. How you're paying for each subscriber? Well, Aweber charge us on the basis of how many subscribers we currently have on our email list.

They would charge a fix fee of 19$ for using their service and tools and after that, it all depends on your subscriber count. For example, from 0 to 2500 subscribers, they would charge 10. From 2501 to 5000 subscribers on your email list, they would charge 30$. So in total, if you've 1200 subscribers on your list, you'll be paying 29$ per month. (19 + 10).

When you're paying that amount, you'll have to make sure that every single subscriber on your email list is interested in what you send to them. Some times subscribers get disturbed when a blogger would send too frequent emails (multiple times a day or even daily in many niches). Though the major factor that determines the interest of the subscribers in what you send is their state of mind in which they subscribed you in the first place.

If a person just wanted to download you eBook for free and that it! He/she won't be looking forward to anything you'll send him in the future. What we would want is to have a valuable subscriber who got impressed by what you do online and wanted to follow your journey and learn along the way.

This is the ideal sort of email subscriber we would aim for.

Now that we have discussed as to why we need to manage our subscribers well, we can get started and see few ways to analyze the subscribers we already have on the list and how we can manage them well.

How To Manage Aweber Email Subscribers

There are couple of things we'll look into when we talk about email subscriber management.

1- Dealing with Unsubscribe
2- Dealing with Unreachable emails
3- Dealing with Inactive Subscribers (No Opens or less open rates)

#1 Dealing with Unsubscribes

It is binding on Aweber users to have an unsubscription link beneath every email that we send. This is a basic right of the subscriber and we can remove the unsubscription link. In fact, there is no point in holding on someone who isn't interested in what you have to offer.

So it's better to delete them from your email list rather then they causing you a hefty bill.

Every time when someones unsubscribe us, their information is still saved in our Aweber account, and we can see how many people (their name, time and other details) unsubscribe us. This means that Aweber still charge us for the people who unsubscribe us long back! Weird right?

But, on Aweber's perspective, they provide us with their information too and charge us for them as they have to save their information for us too.

What we can do is, and what I do on frequent basis is that, I would permanently delete all the people who unsubscribed to my list. Let see how we can do that from the subscribers managment section in Aweber.

Navigate to Subscribers tab >> Unsubscribe (left sidebar). This would filter out all the people in your email list that unsubscribe you. Notice I currently don't have anything to display as I already deleted the unsubscribers.

Once you have all these people displayed, you can check mark them all and hit the delete button that would only be displayed once you'll check mark them. (don't waste time finding the delete button ;))

#2 Dealing With Unreachable Emails

Sometimes people enter false emails while registering to simply download your eBook/Resource if you haven't implemented double opt-ins system, as we discussed that in the previous post in the series.

Such spam emails result in unreachable flag in Aweber, i.e Aweber's server could not send them emails successfully.

Another great aspect of Aweber is that they have the highest levels of email deliverability, much better than an competitor in the industry. This means, that you can sit back and chill, as you'd be sure that Aweber would be able to send emails to all the subscribers successfully without missing anyone out.

In the case of Unreachable emails, these emails IDs are either fake or their corresponding servers don't respond.

We can delete these unreachable emails too by filtering them out as in the previous case.

This time, you need to filter as 'Undeliverable' as shown in the image above. Once filtered, simply delete these emails too.

Next up, the really deal begins.

#3 Dealing with Inactive Subscribers (No Opens etc)

Now, there are people who even though provide the right email, the one that they use for creating random accounts. You might have done this in the past too. We all at some point have email IDs to register for random stuff online. Though we hardy open the emails that we get into our inbox as we know that they are all junk.

This is a big challenge to deal with such subscribers. Luckily, with Aweber, we have extremely great filters to play with, where we can pin point the subscribers who haven't, either opened our email since a specific time, or didn't click any particular link in the emails we send.

By such filters, we can figure out and delete all the subscribers who don't open our emails.

Recently, I deleted about 1500+ subscribers that never opened my emails since 3 years. It was stupid and lazy of me to not delete them long before as they kept costing me Aweber bills for no reason.

Deleting No Opens

Click 'No open' under the 'segments' tab on the left as shown in the image above. You can set the time span since you wish to analyze the no opens. For demonstration purposes, I set the date to few days back so that I would have lot of subscribers to show in the process.

When you'll be figuring out No Opens, you can set the time span to past 6 months or 1 year to be generous. Notice that the recent the date it would be, the more subscribers it would filter out and you won't want to delete any subscriber who might be interested in something you send them int he future.

So make sure you set the date wisely. I only deleted the emails that 'never' opened my email broadcasts. Many bloggers around like to clean out their Aweber databases every 6 months so to delete the unwanted subscribers.

Also, its a well established fact that our email list gets degraded with the passage of time. Meaning by that people might get bored of what you send to them or their interest might change over the time.

A person willing to learn about Blogger or WordPress platform might not be interested in blogging as a whole a year from now. So for that reason, we as bloggers have to clean up our email list so that we only have the subscribers that are interested in what we send them.

Hope this post delivered some insight for managing your Aweber subscribers. A heathly list is what we need to aim for.

I hope you get inspired to start developing an email list for your blog too and make the roots strong of your online business.

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Till, next time

Allah Hafiz :)