Migrating Your List? Remember To Tell Them…
Email Deliverability - Justin Premick - December 5th, 2007 - Permalink
Over the past few weeks I’ve come across a lot of businesses talking about migrating their email marketing campaigns — either from in-house systems to hosted solutions (such as AWeber), or between hosted solutions.
Once you’ve decided that it’s time to upgrade your mailing capabilities, it’s tempting to focus on doing so quickly. After all, if you’re unhappy with an email system, why would you want to spend any more time at all using it?
Today, I want to highlight a common mistake that we see businesses make as they migrate their lists:
They Don’t Tell Subscribers What’s Going On
Too often, I see businesses so eager to drop an email service or software, so eager to cut ties and move on, that they cancel their account or uninstall the software before they’ve even begun to migrate subscribers over to us.
I guess I can understand this — you want to get away from using that system and you’re forcing yourself to move forward — but I don’t agree with it.
Here’s why: that other system can help make your migration easier. By keeping that line of communication open just a bit longer, and letting them know about the migration, you can do two things:
1. Help Subscribers Continue Their Subscription
When your subscribers are migrated to AWeber, they’ll need to confirm their subscriptions.1
Let your readers know about that confirm email — the more “in the know” they are about what’s going to happen and what they need to do, the better your confirm rate will be.
We recommend letting letting them know at least twice before you make the move, say 1-2 weeks before and again 1-2 days before.
In these emails, tell subscribers why you’re moving, approximately when they’ll get the confirm email, what the subject of it will be, and what they need to do (click the confirm link). That way, they have all the information they need to decide whether they want to keep reading (and if they don’t? Let them go.)
2. Sustain and Build Trust and Credibility
In addition to making sure your engaged subscribers make the move with you, keeping them informed helps by showing them that you regard them as people, not anonymous email addresses.
When they see that you care enough about them to let them know about changes/improvements that you’re making to your emails, their view of you and your business is reinforced (or improved, if it was in need of improving).
Learn More About Migrating Lists at our Confirmed Opt-In Seminar
Next week, our Education Team is hosting a free one-hour seminar on how you can effectively use Confirmed Opt-In to grow your business while maximizing your email deliverability.
We’ll be going into more detail on how you can maximize your confirm rates when:
- Thursday, December 13, 2007
- 12:00 - 1:00PM Eastern Time
Not on Eastern Time? Click Here.
What does this seminar cover?
1. If you’ve been collecting subscribers using Confirmed Opt-In at another web-based email service provider, and they keep/provide records of those confirmations, we can migrate those subscribers without sending another confirmation.
Just get in touch with our Customer Solutions Team.
December 6th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Justin, thanks for making the posts show up entirely in the window of the reader. It’s much more user friendly this way.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Aaron,
My pleasure - I’m glad it’s more usable for you
December 10th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Tip to Aweber users from personal experience - and Justin or someone, it might be a nice idea to add this to the help system - do not tell your list to expect a confirmation email before you’ve successfully imported the list.
I made this mistake - and then when I tried to import the list to Aweber, I was told that too many of the emails on the list were defunct, and so *none* of the subscribers could be imported.
Of course Aweber doesn’t want to send emails to defunct addresses - that’s a Good Thing. So I asked for help removing the old addresses from the list. (Aweber’s system had identified these, of course, but I didn’t know which they were.) This was refused. I asked for advice on how to clean the list in general - again, nothing doing.
So I had a few thousand people waiting for a confirmation email I’d told them to look out for, and that I couldn’t send. In the end I managed to import most of a more recent subset of my list, and had to send another message through my old system: if you didn’t see the confirmation email, here’s a link to a subscription form, sorry.
I had several emails from puzzled subscribers - I’m still getting them, months later - and naturally ‘mislaid’ many subscribers. I’d have done much better to forget about importing altogether, and simply ask my subscribers to sign up at a new subscription form. And if I’d just checked, first, whether I could import my list, that’s exactly what I would have done.
Moral of this story: first import your list into Aweber. Then when you know whether that’s worked, use your old system to tell them how the changeover will work.
December 11th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Justin, you are RIGHT ON!
If you respect your lists, your lists will respect and continue to do business with you!
December 11th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Hi Hilary,
While I disgree with your advice to our readers, I appreciate you sharing your experience. Not only will it give me a few things to think about modifying in our help materials, but it also brings up the importance of proper list management.
ISPs look at many factors when determining whether to deliver email from a sender to the inbox or bulk folder (or neither), and your bounce rate is one of those factors. An email solution that doesn’t automatically manage/remove undeliverables will cause issues not only while using them, but if/when you ever decide to move your list elsewhere (as you’ve noted).
"Cleaning" a list would involve emailing the list, in which case you risk the same bounces you’d be looking to avoid. While an email service such as ours may be able to identify some known "dead" addresses in advance and prevent those from being emailed, it won’t know all of them. "Cleaning" is just not something we can in good faith recommend, because of the potential damage to your deliverability that goes along with it.
Sending a reminder, while it appears to have helped in this specific scenario, isn’t something we advise either, because of the high risk of spam complaints - and accusations that you’re not truly using a Confirmed Opt-In model, like in an example discussed on this blog.
—
Picking an email marketing solution is an important decision for any business. No matter whether you end up going with AWeber or another company, make sure you choose a solution that manages undeliverables, supports industry standards such as Confirmed Opt-In, and actually gets your email delivered.
The consequences of choosing a solution that leaves you with an improperly managed list can follow you, making migration more challenging. However, in the event of a list where bounces have been handled, I still feel the points made in this post are valid, as they do help smooth the transition from one email solution to another.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Hi Justin,
Thanks for the detailed reply. I do understand why Aweber wouldn’t want to import a list with too many undeliverables, and I see what you mean about ‘cleaning’. I have a lot of respect for your firmness on this - I moved to Aweber for its better delivery rates, after all.
The only reason I had a problem with the changeover was that I had no advance warning that I might not be able to import my list. Since I followed exactly the kind of procedure you suggest in your post, I had a lot of confused people waiting for a confirmation email I’d told them to expect, but couldn’t send. To clarify, I didn’t send them a ‘reminder’; I had to send them an alternative way to sign up, and an apology for the mess!
So a simple note in the help files would save your new customers this kind of embarrassment. Something like -
"If your list is old and hasn’t been well managed, you may not be able to import any email addresses. If you’re not sure whether your list will qualify to be imported…"
… and then tell people how they can check whether it’ll work, before they start following the (excellent) advice in your post.
December 16th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
I am confused - if aWeber can identify a portion of a list as "undeliverable" when uploading, why not tell the system to not upload those email addresses? Or is aWeber finding this out by emailing each address while uploading?
December 16th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
I think they can recognise some addresses as defunct without emailing them, eg because the ISP’s gone out of business. Then if there are too many of these, they conclude that there will be lots of other defunct addresses in the list that they can’t identify, and so they reject the whole lot. It makes sense.
December 17th, 2007 at 9:59 am
Hilary,
Exactly - we maintain an internal list of domains and addresses that shouldn’t be on any email list.
We can then compare imports to it to gauge whether or not the imported list appears to have been properly managed.
While this isn’t the only criteria we use to evaluate imports - our Customer Solutions Team manually reviews them as well - it’s one of a number of automated measures that help us to maximize all users’ email deliverability.
Thanks much also for your feedback on how we might improve the imports page - I can see how that could help make transitioning to AWeber even smoother - and we certainly want to do that