AWeber: Easier & Faster Sneak Preview

Reports & GraphsIn the very near future we’re going to be launching dozens of enhancements and usability tweaks to make AWeber easier and faster to use for your email marketing needs. Our expert development team has spent the last 4+ months working day and night to analyze how you use the service and how to make it better for you.

A few enhancements include:

These are just a few of the many other subtle enhancements to make your life easier.

Home Preview Broadcasts Follow Up Lead Edit

Sneak Preview Webinar:

If you would like to get a sneak peek at this upcoming release please join our live webinar where I will personally walk thru a few of the exciting enhancements.

We’ll have a brief question and answer period during the call.

[Update] Greatly appreciate everyone’s feature suggestions, but this isn’t the forum to post them. Please make feature suggestions to our support team so they can be appropriately categorized and escalated to our development team. Thanks! -Tom

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58 Comments

  1. Bret Forster

    Great looking new design! I really like the new reports page with graphs. You just making a great service even better.

    Take Care,

    Bret Forster.

    2/27/2007 2:03 pm
  2. Rob Toth

    The best just keeps on getting better. Looking forward to the changes.

    2/27/2007 2:05 pm
  3. Peter Koning

    Cool – I always had a nagging issue with the lead display UI where I kept hitting the "delete view" button. You read my mind :)

    Now the coloured buttons will help.

    Aweber just gets better all the time!

    Cheers,
    Peter

    2/27/2007 2:07 pm
  4. Tim Houston

    I especially like the bookmark feature. Thanks!

    2/27/2007 2:08 pm
  5. Edward Charkow

    Love to see the constant upgrades, care, and attention you put into your service. Aweber has been an awesome tool for us that has only gotten better with the frequent updates. This one looks like a biggie.

    Thanks!

    2/27/2007 2:15 pm
  6. James Riddett

    Wow – great work guys, the new design looks fantastic. Can’t wait to see it in action…

    2/27/2007 2:17 pm
  7. sally neill

    The new features look really great can’t wait to get a sneek peek!

    Sally :)

    2/27/2007 2:17 pm
  8. John

    Hello Aweber,

    it’s good to see Aweber are continuously updating the site with new features.

    I would like to suggest 2 new features that would save a lot of time.

    Most of my time is spent on preparing the newsletter to be sent. In fact it’s quicker to write the newsletter than to prepare it for sending.

    What would help a lot is:

    1. Provide permissions based control of the Aweber control panel. We could then contract out our newsletter preparation – which is probably the most time consuming part of sending out a newsletter – even with the new aweber templates.

    2. Provide an automatic conversion of the HTML newsletter to the text version. I was with one web host company that provided this service as standard and it was a great time saver. Surely Aweber, one of the leaders in this area can do that too?

    Good to see the new additions and training too. Thanks Aweber

    2/27/2007 2:21 pm
  9. Anthony Treas

    Just another reason why I love aweber so much! You’re always looking for ways to improve something that already beats any service out there.

    Thank you.

    Anthony

    2/27/2007 2:22 pm
  10. Lee Lister

    Great that you are improving. Can I ask if we will be able merge lists? I have several with the same messages that I have built up over time.

    Thanks

    2/27/2007 2:23 pm
  11. Rob Rutkowski

    Here are my list of top enhancement requests (and the reasons I’ve been desperately looking at competitors!):

    1- We need easier copying capabilities; I often need the exact same autoresponder to use in a different list, or simply repeat in the cycle.

    2- WAY too much fussing over the double opt in. I understand why, but there are reasons I want to skip the opt in (for my prospects who have converted to customers, for example. Make my customer opt in again is insulting).

    3- Better management of separate lists. Once an email has been opted in, I’d like to add it to different lists for further specializing. The current way of adding to a new list (and it’s infernal optin process) is way too cumbersome.

    4- I’d like an email address I could send a message to, and have aweber automatically convert that to a broadcast. The email would be associated to a specific list, so aweber would know which list to broadcast to.

    My blogging software will automatically generate an email whenever I make an entry. This feature would allow my blog entry to be automatically sent to my house list.

    See you guys on Thursday.

    2/27/2007 2:25 pm
  12. Steve Tennant

    Thanks for the update and your hard work.

    If there’s a way to feed suggestions into your next development cycle, please let me know.

    2/27/2007 2:33 pm
  13. John Currie

    I am so glad to be dealing with a modrn progressive company such as aweber. We get a lot of our business through your autoresponders and find it easy to use now. Guess it’ll just get easier!

    2/27/2007 2:35 pm
  14. Britt

    Are you ever going to make it so I am able to use your system to send emails to people that drop carts? Currently with the "click to confirm" your email they get first, it defeats the purpose of sending an email an hour after a dropped cart…

    2/27/2007 2:43 pm
  15. Dawud Miracle

    These enchancements look great. Thanks for the sneak preview.

    Two things that still concern me…

    1. Make your forms web standards compatible. If not completely (in other words, no table layout), then at the very least close all your tags. Input tags need to be closed.

    2. I make a suggestion months ago that Aweber look at its user base and find a mean user’s tech skills. My guess is it wouldn’t be very high. That said, I made the recommendation that you hire a usability expert to help with labeling some of the admin features. Doing so would change how easy Aweber is to learn for most of your users. Maybe Aweber has done this, maybe not. But the competition is doing it.

    2/27/2007 2:43 pm
  16. Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

    Rob,

    Wanted to address a couple of your commented suggestions.

    We fuss extensively about permission and the confirmed opt-in process because recipients and the recipients ISP’s fuss extensively about receiving email they did not request. Permission is everything in this business and the only way to insure you have permission to email is to ask first. Whether that’s the first time they sign up for a list or changing to another list. Different list means different content, different frequency, and new permission. Without that assurance of permission we might as well just take your email and all of our other customers email and drop it directly to the spam folder.

    Obviously not something we want to do when we work so hard to maintain the excellent deliverability rates that we do.

    Regarding item #4, we have a feature that already automates the broadcasting of blog content with extreme customization. You can find out more about it at:

    http://www.aweber.com/faq/categories/Customers/Messages/RSS+%7B47%7D+Feed+Broadcaster/

    http://www.aweber.com/camtasia/feedbroadcaster/

    2/27/2007 2:46 pm | Follow me on Twitter
  17. Diana Mirkin

    I’m HOPING that you have made it possible for us to specify our default list OR keep the last-used list as the one that appears when we log in!!!

    2/27/2007 2:48 pm
  18. Leon

    Hello all at Aweber,

    It is Great to see all at Aweber are updating and improveing the service with new features.

    Looking forward to the new changes.
    see you on Thursday.

    Leon.

    2/27/2007 2:49 pm
  19. Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

    Diana,

    The new bookmarking feature will allow you to book mark a specific list to be taken to when ever you click on the link.

    2/27/2007 2:51 pm | Follow me on Twitter
  20. Joost

    Can you please up the max MB that an attachment can be to 2MB? My free reports are all between 1.3 and 1.8 MB. I know this is going to help many people.

    2/27/2007 2:51 pm
  21. Brian Mosley

    Wow! I have to say, aweber must have some of the most switched-on, professional and visionary users… reading the quality of suggestions above by John, Lee Lister and Rob Rutkowski. I hope you are taking advantage of this invaluable feedback from the people who are on the sharp end of using your system!

    For my own part, I feel like I’m reaching the boundaries (now, after a month, and configuring 4 other aweber accounts for associates I’ve recommended)… I hope that you will heed Steve Tennant’s suggestion above!

    The biggest wish I have, is for you to make it possible to save an entire aweber account as a ‘template’ so that it can be used as the basis for setting up a new account for associates… you’d find me bringing an accelerating number of new aweber customers your way when you implement that feature!

    2/27/2007 2:54 pm
  22. Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

    Joost,

    Contact customer service regarding your attachment sizes. There is no maximum for attachments. It’s only limited by default so we can talk with a customer about specific reasons why they might be sending a file that large. Sending extremely large files like that can negatively impact your deliverability. It’s generally best to put them on your website and allow recipients to download the file if they want it.

    http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/110/How+Do+I+Add+Attachments+to+Messages%3F

    2/27/2007 2:54 pm | Follow me on Twitter
  23. Nick Bayley

    Great stuff Tom. As someone else has said, you’re making a great service even better. Keep up the good work.

    -Nick

    2/27/2007 3:24 pm
  24. Brian Walsh

    Very pleased to see some cosmetic and functional improvements.

    I find the template I use (bookend) to be very unstable. It gets messed up sometimes when I paste in text.

    On my wishlist, I would like to see more templates, that are secure so they don’t splatter.

    Cheers,
    Brian

    2/27/2007 3:31 pm
  25. Jim Nech

    Tom,

    I am glad to see that you are updating the Web Form Wizard. This is one area that I feel needs some work.

    The main problem I have is being able to customize the layout of the input fields and labels, color, width, text alignment, positioning etc…

    I love the statistics you provide when I use the Java Script form but the default form does not fit all of my Opt-In pages. I am forced to

    Allowing access to more properties of the form would make Aweber IMHO
    almost perfect.

    2/27/2007 3:47 pm
  26. Josh Moore

    Great to see Aweber doing further developments. I’m especially looking forward to the one-click navigation.

    Here’s a couple of further developments that I’d like to see:

    1) The default "thanks for subscribing" page and the options for subjects in the opt-in email – change the "List Name" to something we choose rather than the aweber email. "Please confirm your subscribtion to 123456@aweber.com" means nothing to people. And it’s getting harder and harder to be able to choose an Aweber email that sounds like the name of your newsletter. Being able to choose our list name (which would be separate to the aweber email) would make more sense to people.

    I know there are a bunch of different subjects to choose from, but it just seems like there’s still an overweight leaning towards the aweber email being shown to subscribers, when really it means nothing to them.

    2) Set up own templates.
    It would be awesome to be able to load our own templates into Aweber so we can choose them from the templates drop down, instead of having to copy the code it each time.

    3) "If … then … else" fields.
    Like in mail merges in Word, it would be really useful to have "if … then … else" fields.
    e.g. You could set up an email to say, "If their ‘City’ is ‘Hamilton’ insert "10th April", else if their ‘City’ is ‘Auckland’ insert "12th April" … etc.
    If this scenario this would save having to make up completely different emails for each city.

    Keep up the great work Tom!

    2/27/2007 3:51 pm
  27. Greg Bulmash

    It would be nice if you could create a "registration plug-in" so that when users create an account at my site, they can opt-in for the mailing list as part of the registration process and make it an all-in-one.

    Making them go through two separate sign-up processes with two separate confirmation e-mails makes for more confusion and less conversion.

    There are ways, albeit a bit more complicated, that this could be done where the processes are combined.

    Be glad to help beta-test it and maybe even contribute some code. It would be a HUGE value add.

    - Greg

    2/27/2007 3:57 pm
  28. Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

    Josh,

    You can already fully customize both the confirmed opt-in subject line and the thank you for subscribing page.

    http://www.aweber.com/faq/search/thank%20you

    http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/68/How+Do+I+Customize+the+Confirmation+Message%3F

    Interesting related side note. We periodically do new feature request surveys asking customers what their most requested new feature might be. Every time we’ve run that survey a full 50% of requested features are ones that we already have. I would encourage anyone with a requested feature to talk directly with our support team about your desire to do something specific with your account. There is often a solution to your problem, it just might not be one that you’ve thought. That’s why our team is here. To help you use the tools provided in the most efficient way possible.

    Our extensive knowledge base is also an excellent starting place to search for how to do specific things within your account.

    http://www.aweber.com/faq/

    2/27/2007 3:58 pm | Follow me on Twitter
  29. Eric

    Does this include the elimination of double open reporting. 2 emails sent, opened twice each is now reported as a 200% open rate. This masks how many people are opening vs. reopening. Hell one guy can open 300 times and 299 people not once and you’d never know.

    2/27/2007 4:01 pm
  30. Jason Pearson

    Nice new design. I think you’ll are the best autoresponder out there and look forward to the new features…

    Warmly,

    Jason Pearson

    2/27/2007 4:32 pm
  31. Susan Schilling

    Tom, I’m so impressed with every aspect of Aweber. Now that I’m learning how powerful this system is, my subscriber base has grown.

    Thank you for constantly looking for ways to improve an already fantastic program.

    I appreciate you!

    Susan Schilling

    2/27/2007 4:58 pm
  32. Gary

    Hi

    We find Aweber to be a great service and overall extremely easy to use.

    One feature we would like to see though is the ability to cross reference emails on lists for multiple subscriptions.

    For example one of our sites has an opt-in list, a newsletter list and a customer list.

    Opt-ins get automatically unsubscribed if they convert to a customer and we have the seperate newsletter list as many of our customers just want to receive the newsletter but not general follow up messages.

    So in this case we can end up with the same subscribers on two lists.

    It would be great to have more advanced search capabilities across lists with IF, AND, THEN functions to check for example:

    IF email=list1+list2 AND email has been sent list1 message6 THEN delete email from list1.

    Just my two cents on an already great product though.

    PS I should add support were very helpful in finding a workaround so that we could do this by extracting the lists, cross checking and then using the multiple unsubscribe feature.

    2/27/2007 5:48 pm
  33. Martin Aranovitch

    The new features look very exciting and there are excellent suggestions made here by many of the members.

    Here’s my personal wish list:

    1) I would like to see the ability to create a new list by specifying it as a duplicate of an existing list (i.e. select a list and make an exact copy, then simply rename and edit the contents)

    2) Ability to associate our own domain name to the autoresponders instead of using listname@aweber.com

    3) Ability to merge database records in different lists

    4) Ability to reassign names on a list to another list. I understand there is a potential issue with doing this, but the system could automatically generate and send an email to recipents of that list who are being reassigned saying something like: "You are currently subscribed to ABC Marketing Group’s ‘General Topic’ Newsletter. A new ‘Specific Topic’ Newsletter has been created that we believe may be more pertinent to your interests. Would you like to: a) Transfer over to ‘Specific Topic’ Newsletter? b) Stay on ‘General Topic’ Newsletter c) Subscribe to both lists?"

    Anyway, keep up the great work and thanks for considering our suggestions.

    2/27/2007 5:52 pm
  34. Anita DeFrank

    Thanks! I’m so happy to see that you’re not beyond updating things to make it easier for your users. I can’t wait to see the improvements with the web forms. I agree with the above poster that this was something that needed some extra help.

    Great service and getting better! Kudos!

    2/27/2007 6:10 pm
  35. Borino

    Nice to see you guys listen to feedback and keep improving!

    One small feature I’d like to see is being able to delete unconfirmed lead that I know is bad.

    2/27/2007 6:28 pm
  36. Patrick Judge

    Its great that aweber listens to its customers and constantly acts to help them.

    Look forward to the new features.

    Its great to have unlimited autoresponders.

    I usually get genuine opt in subscribers from my ads, they sign up for my information on the aweber form at my website, then theres people who sign up at my website only to send me there info which I did not request.

    Sometime just out of curiousty I would click on their link only to find their website closed due to spam ( sending people information they did not request).

    One thing I really liked was the spam test meter you have for your messages.

    I often sent emails to people I know but some of the emails were not getting through and now using aweber I was suprised to learn that if your emails contained certain words they are considered spam.

    Evem my emails with just normal chat.

    Now I know my messages will get through to my contacts on my aweber lists.

    The London videos are very good, have`nt seen an autoresponder company with that support.

    One thing that was very good was the welcome letter in the mail I got, very nice !

    Keep up the good work

    2/27/2007 6:31 pm
  37. Lyna

    Tom,

    When will be the new updates be ready?

    This new update will be a plus-point when promoting Aweber, especially when the new interface looks more user-friendly…

    Yup, keep up the good work. We appreciate it.

    Lyna.

    2/27/2007 6:51 pm
  38. Shelley

    Hi,

    I’ve just read the list of enhancements and went YES! It seems that some of my biggest frustrations have been wiped away! Thank you. Can’t wait for when we go live.

    Thanks Tom and Team

    2/27/2007 7:03 pm
  39. Doug

    Good to see that you guys keep ideas fresh, nice service and even better customer service as well :) .

    2/27/2007 7:26 pm
  40. Michael Lang

    You read my mind! I am a big believer in CANI – Constant and Neverending Improvement! In addition to that one of my biggest complaints with AWEBER or any other product is the tutorials that make the product a truly useful tool.
    I am looking forward to whatever you’ve produced.

    2/27/2007 7:31 pm
  41. Martin Hurley

    Hi Aweber,

    Great stuff. You’re at the forefront of e-commerce because you focus on customer, customer, customer… Thanks.

    One thing that would be good to see is ‘auto’ email sentence lengths… so that one doesn’t have to scroll up to click format email sentence constantly.

    Sure you’re on to this one though.

    Keep up the good work and if you need a ‘success’ story make sure you come to see me. :-)

    2/27/2007 10:34 pm
  42. Steve Seltzer

    One feature was discussed about three months ago:
    The ability to customize the "Unsubscribe" window. This would be the perfect point to make a "last pitch" for another product.

    2/27/2007 10:40 pm
  43. Tanuj Damani

    Wow Aweber
    Way to go!
    That is the way to give your customers what they need

    I was thinking about suggesting to you guys to make some upgrades,
    But you have just taken my thoughts our of my mind.

    Congratulations

    I am looking forward for the new Imporvements

    2/28/2007 12:08 am
  44. Raam Anand

    Sounds Good!

    Waiting to get my hands on the new features. In fact, you are good at "reading" your customers mind. You are coming up with features that I "wished" for a few days ago!

    2/28/2007 12:23 am
  45. Jammer

    Hey Tom and Team, Thanks for sharing and well done. Keep up the excellent work! I especially like and appreciate the way you guys improve upon already a brilliant service, the new reports page with graphs helps make it even better for results.

    2/28/2007 1:26 am
  46. Gidon Ariel

    I’m quite happy with Aweber, I’m used to the interface, so I will be happy with whatever new comes out!

    The feature that I’d really love (and Support has basically said it’s not even on the horizon) is personal templates. I am up to autoresponder message #45 (and hope to get to 400!) and they are all the same except for about 5 text blocks. I have to copy the HTML from a previous message, paste it into the new message, edit through the WYSIWYG. It’s a lot more exasperating than that sounds:-) If I could select my own pre-made template, it would be MUCH easier.

    2/28/2007 6:26 am
  47. Mike

    It would be nice if you’d ask for feedback before redesigning the website. That way you’d be able to fulfill your customers needs.

    Whatever ideas are posted now are irrellevent.

    2/28/2007 4:24 pm
  48. Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

    Mike,

    We get feedback every business day and also survey customers regularly. Ideas posted now or in the future are never irrelevant. We’re constantly updating and improving the service as I’m sure anyone who’s been a customer for a while can attest to.

    2/28/2007 4:33 pm | Follow me on Twitter
  49. Joe Lavery

    Tom, your company is TRULY in a class of it’s own!

    I’m proud to be a customer and affiliate.

    Keep doing what you’re doing.

    Joe Lavery

    2/28/2007 7:35 pm
  50. David G

    Great work guys – keep it up :)

    Dave.

    3/2/2007 12:37 am
  51. Ted

    Tom,
    Aweber is one of those products that I was sure I needed before I bought it. Thank you for making it even better!

    Ted

    3/2/2007 9:39 pm
  52. Josh Moore

    Hi Tom,

    I posted a comment – February 27th, 2007 at 3:51 pm – saying that I would like it if Aweber moved away from having having such a strong weighting toward customers seeing the "listname", which is the unique aweber email address.

    It’s getting harder and harder to be able to choose an Aweber email that sounds even similar to the name of your newsletter.
    "Please confirm your subscribtion to 123456@aweber.com" means nothing to people.

    Here’s a quote from my email:
    "I know there are a bunch of different subjects to choose from, but it just seems like there’s still an overweight leaning towards the aweber email being shown to subscribers, when really it means nothing to them."

    In your reply (February 27th, 2007 at 3:58 pm) you said this:
    "You can already fully customize both the confirmed opt-in subject line and the thank you for subscribing page."

    If feel your reply misses the point of my comment. Yes I know you can customise the opt-in subject line – but this takes a day of so to be approved.

    If we look at the "Pre-approved Subjects" for the opt-in email out of the first 16 subjects, 14 contain {!listname}. That’s what I mean by there is an overweighting towards the listname, when really it means nothing to the customer.

    e.g. for my listname, they didn’t just request information from dollarsnsense@aweber.com – they requested information from wisemoney.

    One solution that I’d suggest is to have a "List Name" that is customizable and separate from the aweber email address – and this customizable list name is what would get inserted into the subjects. We’d be able to give the list the same name as our ezine. (And it wouldn’t have to be unique for all Aweber).

    So please hear what I’m meaning: it’s not just about what can be approved by your team. It’s also about how quickly and instantly I can control the details of a new list I’m setting up. And how much I can just run with the defaults, because they make sense, instead of always having to change them.

    Thanks

    3/6/2007 8:22 pm
  53. Robert Palmer

    Hey Josh,

    Well, I just want to mention that having someone call after I first
    signed up was unusual, and he even left a voice mail. ;-)

    The other thing was to receive snail mail that wasn’t considered JUNK.

    Keep up the great support.

    Robert

    3/8/2007 6:30 pm
  54. dave

    Hey,

    I’m using your service for about a year now and i must say it really increased my contact with our (futured) clients !

    Keep up the good work !

    5/31/2007 6:44 pm
  55. Robert Earl

    I wanted to thank you for the intro call that you made. We were able to update our website and the 600 plus forms on the site in 1 day, all using aweber forms. We have also started some split testing so we will be able to track the home buyers and sellers and see how much information they are comfortable with sharing. Great Product.

    6/5/2007 3:43 pm
  56. Matt

    I am so glad I cam across this posting. I can certainly make use of these features and can’t wait to try it out. Excellent.

    10/5/2007 1:45 am
  57. Nik D'Angelo

    I love the improvements. AWeber keeps walking side by side cutting edge technology. Bravo!

    7/26/2008 9:49 pm

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