Happy Birthday to Us…

New Features - Justin Premick - August 28th, 2007 - Permalink

Birthday Hats…what, you didn’t bring cake and ice cream?

Nine years ago this week, the very first paying AWeber user started setting up and running an email campaign.

We’ve come a long way — more features, more users and a much better-looking website than the original. (Doesn’t that flashing credit card icon at the top look sweet? ;))

As we roll on toward a decade of helping small businesses manage their email marketing, I thought it’d be fun to put together a timeline of the last 9 years of AWeber, with a few changes and features highlighted.

AWeber: The First Nine Years

A few of the highlights and enhancements since 1998:

August 1998: AWeber.com launches, offering “automated personalized follow up to close the sale, increase profits, and save you time”
January 1999: Graphical Reports are introduced, showing new subscriber activity, ad categories and a few other reports.
November 1999: Broadcasts are introduced, enabling users to send email newsletters to subscribers.
June 2000: Importing multiple subscribers is introduced, enabling users to easily collect subscribers offline and add them to their email campaign.
August 2001: Views make it possible to broadcast to specific groups within a list.
July 2002: Advanced scheduling of broadcasts enables users to create a message today, and have it automatically sent at a date/time in the future.
July 2003: Unlimited Email Campaigns - users can set up as many autoresponders and newsletters as they want, at no additional cost!
November 2003: Open Rate and Click Through tracking are integrated into messages, making it easy to measure subscribers’ response to your messages.
September 2004: Users can create HTML messages in minutes using our point-and-click WYSIWYG editor.
December 2004: We thought opt-in forms should be as easy to create as HTML messages, so we introduced a point-and-click Web Form Generator. And just in time for Christmas, why not make it easy to send deduplicated broadcasts to multiple lists?
December 2005: Bloggers everywhere can syndicate their blog through email using the Blog Broadcast tool. The templates that we introduced for the Blog Broadcasts are also released for email newsletters.
May 2006: To better serve the needs of our users worldwide, support hours grew to 12 hours per day.
July 2006: This email marketing blog launches :)
November 2006: Support hours expand even further as Saturday live customer support rolls out.
December 2006: The Web Form Generator is improved, enabling users to create new fields and drag-and-drop them into forms on the fly.
January 2007: The new Knowledge Base goes live, with more answers at your fingertips than ever before - and a handy auto-suggest tool on the support page.
February 2007: Live Webinars begin helping small businesses set up their first email marketing campaigns, and educating them on topics like how to create email newsletters and capture as many subscribers as possible with their opt-in forms.
March 2007: After months of development, AWeber’s Development Team unveils our new user interface, with many enhancements to make managing your campaigns quick and intuitive.

Along the way, thousands of small businesses have more effectively communicated with their customers and sent email newsletters and other marketing campaigns. And we’ve grown from one person to a team of 23 (and still growing).

Thanks!

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: you’re the reason we’re here and in business.

Thanks for trusting us to get your mail delivered, to manage your email newsletters, to syndicate your blogs, to follow up with your customers and prospects. We’re excited about what the next nine years will bring, and we hope you are too.

Cheers!

-Everyone Here At AWeber

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 9:26 am and is filed under New Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink.

19 Responses

  1. Chibueze
    August 28th, 2007 at 10:18 am

    Dear Aweber,

    Happy Birthday to you all.

    You guys are great.

    Cheers!

  2. Darren
    August 28th, 2007 at 12:34 pm

    It was a great milestones of achievement there.

    Congratulations and Happy Birthday to AWeber!! :)

    Towards a decade of AWeber, Cheers!

  3. Vincent
    August 28th, 2007 at 12:35 pm

    Wooowww.. time flies !

    H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y !!!!!

    Very curious what the future will bring…
    Like uh… new feautures… :-)

    You are the BEST !

  4. Diana Fontanez
    August 28th, 2007 at 12:50 pm

    Happy Birthday, Aweber!

    Your team ROCKS!

  5. Martha Matthews
    August 28th, 2007 at 12:56 pm

    Congratulations on your 9th Birthday! I have been with aWeber for a little over two years now and I love it. It is so asy to use and does so much. Thanks guys!

  6. Andy
    August 28th, 2007 at 1:31 pm

    Keep up the good work! And oh ya, HAPPY "B" DAY!!!

  7. Jens P. Berget
    August 28th, 2007 at 2:15 pm

    Happy birthday to you all!

    It must be a great feeling to have something so successful and sit back and look at the past and then think about the future while you are eating your cake.

    Thanks for all support and have a great day.

  8. Karin Vrij
    August 28th, 2007 at 5:19 pm

    Yeah, H A P P Y BIRTHDAY

    I started my business about 6 months ago and the best thing about
    AWEBER is the customer service. All my questions are being answered and withing one day! GREAT.

  9. Gary
    August 28th, 2007 at 5:57 pm

    Happy Birthday.

    Aweber services rocks and we couldn’t run our business without you guys.

    Great to see how far Aweber has progressed and looking forward to many more fantastic changes in the future.

    Great stuff!!!

  10. Trevor Simpson
    August 28th, 2007 at 6:03 pm

    I discovered you guys around 4 months ago after months of researching for this type of service. I can honestly say there is none other like you and probably won’t be. Service is brilliant, and as we learn about Aweber’s program and features, it just gets better and better. A very warm "Happy Birthday" to everyone. You deserve everything great that comes your way.

  11. Carol Bentley
    August 28th, 2007 at 6:04 pm

    9 years! That’s 2 years past the ‘7-year itch’.. oh, that’s supposed to be for a marriage isn’t it? Well I guess it’s a bit like a marriage ’cause you work damn hard to make it all work and we use your efforts to make our lives that much easier. Yup! I reckon deep and sincere congratulations are definitely well deserved by you guys, for coming up with the concept in the first place and for making it the best there is!

    Happy Birthday to you…
    Happy Birthday to you… (you know how it goes..)

    I look forward to celebrating your ‘coming of age’ on your 18th! :)

  12. Travis
    August 31st, 2007 at 9:48 pm

    Congratulations! Something like 94% of small businesses in north america don’t make it to their 9th birthday… You guys truly stand out, with fast answers to email support questions, and online Live-Chat, a great combination.

    Nice work Tom and Team!

  13. Neville Chambliss
    August 31st, 2007 at 10:19 pm

    Happy Belated Birthday:

    Aweber you guys are awesome keep it the Good Work! Happy Birthday

    again and many more!

  14. Joseph
    September 6th, 2007 at 4:01 pm

    hey There,

    Happy Birthday AWeber. As a new user, this program is really helpful compared to a lot of others. 9 Years is a testament to your success. here is to another 99. Cheers!

  15. Scott
    September 7th, 2007 at 5:43 pm

    You guys ROCK! So glad to have made the decision to use YOUR service over the other choices out there - I’m a VERY happy customer and will be for many years to come….

    HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

  16. Chibueze
    September 10th, 2007 at 9:01 am

    Dear AWEBER,

    Happy birth day to you. You guys are great.

    I am in live with your servics.

    Congratulations.

  17. Sandra
    September 10th, 2007 at 10:04 pm

    Happy Birthday!

    You’ve come a long way! Thank you for being a fabulous, reliable service! I have been with you for 2 years now and I always tell my clients to use your services! I can’t wait to see what else is in store for Aweber in the future.

  18. Catherine
    September 11th, 2007 at 2:52 pm

    Happy Birthday Aweber!

    I first thought that we shared the day but then realised that mine was a month before.

    Today is my first attempt at using the Internet since the Hurricane Dean affected us in Jamaica. I live less than 5 minutes walk from the seaside and needless to say, all our power lines went down a 3km stretch. We were without electricity until the night of September 2, hours before we had to cast our votes to either ‘change the course’ or ‘not cchange course’. Still no land line, thanks to the tardy Cable & Wireless appropriately labelled by some ‘careless & worthless’. So no landline phone, no internet, no VOIP, no website business, no online dating - just when I met a great guy! And of course no income -

    I used Roboform on my PC and can’t get used to the fact that I don’t have my PC or Roboform when I try to visit an Internet Cafe.
    And I can’t believe how very quickly your well organised life can become traumatised by the passing of a hurricane.

    But I tell you this, just seeing Aweber logo and the website today was such a wonderful and comforting feeling.

    Happy Birthday once more.

  19. junk food facts
    September 13th, 2007 at 12:16 am

    Hi Nine years baby, Congratulations and wish you happy birthday
    i saw what you all are done in every month and year, its very nice and tough job . but you people prove it . we expecting your new release every month, hope you will give more informative and effective ideas
    heartly congratulation to sweet Aweber

Leave a Comment











Subscribe without commenting




« Web Analytics and Email: Bounce Rates | How to Integrate Google Analytics with AWeber »