Hey folks,

I currently use MailChimp for the email subscription forms on my blog, but I keep hearing that AWeber is better, so I have two questions:

1) Is AWeber available for Blogger, or is it only compatible with WP/Drupal/Joomla only?

2) If it is compatible with Blogger and I make the switch, would I lose my current subscribers? 

I mean “MailChimp”…

@mellissathomas @amyhallbiz

I’ve moved from Constant Contact to AWeber. AWeber works with everything, and they have the most amazing integration with other tools. I had to make the switch because I needed a list service that integrated with WishList Member, my membership plug-in. MailChimp wasn’t an option for me for other reasons.

AWeber does require double opt in. That means that when you move a list to them, everyone must confirm their subscription.

When I did this, I lost 45% of my list. At first, I was heartbroken. But then I realized that these people had lost interest in my list. I thought of it as pruning out the dead weight. And I realized that the number of subscribers is only as good as the number of people who really open my stuff. 

I did follow up with the “lost” members using a free service, and honestly, after 3 follow up attempts, I didn’t even regain 10 members. It made me feel better at the time, but in retrospect, it was a total waste of my time.

Since then, I’ve become an advocate of list pruning. I regularly go back and see who hasn’t opened and email from me in 4 months, and poke at that subset of the list. I want them to either rejoin me, or drop off. I want to know that my list is vibrant, and not stuffed with people who really don’t care any more.

I LOVE AWEBER. The signup forms have stats, so I can see on my website and Facebook page the conversion percentage for the forms (how many people look at the form vs sign up). That helps me to tweak the form and the content around the form.

Hope this helps.

@mellissathomas What blogging platform do you use? I can only speak for WordPress… but there are a couple of ways in WordPress … A MailChimp plug-in  or build a form in WordPress and use the MailChimp API to get the email addresses into your MailChimp account. I’ll caution you about using the same colors as your website … email subscriptions form are most productive when they DON”T blend in with the site … When they pop off the page, then people can notice them and take action on them. The best colors for an email subscription form? Yellow background with blue text. (Ugly huh? but it works!)

@mellissathomas I don’t know anything about the blogger platform, but can you use plug-ins? If you can there is probably a MailChimp plug-in that will give you some additional versatility with your webform.

Thanks for the link, Howie. Interesting caveat with the affiliate links. @howwhowhen

@mellissathomas Yes you can install Aweber on blogger or in fact any website, after creating the sign up form, you simply copy the code and paste it in your blog.  Shout if you need help.

https://help.aweber.com/entries/21627471-how-do-i-add-a-form-to-my-website

@atlantarobin Yes, you’re correct. Not all affiliate links are banned, just the ones that have been identified as spam in the past. http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/does-mailchimp-ban-affiliate-links/

@amyhallbiz

Amy, thanks sooooo much for that article link. It really does explain MailChimp’s reputation regarding affiliate links. So they DO accept affiliate links, but NOT ones that negatively affect their OWN reputation in the search engines, etc. So I guess the key would be to make sure you don’t send emails that might get delivered to your followers’ spam folder, right? That would ding MailChimp’s reputation and that’s what would trigger their ire, if you do that repeatedly, right?

Robin