By Pat Flynn on October 19, 2015SOURCE
Earlier this year, I made a big decision to move my email list of more than 135,000 subscribers to Infusionsoft from AWeber, which I’ve used for the past five-plus years. Three months later, my email list now lives on a relatively new and rapidly growing platform called ConvertKit.
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I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why I moved and which is the best email service provider. Here’s the entire story of why I landed on ConvertKit as the one that best suits my marketing needs.
From the Beginning
Starting an online business today almost always means starting an email list, but when I started my online business in 2008 I did NOT start building a list until a year and a half later.
Big mistake.
I missed out on a ton of marketing and advertising opportunities on GreenExamAcademy.com, and I didn’t even know how powerful an email list was for things like validation and data extraction.
Plus, it’s an amazing relationship building tool for you and your audience—not to mention a safety net if you lose access to the audience you’ve built on another platform.
In 2009, I finally got my head on straight and signed up with AWeber, an email service provider (ESP) that a number of my online business friends recommended, and I almost immediately starting seeing returns on my investment.
I learned how to get a sign-up form up on my site, and I dropped my first one on the homepage of GreenExamAcademy.com. There were no giveaways or “lead magnets” as opt-in incentive. The only thing I offered was my “exclusive newsletter,” although I quickly added copy to include “exclusive deals on my study guides and LEED-related products.”
Seven days later, I had built a list of just over 200 people. I sent a broadcast email which included a link to my eBook, The LEED AP Walkthrough, and a $5.00 off coupon code that expired within twenty-four hours.
Within twenty-four hours after sending that email, I had fifty-three people purchase the book for $24.95, grossing just over $1,300 in sales with one single email to my list of 200 people.
That was the most money I had ever made in a single day in my life, and it blew me away. This email thing actually worked!
A couple of months later, I discovered the power of having an autoresponder series—a series of pre-written emails that are sent automatically and sequentially to subscribers after they sign up.
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I experimented with creating a short three-email series, which was sent over the course of seven days after people subscribe.
Email #1, which was sent immediately after someone subscribed, was about how to get started studying for the exam, giving people all of the background information they needed to know before getting their feet wet with the material.
Email #2, sent to subscribers a day later, pitched my eBook study guide. I had explained that it was everything they needed to know to pass the LEED exam, conveniently packaged into a printable PDF file and delivered immediately upon purchase. The link in the email sent people over to my sales page, which had a lot more information on the features and benefits of the product.
Email #3, sent to subscribers one week after subscribing, shared a link to a set of practice exams sold by another company I was partnered with. I included an affiliate link to that product in that email.
Apparently, the experiment worked very well because sales started to increase month after month, parallel to the growth of my email list. Unfortunately, however, I didn’t have the tools or knowledge required to be able to track this very well.
As a beginner marketer who tried to do everything himself, I was very intimidated by all of the fancy tools out there that could possibly help with tracking and conversions. I didn’t want to break what already seemed to be working.
For years, the same email list and autoresponder series worked its magic, and I didn’t touch the copy or add any more emails to the series until the exam changed in 2012, and I had to start over on a lot of things.
I was very happy with the results of building my list on GreenExamAcademy.com and was extremely happy with AWeber as an email service provider. In fact, that list still lives on AWeber, and I’m still 100% supportive of the company and highly recommend them for those who are just starting to build their email lists.
So where did this switch come from?
That’s in relation to my email list here on Smart Passive Income. That’s a whole different story to tell…
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SmartPassiveIncome.com’s Email List
The Smart Passive Income Blog started in October 2008 simply as a place for me to report and talk about everything that was happening with my business at GreenExamAcademy.com. Starting an online business changed my life and saved my butt after getting laid off, and it was the least I could do to pay it forward and hopefully help others that had met struggles during the recession, too.
Through research and conversation, I knew that there were lot of other people already teaching online business, but I never saw a real-life, open case study of someone else’s business in the space.
So, that’s what I decided to bring to the table, and that became the inspiration behind my income reports, the niche site duel, and other open case studies here on the blog.
Back on topic—did I start an email list when Smart Passive Income started?
Nope. I did not. Why?
I didn’t feel the need to because I wasn’t selling anything.
Another big mistake.
Although I didn’t have anything to sell, the main point of the site was to serve others and become a top resource for people in this space, and by holding back on the email list, I ultimately limited my capacity to help.
In January 2010, after re-attaching my head again, I finally started to build my list here on SPI. As incentive, I created a PDF guide called Ebooks the Smart Way: A Complete Guide to Publishing, Marketing and Automating a Killer Ebook, which is still being downloaded and used today.
I’ve talked about email marketing many times in the past, and I have a few select articles to share with you about growing your list and increasing conversions:
SPI Podcast Session #78: Rapid Listbuilding with Clay Collins
Conversion Strategies with Derek Halpern (SPI Gets Critiqued)
Conversion Strategies Results (I put Derek to the Test)
I used AWeber again to setup a new list (in the same account), and five years later, I’ve built the email list to more than 110,000 subscribers.
At the same time, I watched that my AWeber bill pass the $1,000 threshold for the first time:
pat's aweber bill
AWeber’s pricing is pretty standard and is actually very friendly when starting out, because you pay as you grow. There’s an annual fee of $194, and you pay more on top of that based on the number of subscribers you have.
aweber pricing structure
As you can see, I was being charged $181 per month for 26,000 subscribers (which, relative to the chart above, looks a bit higher than normal) and an additional $8.00 per 1,000 subscribers.
Including the other lists I had built over time, including Green Exam Academy and other interest and webinar lists, I was being charged $1,101.00 for a combined subscriber count of about 141,000.
That’s a substantial list size, and honestly, there was no big issue here for me. I was happy to pay the fee for the service, although I’ve always had a complaint about how AWeber defines a subscriber.
For example, if someone is on your list and they choose to unsubscribe later, they still count as an email in the system which is included in your total subscriber count. You must fully delete that record from your account in order to not have to pay for it, and so I found myself going into each of my individual lists and deleting unsubscribes from my account about once a week.
And no, there is no easy way to delete them from your account—no “delete all unsubscribes” button, which would be nice for obvious reasons. When you have a large list and send a considerable number of emails, your unsubscribe counts could be in the thousands per week.
Additionally, if someone were subscribed to two of your lists, they count as two subscribers. For example, perhaps someone is signed up to your main list as well as a secondary list you created for a particular webinar you conducted. That counts as two.
Some of my records were found to be subscribed to four or five of my email lists!
Apart from this, AWeber was exactly what I needed to build my list. It has helped me foster a deeper relationship with my audience, while also helping me collect valuable information and feedback over time. I can also directly account hundreds of thousands of dollars in total earnings to specific emails that I’ve sent to my list.
It wasn’t until I started to focus on the future of SPI that I saw AWeber lacking functionality in terms of segmentation, “tagging” subscribers based on certain actions and easy to setup automation.
You can set up “rules” in AWeber to automatically segment your audience, but these rules simply subscribe or unsubscribe people from various lists. For example, when one person joins list B, they can be automatically unsubscribed from list A. This simple rule is particularly useful when you have a non-customer email list, and a customer email list.
As I look to better segment my audience based on not only what you want but also what you have read, downloaded, and purchased on SPI, AWeber just didn’t seem have the more advanced capabilities that I wanted.
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SPI was growing up, and it was about to outgrow AWeber. The question was then . . . where was I going next?
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