I have heard of a lot of people mention that they have had autoresponder woes lately.

In particular, many marketers who target the internet marketing niche have had their Aweber accounts closed recently and they are wondering what autoresponder to switch to.

They are also wondering why they were shut down when they see many other people following the same practices they used.

I don’t have all the facts, but I do have some information that may shed some light on the subject and some ideas what may be going on that I have gleaned from the clues at hand.

Aweber and other major auto-responders  services have a department dedicated to resolving spam complaints and handling relations with the email service providers (ESPs for short.  Comcast.net and AOL.com for example) to ensure a high level of deliverability for their emails.  This is one of the main reasons why I recommend using a service rather than hosting your own autoresponder script.

But the situation has been getting out of hand lately.  Some major internet providers including Comcast.net were receiving lots of complaints about email from their customers.  Comcast blocked all emails coming from Aweber for a  period of time.  During this time, marketers saw subscribers drop off their lists due to email “bounces”.   Some people with larger lists lost hundreds or even thousands of subscribers.  This is what happens when the email provider blocks email coming from the sender’s domain  or the IP address of a particular mail server.

So while Aweber was trying to deal with complaints from the ESP’s,  Aweber’s support team got hammered with complaints from a lot of their cust0mers.  Basically, all of their customers regardless of their marketing practices and target market were affected by the bounce problem although it was primarily people who targeted the “make money online” niche that were generating most of the complaints.

In particular, there were two complaints that seemed to be recurring in discussions with Aweber support staff when people lost their accounts.  One of the offenses is when people “bury” the unsubscribe link by putting a lot of white space at the end of their email so people will have to scroll way down to find the unsubscribe link.  This practice causes complaints because people may hit the “Spam” button rather than scroll down to the bottom when they don’t see the unsubscribe link.

The other reason I heard for people getting their account closed was for promoting Clickbank products.  Now I don’t have any confirmation from Aweber on this, but my guess is that these complaints were mostly generated by people who opted in to a list expecting to get a free report or other product promised on a squeeze page and then were immediately sent to a Clickbank affiliate link.  Instead they should first get either the link to the free product or at least some confirmation that the product will be delivered.

I saw this happen several times when I was doing ad swaps.  People would ask me to send their offer to my list, but when I saw that the first thing after opting in was directly to a sales pitch  I either refused or asked them to fix their offer.  Many people I talked to said that they didn’t have the ability to edit the offer page.  Of course if they were sending straight to an affiliate link, the page is on the vendor’s server and they don’t have access.

Even though I checked out the offers and saw that there was a notice at the top of their one time offer page  indicating the subscriber will be getting their free product in the email, I still saw complaints sometimes.  Things like “Don’t you know what FREE means?”  I’ve heard many other marketers say they get the same complaint.  The truth is, you can’t expect your subscriber to read every word on the page.  And while you may feel comfortable knowing that you notified them, that doesn’t do anything to alleviate the subscriber’s frustration and feeling that they have been cheated.

When I received complaints from my subscribers, I knew that statistically only 10 percent of the people who felt wronged actually went to the trouble to complain.   Others just unsubscribed.  Still more may have stayed subscribed, but they certainly didn’t trust enough to buy.

So I developed a solution to this problem.  I call it OTO Express and you can get it free at Otoxpress.com.  What OTO Express does is put a popup in front of your One Time Offer that people are directed to right after opting in.  This popup is not an annoying popup that beeps and prevents you from closing the window if you so desire.  It simply tells the subscriber that their free product will be delivered in the email.

You can see an example of what  OTO Express does here:  http://otoxpress.com/oto?id=42 .

If you want your new subscribers to be happy, you should make sure they know they will be getting their freebie Before you throw a sales page in their face.  Try http://otoxpress.com.  You can use your Clickbank offer (or just about any offer) and still give your subscribers the warm fuzzy feeling that makes them want to buy,  instead of the hot pounding feeling that makes them send you hate mail!