Autoresponder Wars Volume 1 – Aweber vs GetResponse

Igor Kheifets:
I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is the List Building Lifestyle, a podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, then this podcast is for you. I also invite you to attend the free workshop at Igor.ac, where I’m teaching how I made $21,779.25 in affiliate commissions by sending just 481 clicks to my affiliate link in one day.

I’m also explaining why I walked away from ClickBank, and I don’t promote ClickBank offers anymore, as well as the five things I look for in the perfect affiliate offer. I’m even going to show you the one-page website that I used to make over half a million dollars in affiliate commissions this year, and I’ll even drive you to attend this workshop by giving you a $497 value course that shows you how to share your big, high-converting affiliate offers free in next affiliate promotion.

In addition, I’ll even give you the three offers, I’m promoting right now, that are making me money as we speak. All of that and more at Igor.ac. Now, it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

Terrance Lackey:
Welcome to the List Building lifestyle show. I am Terrance Lackey, your co-host, with your host, Igor Kheifets, the master of list building himself. What’s up, Igor?

Igor Kheifets:
Hey, Terrance. I was thinking, so if you’re co-host, I can’t be the host. I think I’m a co-host, too because we’re two co-hosts now.

Terrance Lackey:
Yeah. Think about it, two co-hosts. Well, there you go. I have to change that next time I interview you.

Igor Kheifets:
Damn it. I got demoted on my own podcast.

Terrance Lackey:
Yeah. Hey, this is an episode I’ve been looking for, Igor, looking forward to, is a new series, a couple series, autoresponder wars. Can you tell us about that one?

Igor Kheifets:
Yeah. It’s basically a novel I’m writing. I’m just kidding. No, but one of the most common questions I get all the time is autoresponder related. It can be something as basic as, “Igor, should I use GetResponse, or should I use AWeber, or should I use something else?” It can also be something a little bit more complicated when people expect me to know everything about every artist when we’re out there.

Just the other day, there was a new release in the autoresponder community, there was a new program released by my friend, Neil Napier, that I’ll be testing. Everyone contacted me, and it was like, “Igor, what do you think of that? Did you use it? Is this any good? Does it deliver?” I was like, “Chill. It just came out today. Why am I supposed to know about the thing?”

So, I figured if everyone wants to know so much about how I feel about different platforms, different software, then I figured why not talk about it. The thing about autoresponders is that there’s a whole industry, and there’s so many different things to talk about. So that’s why I figured, we won’t be able cover everything in one episode, and you’ll have to take it one step at a time and really start producing several volumes of this huge discussion.

So, today is volume number one. I want to run a comparison between AWeber and GetResponse.

Terrance Lackey:
Wow, this is a great topic. I’ll tell you what, every forum I’ve looked into, the Warrior Forum, everywhere on groups on Facebook or wherever you look online, people are always asking the question, “What autoresponder should I get?” I tell you, the responses are 1,000 different responses, and people have different experiences. It’d be great to get your take on it, for sure. So right now, it’s going to be between AWeber and GetResponse. So, how do you start into that, Igor?

Igor Kheifets:
Well, I can start with my own personal experience with each and every single one of them, then I’ll share which company, what each company wants really, and what happened there. Then, I’ll just make a recommendation based on who you are. So, my experience with AWeber has been, I’ll call it, up and down experience over the years. They’ve been the second autoresponder I’ve tried. The first one was always GetResponse, but they were the first autoresponder that I used, where I’ve built a list that actually made me money. So I’ve been an AWeber customer for on and off for well over 10 years.

The thing that AWeber evolved over time, because there used to be a time in our industry when everyone who was making money online in any industry, be it make money industry, be it weight loss industry, there was just almost as if there was no other than AWeber. Everyone was using AWeber. They were above and beyond every single company out there, including GetResponse, who was, at the time, a smaller company out of Poland. AWeber were always the pioneers in different features. Their interface was always easy to use. Anytime you were watching a VSL or reading a sales page by a marketer or where they were showing proof, there was always an AWeber screenshot on that page.

So, AWeber had, in a way, it had built-in credibility with it. So, if you were using AWeber, you were one of the good guys, so to speak.

Then once upon a time, AWeber decided to start banning people. They started banning people like aggressively. The industry grew, and people started mailing more aggressively or whatever. Maybe AWeber changed. They changed their direction because, at some point, they switched from serving internet marketers to a serving people who are more offline business owners and who would be way less aggressive when it comes to mailing, like a bakery owner who sends out a weekly newsletter for Easter or something like that. Just a totally different type of customer than people like us who mail every day and mail literally hundreds of thousands of emails every single day.

Now, obviously, for spammers AWeber wasn’t a good choice because AWeber never really supported or appreciate spammers. So, they never liked that. So, AWeber, for a very long time, I loved them. I always put them on the top of the autoresponder pedestal, if you will. So, there was a ranking system, which there never were because it’s always a subjective experience, what software you want to use? AWeber was always there. The price was right. The delivery rates were great. The user experience was great.

Just overall, everything worked well until they started banning people. The first experience I’ve had with AWeber losing an account was when I lost an account that was 100,000 people big. So I had a list of over 100,000 people. Anytime I would email that list, I would make at least $3,000. So, I was happy. Then one day, they banned me. Why? Because I had a few spam complaints. I wasn’t over the threshold, but because my list was so big, it was putting a strain on their servers, and they let me go with no warning, no ability to back up my list, just kick me out. I got that email from Josh that everyone else’s received. It was basically end of story for me with AWeber.

Terrance Lackey:
Wow, it’s got to hurt. 100,000 list not backed up, man.

Igor Kheifets:
Yeah. That was another mistake, by the way. That’s on me, not backing my list every day. Obviously, I learned that lesson ever since. Now, I back up my list daily, but I really had to start over. I had a backup of about 60,000 people. I didn’t have my whole list. I could not export my recent openers, which was bad because when it comes to lists, recency is very important. Recency is extremely important.

So, when it came to AWeber, they banned me for the first time. Right around the same time, almost everyone I knew, at one point or another, lost their account with AWeber for the exact same reason. Now, the other contender is GetResponse. GetResponse isn’t as fast to ban people. They actually keep their customers, but GetResponse was always second best when it came to user experience, which they improved over the years, but it’s still kind of clunky even today.

What we like about them is they improve their email delivery. What they’ve done is they built a system that’s friendly for affiliate marketers, which is most people I work with. So, now these days, unlike back in the day, these days, whenever I have to choose between AWeber and GetResponse, I choose GetResponse. Here’s why. So, at that time, when I lost a 100,000-person email list wasn’t the last time I got banned from AWeber because I made a few attempts to go back to AWeber after that. I’ll admit it openly, being a very advanced email marketer, I test things out, and I test things out that most people would consider to be gray hat, nothing illegal, but a gray hat for sure. Areas that most people won’t touch because they are afraid.

For me, I was always happy to experiment on the cutting edge, if you will. So, what happened was I had a few AWeber accounts where I was doing that. Eventually, AWeber found my accounts and they hated me for it. They hated me for using their platform as a testing ground. So, they not only banned me, but I got a personal ban. Have you ever heard of a personal ban from AWeber?

Terrance Lackey:
No. That’s kind of personal. [crosstalk 00:09:30].

Igor Kheifets:
Yes. So, now, anytime, anyone emails their list and they mentioned the word Igor, or they mentioned any one of my domains, their account goes into a manual review because the system gets triggered by that keyword. It goes into manual review, and AWeber basically tells you, “Look, you’re promoting Igor or you’re talking about Igor. We don’t like Igor. Therefore, if you promote him, we can’t allow you to mail. Just stop promoting Igor, and we’ll allow you to mail.” That’s it.

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content, hop on over to listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this episode. I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the show. It really helps. Thanks.

So, this actually just recently happened to me this week with a joint venture partner, who was mailing out for my webinar. He obviously called off the JV because he was concerned he’s going to lose his account. Now, he didn’t lose his account. He got an email from AWeber today that he’s fully reinstated, and they just don’t want him to promote me. You see, now, I’m personally banned from AWeber for, basically, experimenting.

So, AWeber is off my recommended list. I still respect them though. I have to say that if you are in a good shape, with AWeber, it’s worth looking into. But then there’s another problem. You see? Another thing that I have is I know people in this industry, and I know a lot of people who created these turnkey systems. You may have seen them. For example, my friend, David Dekel, who created the Funnel X system, and more recently the Profit Passport. Have you seen that one?
T

Terrance Lackey:
I have. I have. That’s been going around here recently.

Igor Kheifets:
Yeah. It’s a very hot system. It’s making people a lot of money. If you’re actually looking into it right now, I recommend you check it out and look up, David Dekel, look up Profit Passport. Very, very cool system. David is a champion when it comes to building these.

So, he actually had two other systems before this one. One of them was based in AWeber. Guess what happened? So, David referred a ton of business to AWeber. I think, well over 100 and something accounts, if not more than that. So, he was one of their biggest affiliates, for sure, over a span of 30 or 60 days. Then very quickly, they turned around and they banned him.

Terrance Lackey:
Wow.

Igor Kheifets:
Not only they banned him from the system, they also banned him from the affiliates program. What happened was, his entire system that was custom coded through AWeber and all the automations, he now had to rebuild it into GetResponse.

Terrance Lackey:
What did he do? Did they outline a reason? Or was he experimenting as well?

Igor Kheifets:
I don’t remember, but they banned him. He wasn’t the only one. It happened to a few more people I know. It’s basically a very common thing for AWeber to do. They ban you. They don’t give you a prior notice. They don’t care that it’s your bread and butter. They don’t care that you’re basically… The livelihood of your children depends on it. They don’t really care. They don’t give you an advance notice.

Now, again, I’m saying that they don’t give you an advance notice because other systems may. For example, I used to own an account for two years within the Israeli autoresponder that you can’t really use it unless you speak Hebrew, which I had the advantage of doing. So, I was using and I was mailing, and I had a big list on that platform as well. One day, I got a call from the owner and he said, “Look, I blocked your mailing capabilities because anytime you mail, you overload our server and you basically get us banned temporarily from Hotmail.” They need Hotmail because lots of Israeli email systems are based on Hotmail. They’re a little bit outdated.

So, he said, “Look, we can’t allow you to use our platform because you’re hurting deliverability for other members” because I’m primarily mailing to Gmail. I’m basically geared towards Gmail. They’re not so much. I said, “Okay. I appreciate you calling me personally about it. I won’t mail, I promise I will mail, but can you give me a couple of days for me to back up all my followup sequences, all of my subscribers, all of my automations?” He said, “Yeah, sure. I’ll give you two weeks.” He kept my access for two weeks. I exported everything. I backed everything up. I moved myself into another system. He was very nice about it.

So, even if you want to ban me from your platform, why be a dick about it? So when it comes to AWeber, unfortunately, there’s one guy who bans everyone, and anyone who ever got banned, got an email from… His name is Josh. If there will ever be a time when I am sacrificing a lamb and drinking its blood to please the devil, I will only make one request. It’s going to be to go after Josh because I have more emotional pain associated with him than anyone else in the industry.

So, I mean, this is just, again, a very colorful way to say that AWeber is a great system. In terms of system, it’s a great system. At the same time, you’re always running the risk of getting banned if they don’t like you, if there’s a spam complaint, if there is a claim that they don’t like, or if you mentioned the word Igor, right? But GetResponse is a lot more allowing. It’s a little bit more difficult to use, but it’s a lot more friendly to beginners and affiliate marketers specifically.

So GetResponse is, definitely, going to be my recommendation today if it’s stacked up against AWeber. Although, if AWeber wasn’t banning people, and even if they still kept that personal ban against me, if they just left everyone else alone and just allow people to mail, I would recommend them. Right now, as of today, GetResponse is definitely on top of AWeber for me. AWeber as a secondary option, unless you don’t have any other options, which we will be discussing in future volumes of autoresponder wars.

Terrance Lackey:
Wow, Igor. That the viciousness of the ban is just surprising to me. I tell you what? You’re right, back in the day, I do recall everybody who was somebody online, they did have an AWeber account. I couldn’t find anybody that didn’t have an AWeber account that was actually online marketing. Then, there was GetResponse that was pretty new for me back then. I’m a rebel. I took a look at both platforms. I got a trial on both. I did, ultimately, make the decision to go to GetResponse because I did feel like they were a little bit more user friendly as far as the tutorials. They reached out, the emails, a softer approach.

I’m shocked at the way they handled your situation because if they had a brick and mortar business, would you treat a customer in your building, even if you felt that they were, I don’t know, manipulating something or whatever. I’m not sure what the correlation would be, but certainly you would be gracious and kind and treat them with respect. It doesn’t seem like-

Igor Kheifets:
I don’t mean to say that they did not treat me with respect. It sounds like they told me to go fuck myself or anything like that. They were very nice about it. Again, the “respect” is something… If I get banned from a system, which, again, I was banned from other systems as well, not just AWeber. That’s cool because I’m very, very aggressive. I’ve made every mistake you can think of. I’ve literally tried every single thing that you can read about when it comes to email marketing. I’ve tried black hat stuff way, way back. I’m more recently with gray hat stuff. I’ve tried scripts. I’ve tried servers. I’ve tried SMTPs. We’ll be discussing those as well. If there is a method of any kind, I tried it.

However, when it comes to the respect portion of it, what I would expect from a company, the size of AWeber, at least allow me to back up my list. At least allow me to back up my followup emails. That’s actually a lot of work. It’s one thing to not allow me to download my leads, but I invest a lot of time and effort and energy into writing emails and setting them up and creating intervals, and creating a delays between them and segmenting people to receive an email or not to receive an email on a certain day. That’s a lot of work, a lot of work.

So, if I get banned and I’m not allowed to export that, that’s a big shame. That’s a huge shame. That’s just such a bummer. Now, nothing fatal. One thing I love about email marketing is that you’re never depending on any one autoresponder company, which means even if you get banned from AWeber or GetResponse, or even any anyone else, you can rebuild into a new system, you can take your list, you can upload your list, prove that the list is yours. You can take your emails. Even if they didn’t allow you to export them, you can still write them by checking out your own inbox because you probably sent out test emails through yourself. If you did it once, you’ll do it again.

But just the nice thing to do, just allow the person to grab their stuff and walk out. If you kick someone out from the restaurant, don’t you allow them to take their clothes with them.

Terrance Lackey:
Sure. Get your things. Yeah, absolutely. [inaudible 00:19:06] So, absolutely letting you, at least, decommissioned from the platform. Yeah. That’s not the first time I’ve heard that. I’ve heard that from others as well. So, this is autoresponders war volume one, AWeber versus GetResponse. I hear the set resounding recommendation. The winner of the two would be GetResponse, right? That’s what you were?

Igor Kheifets:
Yes, you are correct because in many ways they are very, very similar. As far as automation sequences, tagging systems, exclusions, integration with other systems, API, all that stuff, they’re very, very similar. So, they’re like stepbrothers, if you will. A lot of times, it comes down to your preference between a white or blue interface and the green one, that AWeber gives you versus the blue one and GetResponse.

So, a lot of times you can’t even tell the difference. That is why GetResponse is now… Over the years, I have to give it to GetResponse. They’ve really improved. They were crap as little as five years ago. Now, they’re way, way, way better, way better. So, guys, if you want to check out GetResponse, go to getresponse.com. It’s not even my affiliate link. Get a 30-day free trial. I actually recommend GetResponse now in our 301k challenge, which is a challenge for people who are just getting started in affiliate marketing. So, it’s definitely the go-to autoresponder right now for my customers.

Terrance Lackey:
Well, there you have it. There’s nothing further to be said. That’s going to be autoresponders wars volume one, AWeber versus GetResponse. Recommendation from Igor going towards GetResponse, in this case. Looking forward to autoresponder wars volume two. What are we going to explore on that one, Igor, coming up?

Igor Kheifets:
That one, we’re going to be talking about using self-hosted setup versus a third party, like AWeber or GetResponse. So, the pros and the cons, and what should you do? Shall you have to make the choice.

Terrance Lackey:
That’s going to be coming up in the autoresponder wars volume two. So that’s another one in the can, another episode in the can. Thank you listeners for listening to List Building Lifestyle Show. We’re looking forward to seeing you next time.

Igor Kheifets:
Thank you for listening to the List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, the transcription of today’s show as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, don’t forget to claim your free seat at the workshop I’m hosting this week, where I showed the two-step system that made me the top affiliate for people like Matt Bacak, John Crestani, Richard Legg, Michael Cheney, and many, many others. In fact, on this workshop, I’m going to show you the exact approach I take whenever I promote an affiliate offer, the exact offers I promote as well as how I was able to make over half a million dollars in commissions using my small list of just 18,000 people promoting a weird type of product that almost no one else promotes. All that is yours at Igor.ac. So go ahead, claim your seat right now, and I’ll see you there.