Review: AWeber Just Got Better

After logging in to AWeber yesterday, I was greeted with a new, cool-blue interface. At first glance, it looked like a normal face lift. After 1 full day of heavy use, I noticed a few things that stood out besides the nicer looking design so I thought I would share.

No More SHIFT-clicking
The first thing that stood out for me was that in the previous version, I would continuously have to use SHIFT-click when looking at user details. SHIFT-clicking opens up a new Internet Explorer browser window for those of you who may not know. Opening up a new window was the only way to view signup details of each individual contact since in the previous version, using the back button to go back to your list resulted in some kind of browser session error. Not sure what it was and nor do I really care because AWeber has fixed that issue! In this new roll out, when you click on a contact to view user details, looks like JavaScript has been implemented to auto pop a temporary window. Normally, when you check user details, you are doing it from within a page containing a portion of your list. Click, popup, check details, close and repeat. In between every check, the list of users would always be in your main browser. What a good way to handle this part of the system. AWeber has automated what I used to do manually when checking individual user details. What’s so critical in user details that I would need to constantly SHIFT-click you ask? Depends on how your list is setup. By default, you can see country, city, longitude, latitude and more. By implementing a few pieces of code on your own sign up page, you can push custom data (such as age group, gender, ad tracking etc..) into the database. But enough of that, this post is about new & useful features of AWeber.

Easier to Use
The second thing that I like about this new interface is usability. It is much more intuitive & seems quicker as well in term of load times when going from one list to another. Since I did have to create a new list today, it just seemed a lot easier to go back and forth between lists than before. I can’t put my finger on an exact answer but usability & possibly a better layout seem to make it easier and more intuitive to navigate around in the system. In short, if you see Green in the new design, it’s all good. Red means you should pause and re-read what you just read because you are about to make significant modifications in your account.

Faster Load Times
Thirdly, the global search function seems to be quicker as well. This function allows you search for an email address that may be in all of your lists. Normally, this would take a bit of time as the system needs to go through each list before spitting out the results. Well, the new interface would still need to do search all lists but it does seem like it is much quicker for results to show. Perhaps database & connection codes got an efficiency upgrade as well. Nice! Having said that, showing today or yesterday’s signups still took as long as before the upgrade. I guess this will vary with the number of signups and amount of detail within each signup. I am hopeful load times for this portion of the system will also decrease in future releases.

Are There Any Glitches?
Only 2 minor glitches that I have run into so far.

First Glitch
When the maximum number of Results per Page was selected, the total number of contacts would disappear on the page. For example, if the list was showing “Results: 1-20 of 46” and you choose to display 50 Results per Page, this whole line – “Results: 1-20 of 46” – would disappear making it a little difficult to know the exact number of contacts on the page. The only way to know for sure is to remember the total number before choosing to display the maximum number Results per Page. After speaking with tech support, I am not even sure if this can be considered a true glitch or simply a way developers had intended for this to work but if there is no way to go back and display a non-maximum listing per page, I believe this could be improved upon. It really was not a big deal but as someone who depends on AWeber for email management and the stats that come along with the system, thought I would at least do my part to help make this system even better for future releases – so I reported it.

Second Glitch
A second minor glitch is that the Excel / CSV export function results in a blank page with no actual file to download. Reported that as well and I am sure it will be fixed soon.

Feedback from an Internet Marketer’s Perspective
That reminds me, I need to send in feedback on developing some sort of automated filtering function for use to segregate a blast. For instance, wouldn’t it be great if one could signup normal & paid traffic to one list and tag them differently? In fact, I do that already but AWeber does not have a an easy way to differentiate open & click rates between paid & non-paid contacts. One metric that I have been wanting to know is the value of a paid contact versus one that comes from organic traffic. Now that would be a fantastic add-on! There is no official resolution for this as of yet (at least as per tech support) but having said that, I was however able to manually put together something to make this work within AWeber. It invovles pre-AWeber tagging and manual filtering before an email blast. For those who are interested in details, leave a comment as it will encourage a future post on the specifics.

Summary
I have not had the chance to personally speak with Tom Kulzer, CEO of AWeber, since we first met on an affiliate marketing forum way back when. In fact, I don’t even think that forum still exist. But since meeting Tom (I am guessing around 6 years ago), I have been using AWeber as part of my email management system. AWeber is truly a great email management company who is still getting better with time. You should check them out if you are in need of an email list management system or if you run a newsletter, follow-up or autoresponder list.