It's true. You can get everything else right in your business, and still fail. And fail big time. I've seen it happen a bunch of times in the past 26 years I've been working from my house here online. You see, you can do everything else right, and someone can still come and decide they are judge, jury, and executioner. And you know what? It's not fair to you. Especially when you do everything right, and some company without a soul just pushes a button and decides, without talking to you, that you have somehow violated international airspace or jaywalked or some other ridiculous "rule" that they seem to make up on the spot. That one thing you could do wrong, without even knowing it? Go with the "wrong" autoresponder/listserver company. The real money is in your List, and you need to protect your list at all cost. There are a bunch of reasons why I've used AWeber for over 20 years now. And there's a really good reason why I personally would never, ever, ever use or recommend MailChimp. You see, Aweber just works and works and works. Is it perfect? For most of us, I would honestly as close as anybody in my 26 years has come to it, anyway. The deliverability rates are great, the entire company from Tom Kulzer himself, all the way out to the frontline staff all "get" what legitimate marketing looks like, and they have defended me on more than one occasion. Listened to my side, agreed I had good practices, and that was end of. No drama, just professionalism. My experience has been, and my firm belief is, that as long as you are legit and not trying to do anything funky/spammy/etc, AWeber is your best bet for a long, happy, productive life of growing your List and keeping it safe at all times. MailChimp, on the other hand??? In my experience, give them a wide, wide, wide berth. For your own safety. I did a test a few years back and I moved one of my lists over from AWeber to MailChimp, just to test it out for my clients. Now keep in mind, this was a 100% legitimate, double optin list that AWeber had NO problems with. A few months into it, I wake up one day and MailChimp had shut me down. NO idea why. NO sort of "hey, is there a problem here?" NO willingness to tell me what the the supposed "problem" was. Nothing other than "Thanks, but we don't want your business any longer". That was IT. Now, not for anything, but I think I know what you can and can't say and do here online. My List is my gold, so to speak. You don't get 26 years of sitting in this chair by being a total knucklehead. So... What I did, like any sane person would do, was happily go back to Aweber and promise myself to never, ever leave again. Even for the sake of testing something out. MailChimp could care less about you, in my personal experience. Is AWeber going to keep 100% of its customers happy 100% of the time? I think that's a bit unrealistic for any company, and quite frankly near-impossible. But they do in my opinion strive for that goal, and this in a market that can be more than a bit thankless at times. So... Mongo like AWeber. AWeber good. Mailchimp bad. MailChimp, you guys blew it. Screwed up big time. BTW, I tend to focus on positivity, and give people/companies who give terrible customer service a bit of grace. If anything, I've bit my tongue a bit while writing this. Give AWeber a test drive and see what I mean. Thanks for being one of my subscribers, and please reach out via email or phone if I can do anything to help your online efforts grow even faster. To your success, Frank
