The best thing I ever did to increase my residual income was switch autoresponders from 1ShoppingCart to Aweber. Harrison Fellman did an “expose” video in, I believe, January ‘07 about how 1ShoppingCart sucks, but many of us are stuck with it. His video was part of a promo for another product - I don’t remember what - but it spoke the truth.
I like 1ShoppingCart for it’s order processing abilities. Although it fails to pick up Paypal orders at times, overall, it’s the best solution out there. And when I first started using it, I was happy to use their autoresponder as well - that way my customers wouldn’t have to fill out a separate, Aweber, subscribe box after purchase - since they’d already be in the 1ShoppingCart database.
It *seemed* like a seamless way to both take orders and remain in touch with customers after purchase.
Unfortunately, their deliverability plummeted right before Fellman’s video (which is probably what prompted it). They’ve attempted to recover by adding new IP’s and URL’s from with their mail is sent, but it’s not getting past the SPAM filters.
Once I switched everyone I could over to Aweber, response to mailing increased. My Aweber list is about 17% the size of my old 1ShoppingCart list, but they make me more money.
I ran a test over the weekend to see exactly what happened to my mail from Aweber & 1ShoppingCart.
Of 20 messages sent to mail account on Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Spam Assassin on the “default” level (which is 10) and my local ISP, here are the results:
Gmail: 13 in SPAM folder
Hotmail: All ok
Yahoo: All 20 in SPAM folder
AOL: All ok
Spam Assassin: 18 marked “SPAM”
Local ISP: All ok
TOTAL DELIVERABILITY: 42.5% Failure
That’s nearly half your list!
With Aweber, 20 messages were sent to my test accounts on the same services, with the following results:
Gmail: All ok
Hotmail: All ok
Yahoo: All ok
AOL: All ok
Spam Assassin: All ok
Local ISP: All ok
TOTAL DELIVERABILITY: 100% Success
Messages were the same, only difference was 1ShoppingCart v. Aweber having sent them.
If you’re going to bother collecting email addresses, use Aweber. There’s no sense in having them and mailing them if they never get it - and, unfortunately, with 1ShoppingCart it looks like they’re not.
