Hey all!
I am getting into email marketing and have a list of 13,000 now (I purchased 10K from a similar website in my niche legally, and the rest are from my site). I use Aweber. Whenever a user gets added to my list, a campaign starts where the first 5 emails are informative, giving them tips, links to resources on my site, and no selling.
Even with that, my subscribers are complaining and this has caused Aweber to flag my account. I cannot import any new subscribers in bulk (out of 13,000, I have 3,000 that still need to be imported). They are telling me I need to keep the complaint percentage down to less than 0.01%. That's 1 complaint for 10,000 subscribers. It's ridiculous! It's too easy nowadays in Gmail to just click Complain instead of unsubscribing.
My open rate is around 20-50% (depending on the email), and my click rate is at least 4%-10%. I am collecting 10-20 emails a day from my site via OptinMonster popups, etc. However, if I cannot monetize them properly, it makes no sense for me to continue collecting emails.
I've been thinking of using Sendy on my own server. People will stay on Aweber for the 4-email intro sequence. Then once done, shifted over to Sendy where I can email them offers on a regular basis (i.e., every couple days). Since Sendy is on my own server, I can control things. Does this sound crazy?
Questions for the experts:
Hey!
You could host your own DB and use services like sengrid.com or mailjet.com, who have an API, for sending.