aMail: aMember Plugin For AWeber

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aMail is an aMember plugin I wrote that syncs up your members with your AWeber lists.

aMail: aMember Plugin for AWeber

• It automatically subscribes your aMember customers to the AWeber list that you specify when they purchase your products and subscriptions through aMember.
• It automatically removes them from those same lists when their subscriptions run out or if their subscription is cancelled by the customer or the admin of your site.
• It optionally allows your customers the ability to remove themselves from your AWeber lists from their member page.
• It gives you control over which pieces of customer information from aMember gets imported into custom fields in AWeber to further personalize your emails.

We all know that email deliverability is crucial for the success of a business. “The money is in the list!” Even though aMember has some pretty terrific email and list capabilities built right in, most people who own that software and install it on their server know better than to make heavy use of those features.

Keeping your server from being blacklisted for SPAMMING is a full-time job that is better left up to somebody else and we all know that the somebody else who is best is AWeber. We like the fact that they spend their time making sure our emails can get delivered to our customers even if they can be a pain about the rules sometimes.

The Story Behind The Plugin

When I first started using aMember myself I immediately wanted it to integrate with AWeber. So did many of my clients. It was puzzling to me that there was a spot on the aMember site for an AWeber plugin but it said,

“Unfortunately we have found a few problems in existing AWeber integration, so downloads are suspended. Once the problems are resolved, new version of integration plugin will be released.”

But it has said that for years. The scuttlebutt was that AWeber didn’t like the plugin and so aMember took it down.

I spoke with AWeber and they said they didn’t have any problems with their plugin. So I spoke with aMember and asked really nice and they gave me a copy of the plugin. I began to learn how it worked and to install it on a my client’s sites and I could see that it had a few problems as far as I was concerned.

First of all it didn’t get the main job done very well.

That job is to do what every aMember owner wants which is to automatically enroll their customer into the proper AWeber list when they make a purchase. Of course the customer has to complete the double opt-in process as well…always will.

With the plugin from aMember, once the customer completed their purchase, they had to perform one more step and submit the AWeber signup form. Sure, that form was automatically generated by the plugin and appeared on the thank you page with all of the fields already filled out so all the customer had to do was click on the submit button, but most customers would ignore it and your list would remain empty.

That was the biggest complaint I heard from my customers about the old plugin.

Sure, there are ways to automatically submit the form with Java script but does that actually stay within the spirit of what AWeber wants you to do in regard to letting your customers know they are being added to a list?

No.

Not only that but then you lose control of your thank you page for customer receipts or up sell code and one-time-offers that can be based on the purchase they just made from your site. That is too high of a price to pay.

I had other complaints besides that too.

My first problem was that the plugin was supposed to let you specify a different list for every product…but it really didn’t.

There were some bugs in the code that prevented that from really working properly which was no big deal for me to fix but it was a little frustrating to discover that at first. But what if you had the option turned on for multiple products per order in aMember and you wanted the customer to get put on a different list for each eligible product? This is especially important if the information you are sending out in your AWeber list IS the product! It didn’t work. You could only have the customer subscribed to one list per order and the automation rules at AWeber, while terrific, would not always be able to necessarily get you out of this jam.

The second thing that really confused and angered the customers which in turn causes problems for site owners was the aMember newsletter subscriptions checkbox on the member page.

When your customer checks a box on your site that says, “Unsubscribe from all e-mail messages.” then they do NOT want to get another email from AWeber. That just makes them angry and they’ll report it as SPAM in a minute. They don’t want to hear you try to explain to them about how that checkbox only controls emails from the aMember program, blah, blah, blah.

So a lot of my customers have asked me to remove that section from the member page. I always thought it would be better if it was integrated and could control AWeber.

Another thing that was impossible but would have been nice is if you, the site owner and admin, could unsubscribe someone from one spot.

Customers don’t read the bottom of their AWeber emails and follow the instructions to remove themselves from your lists when they want off. They reply to the email or they come to your site and say, “Please take me off of your list.” So you have to go into aMember and check the unsubscribe box in their profile and then you have to go to AWeber and look them up there and stop their subscription. Sometimes they have multiple subscriptions so you have to sit there and go through all of your lists. You have to do that because if they want off you have to honor their requests because you are a good Internet citizen, right?

Those were my biggest complaints so I decided to do something about it and write an aMember plugin I would be happy with and proud to sell to others with the same problems and desire for total integration between aMember and AWeber. I wanted to be sure it would meet AWeber’s high standards for deliverability and that it would be something they would be happy with and approve.

I sat down and wrote the first version before I spoke with AWeber. I still feel it was the best way (and I won’t tell you how it worked) but when I discussed it with them they shot it down and said they didn’t want subscriptions coming to them like that. They pointed me to their email parsers and explained how it worked for PayPal and Authorize.net and other shopping cart systems like that. I took their criticism and advice and completely rewrote a second version to their specifications. Now I had something that would subscribe a customer to whatever list you specified when they purchased from your aMember program.

The next thing I did was apply how AWeber allows you to unsubscribe customers from lists via “remove” emails. I tapped into aMember newsletter controls and solved the integration problems with unsubscribing as successfully as I solved the ones for subscribing.

For good measure I fashioned thank you page templates that improve the chances of your customer actually performing the double opt-in process that AWeber requires so that you have a much higher number of customers receiving your emails. One set of these thank you pages work within the aMember purchase process and the other set can be integrated with AWeber’s normal web form and subscription confirmation process so you can get the same results for opt-in pages you might still have for free lists on your web site.

But does AWeber allow this?

There were some who were skeptical that AWeber would ever approve of an aMember plugin that utilized the email parser because of the issue with having an audit trail of the customer’s IP. But they allow it from PayPal, so why not aMember I thought? Besides they are the ones who told me to use their email parser.

Since I honor the “unsubscribed” flag that the customer decides to set or unset during the signup process, and since I send the admin payment confirmation email through the AWeber email parser just like their other pre-defined parsers and since I include the subscriber’s IP address as a custom field in AWeber for proof, plus as a bonus since I allow the customer to unsubscribe them self when they want to — I was sure my plugin would be allowed for anyone if they follow all of my setup instructions.

I went to AWeber one more time and asked for complete assurance that this would be alright with them. I did not want them to come back later and say that they had a problem. I showed them the customers who were subscribed to my AWeber lists through the aMail plugin on my servers and their email parser and this is what they emailed to me:

As long as these people understand that they are being added to your mailing list, it is okay to set up a parser for them. We do understand that subscribers sent to us through a parser will be from the same IP address – that is not a problem.

Go for it!

Regards,
Nick Moore
Customer Solutions Specialist
AWeber Communications, Inc.
http://www.aweber.com

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Let Us Show You How… Live!
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AWeber will let you play as long as you follow their rules.

>> If you would like to start using AWeber to build and manage your email lists then get an account today.

>> If you would like to start using aMember to sell and protect your products then purchase it today.

>> If you would like to have the aMail plugin integrate the two of them then you can purchase it here.

The video I include in this post shows how it works and how to install the aMail plugin into aMember and integrate it with AWeber.

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