I work at Infusionsoft where we all have lots of PASSION towards our product. Yesterday I recevied a disheartening email from someone talking about how AWeber has far superior deliverability and open rates.

I was concerned, we track email deliverability very closely. I work very closely with the Support Reps and with our Email Deliverability expert Ryan Peterson. I’ve worked at an ISP where email deliverability was a problem and you hear about it, fast! We don’t have that problem. Occasionaly someone calls about a problem, but almost without exception the problem is not ours, but rather a slow MTA in someone else’s network, or an incorrect address, or sometimes a spammer whose account was disabled due to spamming. Occasionaly we get a rash of spammers and our value ip’s drop to below 96% deliverability but it’s not frequent.

So why do people believe AWeber has better deliverability? I heard a rumor that it was because if someone opens an email twice, AWeber’s front page open metric counts it as two opens instead of one… I thought “that is unlikely”. If it’s true, then Open Rates and Click rates are not a good comparison because we report them differently. Even though as a programmer, I thought it would be silly for them to report opens and clicks that way I decided to find out for myself. I signed up for a demo account. Prepared a list with three addresses, opted them in, and sent a message. I opened one of them. I closed it, and opened it again. I clicked the link a few times… The click definitely worked, but the open was still correct… Hmm… I thought… What if the tracking image is getting cached, and that’s why it isn’t working? So, I cleared my cache and tried again. VIOLA! I was able to rack up as many opens as I wanted. I now have a broadcast in my AWeber account with 12 Open, and 6 clicks, but that only went to three recipients. What does this mean? If someone opens the message on another computer, or through webmail, or webmail in two different browsers, or forwards the message to another email address. All of these scenarios will without a doubt be reported as multiple opens in AWeber.

I feel much better now, and more confident knowing for myself that our deliverability is still world class.

To satisfy the new FTC guidelines… I did this blog post of my own accord, after hours, at home, and not for any compensation , payment, or bonus (monetary or otherwise).

Edit: After reading Tom’s comment, apparently there is a way to view unique opens. However, since my account was canceled prematurely, I can’t go see how easy it is to find or use.

Today, when I got to work, an email was waiting in my Inbox that took me to a blog post about our Product at work, Infusionsoft.

About 6 months ago, I tried out Infusionsoft for the 1st time. When I got working with it, I was almost sick to my stomach because once I got into the system of rules I realized how much I was truly losing out on all of these ages in marketing online. I look back at some of the systems that I applied before and laugh because I now realize after applying Infusionsoft how primary they actually are and how little he can truly do with them in comparing to Infusionsoft.

For instance, you can have a sales team of 70, automatically broadcast leads, automatically assigned to lead to a follow up sequence dependent on the possessor of the lead, have the lead automatically unsubscribed and added to a new campaign when they execute an action that you have set up, track all of your clicked links, make split e-mails that send via plain text and HTML, and open source API developer keys if needed, and much much more.

—Ben Janke – http://alexanderalaric.com/blog/?p=2320

Thanks for the props Ben!