Hi Everyone,
If any of you have been wondering where I’ve been, or why I haven’t been blogging or sending out my email thoughts-of-the-day, I’ve just run into some annoying online troubles.
Some of you may remember my complaints about my list host (or my mailing list provider). I had mentioned in one mailing that they were threatening to shut me down.
Well, they did.
Yup, all 25,000 people on my list…all gone. Well, not completely gone; I have to move you all over to a new list provider.
And when I send the request for you to all RE-SUBSCRIBE, I’m sure I will be lucky if 50% of you do.
I could bore you with a few details of what my list provider said was the reason they were shutting me down…well, let me give you some:
Three weeks ago they said that 1) 8% of my new subscribers actually bounce my “welcome” message. Which says to me that 8% of people were signing up JUST TO GET THE FREE EBOOK DOWNLOADS and they were entering fake email addresses.
And 2) that 0.03% of people complained to my list host when they got one of my 2 “follow-up” emails. So this means that when people would get (probably) my 2nd automatic follow-up message 2 days later, they would unsubscribe and then complain I was a “sp*mmer”. I guess some people just forget what they did 2 days earlier….
So, I took steps to make it HARDER to sign up for my newsletter, so that cut down on the bonce rate. Next, I completely deactivated my 2nd follow-up message. I checked the stats on that; this one move almost completely eliminated the complaints.
But, the list host still kicked me out; they said I didn’t make enough of an improvement. So I asked some people in a web forum about this whole ordeal. They said this particular list host has been shutting down all kinds of clients lately, and they ARE TARGETING CLIENTS WITH BIG LISTS AND WHO ARE STILL ON THEIR OLDER “LEGACY” PRICING STRUCTURE.
See, I signed up with them in the late 90’s. I was paying about $20/mth. A new client with a list size of 25,000 subscribers should now be paying $150/mth.
Voila the reason why they shut me down. Those dirty liars. They just wanted to get rid of a high-traffic client that was still on their old pricing model. Of course, I’m mad.
This has really slowed me down. I don’t have the time to change up my entire site right now. I’m bad; I don’t have the whole site on a template or css or whatever. I have to go change all my sign-up forms and each page by hand…. 🙁 Anyone know a quick, easy way to import a static site into a template?
My NEW list host only allows me to import 2000 subscribers per day. So this is going to take me 12 or 13 days to send out an invite to all of you!
To speed things up, PLEASE SUBSCRIBE here. I promise to be back to my normal self ASAP.
-Shawn
