Comments on: Zookoda Move to Manually Approve Broadcasts

By: Mike | Blog

Mike | Blog — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 00:58:34 +0000

That’s going to be tough – weird decision!

By: Donald

Donald — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:32:26 +0000

Certainly, they have to be paying attention to this blog and all of our responses. Maybe they will take heed and seriously rework the system.

By: Dennis Ray Nestor Jr.

Dennis Ray Nestor Jr. — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:34:50 +0000

They Must have been dinged by the RBL’s

By: Lane Lester

Lane Lester — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:26:23 +0000

For those who can afford to pay, there’s no doubt that Aweber is great. Losers like me have to find cheaper approaches. For regular newsletters, as opposed to autoresponder emails, I’ve had a good early experience with self-hosted NmnNewsletter. If you’re comfortable with FTP, get the download: http://freshmeat.net/redir/nmnnewsletter/68008/url_zip/NmnNewsletter1.0.7.zip
There’s a good PDF manual that comes with it.

By: Maya Norton

Maya Norton — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:51:18 +0000

Hmm, it doesn’t sound like they thought through their options that well. Especially if they are keeping strict US business hours. Bad call all around.

By: Rich Miller

Rich Miller — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:40:22 +0000

I built my mailing list using Zookoda, but switched to AWeber in September. I’m pretty impressed with AWeber thus far, and their delivery rates seem much better than Zookoda.

I’m now using Feedblitz for my daily blog update emails and AWeber for a weekly newsletter with “beyond the blog” content, and I’m pleased with both services.

By: SpicePuppy

SpicePuppy — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:27:11 +0000

Zookoda is a great opportunity for spammers because it’s a free service, while AWeber users are generally very careful not to risk losing their account. Still, manually approving every message can’t possibly be a good idea.

By: mbhunter

mbhunter — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 04:57:39 +0000

I started having problems with Zookoda at the same time you did. I moved to another service. The service was reliable for a while but it was slightly clunky to figure out what to do to get things moving.

By: Sonia Simone

Sonia Simone — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 04:27:41 +0000

Aweber gets such consistent high marks for deliverability, which is the primary name of the game IMO. I’ll deal with a clunky interface if it means my mail gets through.

I also realized shortly after I set up my list on Emma that I really need an autoresponder function, which Emma doesn’t have. And I notice that in a lot of replies to my email, my header’s been amended with [SPAM] which is just [ANNOYING]. I think that Aweber is more aggressive & successful about cultivating relationships with ISPs and ESPs.

By: Welcome to Paradise

Welcome to Paradise — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 03:30:44 +0000

I don’t get it, people are switching automatic and they (at Zookoda) are taking the reverse gear. It them who will be loosing not others. Maybe they get this and reverse their decision.

Anyway good luck to them.

By: Carl Pruitt

Carl Pruitt — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 03:12:06 +0000

Unfortunately, such nitpicking is the way that aweber has kept their high deliverability rates. It does make the process a hassle if you didn’t start there to begin with!
- Carl Pruitt

By: walter wimberly

walter wimberly — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:51:54 +0000

The approval process would have to kill through-put I’d think. You would think that a program could check bounces/un-subscribes to detect spammy messages, and then flag a manual review to determine if the account should continue/drop.

I’ve seen this done with websites, why not e-mail processors.

By: Dan and Jennifer | Ask Dan and Jennifer

Dan and Jennifer | Ask Dan and Jennifer — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:26:47 +0000

Hey Darren,

Hmmm… good luck with Aweber. We were with them for well over a year and always very happy… they’re the best “autoresponder” email follow-up service we’ve tried. And they certainly have great delivery results.

But since our main focus these days is email syndicating our blog content for AskDanAndJennifer.com, we ended up moving to FeedBlitz not long ago. THe Aweber blog syndication tool isn’t nearly as seamless. We had to manually edit every single post, and it was kind of a pain.

Depending on your list size FeedBlitz costs just as much if not more than Aweber (new pricing structure at FeedBlitz recently).

But FeedBlitz has the cleanest and most versatile blog-to-email function we’ve seen yet. It just works. We don’t have to spend time daily or weekly preparing these emails… their RSS syndicator just pulls down the latest entries, formats them nicely, and preps the email. Then it can auto-send it or I can send it on command – that’s been our preference lately since we can now even reorder the sequence of blog posts in the email, and the first one becomes the title of the message. :-)

Oh, and unlike some of the other blog-to-email services (like Feedburner’s) you can also send out custom “broadcast” emails whenever you choose.

We’ve been with FeedBlitz for about 4 months now and are quite happy with them. No way to know for sure what their delivery rate is, but we’re seeing an average of 30% open rate on our messages. Considering the custom nature of the subject lines (each message will appeal to a different subgroup of our audience), that’s not bad. Could be better, but not bad.

Have an awesome day!
Dan & Jennifer

By: Liz Strauss

Liz Strauss — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:13:11 +0000

Hi Darren,
I’m sorry to hear this too. They’re a great bunch of people, but they just can’t seem to get their “game” right.

By: Darshana

Darshana — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:10:24 +0000

I think you are taking the wise decision, if its being giving you this much trouble. I am not much aware what are the best services to fill in but I have seen lot of people use Aweber so it must be pretty good, because I keep getting my newsletters.

Going back to manual checking is a step back to stone age, you only help the objectives of the spammer, its much better to use new technology which won’t disrupt your service to true clients.

By: Brad V.

Brad V. — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:06:38 +0000

Wow! So now Zookoda will be even more inefficient – I didn’t think that was possible. I dropped them a while back because lots of my subscribers weren’t getting their newsletters (I only sent it out once a month). I also didn’t like the user interface to plan, prepare and eventually send out an email.

Like the Complete Geek above me said, who has that much time on their hands? I hope Zookoda employees like busy work!!!

By: Complete Geek

Complete Geek — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:56:16 +0000

Sounds like the the people at Zookoda like endless busy work. Who has that much time on their hands. Aweber looks pretty interesting. I’ll have to research more on them.

By: Ben Cook

Ben Cook — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:39:02 +0000

I’ve been very happy with Aweber. I love the feature that allows you to integrate your blog and make a broadcast automatically every X number of posts. Very useful.

By: David at free Christian resources

David at free Christian resources — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:10:33 +0000

Yes, I used to use Zoodoka. It had such potential. As with you though about half of the emails bounced, and every couple of weeks it would just stop sending the emails.

I am now with feedblitz and I have to say they are superb – I can just sit back and let it do all the work without having to worry!

By: Kelvin Kao

Kelvin Kao — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:05:20 +0000

Hm, this could create a lot of delay. On the other hand, I actually appreciate video sites like Revver and Metacafe that actually manually filter their contents…