How To Painlessly Import Your Feedburner Subscribers To Aweber

If you’re looking for a way to send out your own customized emails to YOUR subscribers, you need to have an auto-responder set up.  Building your list early is important, but even more important is having control and ownership of your list.   Yesterday we went over the benefits of using Aweber over Feedburner to maximize your list of email subscribers.

Aweber and Feedburner actually work quite well together.  You will see a boost in your Feedburner subscribers as they sign up with your Aweber list, and Aweber uses your Feedburner RSS feed to send out a blog broadcast. So they compliment each other nicely.

If you haven’t already created your Aweber account, head on over there & do that real quick….go ahead, I’ll wait.  

Follow these quick steps  and you’ll be done in a jiffy:

1.  Log in to your Feedburner account and click on your feed name.

2.  From the “Analyze” tab you will see Feed Stats on the left sidebar, and down just a little ways you’ll see “Export Excel * CSV“.

3.  Click on CSV to download your subscriber list. A CSV file (comma separated value)  is just one way digital data is stored.  Save to your hard drive in place you will remember.  I stored mine in a new folder called “Subscribers”.

4.  Open your saved file (I opened mine in an Excel spreadsheet format) and keep that handy.  You’ll see all your subscriber’s email addresses listed along with their status.  If they signed up on your blog, but never confirmed their subscription by responding to the email sent by Feedburner, you will see “pending verification”.

Below you’ll see both the Feedburner page and what the spreadsheet looks like:

5.  Log in to your Aweber account and hover over the “Subscribers” tab at the top of the page.  In the drop down menu you will want to click on “Import”.

6.  Scroll down a bit and you will see the box titled Subscribers.  Copy & paste all the email addresses from your spreadsheet you just saved into this box..  You don’t want to paste anything else in there besides the addresses.

7.  Scroll down a bit more and you’ll see the “Delimiter” box.  Just leave that as is with TAB filled in.

8.  The next box is where you tell Aweber how the list of subscribers you are importing originally signed up to your list.  It’s important to let Aweber know the details, so you’ll type in:

“These are my subscribers that signed up on my blog www.YOURBLOGNAME.com via FeedBurner.  All went through double opt-in process and I wish to import my subscribers to Aweber.”

9.  Click “Yes” to automation rules &then “Next“.

Keep in mind that Aweber manually reviews any imports to make sure they follow the same strict no-spam standards of double opt-in.  It will take a day or two before you see the new subscribers show up in your Aweber account.  You will want to come back and check the status by going to this same Import page and scroll all the way to the bottom for any messages.  The first time I tried to import I was told that I didn’t give enough info, so be sure to give them the details.

The only sucky part of importing the list is that Aweber will send confirmation emails to all your subscribers requesting they opt-in again.  This is why it’s better to do this early on instead of waiting until you have a huge list.  I am still waiting on a few people to re-confirm, but it is coming along.  Had I thought about it beforehand, I think the best thing to do is post a blog letting everyone know you are switching and to keep an eye out for the Aweber confirmation email.  Hind sight is 20/20.  Learn from my goofs. 

If you subscribed to Market Like A Chick a while back, please check your email for that confirmation once again.  

That’s it, guys.   I put this off for so long thinking it was going to be difficult, but it really is a very simple process and you will be happy to have the ability to control how you communicate with your subscribers.  Aweber has a free trial, but even after  the trial it’s a measly $19 per month and worth every penny!

If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.  I love reading & responding to them, and you may be helping someone else with your question or feedback. I’d love to hear some success stories!

To Your Success,

Tagged as:  Email Marketing · Marketing · Monetize Your Blog