As a followup to my post last week on why I use Aweber to deliver my newsletters – a little bird just told me that Aweber will be announcing a scriber count chicklet in the coming days.
This new feature is to go live on Tuesday and is is similar to Feedburner’s subscriber counter in that it’ll display to prospective subscribers to your newsletter how many others have already subscribed.
It’s all about social proof.
Aweber publishers will be able to choose colors and can add chicklets to current signup forms.
This is very cool. I don’t really use Aweber as I don’t have enough traffic at the moment to justify the expense, but this could prove to be a decent addition to the service.
I’m in the process of building up a blog at http://www.mytowntalks.com where it may make sense to starting using some type of email subscription service to stay in touch with readers. The blog is still pretty new, but the traffi has been on steady rise for the past couple of months and I hope I can really build it up over the next year or so.
Hi there yes i agree it is a very useful bit of eye candy for the subsciber, although aweber provides all your stats any way, Its not something a newbie would use if they dont have big list.
But yes has its uses.
Feedburner is better.
I had checked the newsletter example of yours Darren, which was of aweber, and it looked awesome! That shows why you use them for delivering the newsletters.
Good to see them releasing the chicklet for subscribers count.
I don’t really get why they would bother when everyone already uses feedburner which works just fine.
Ok great..nice new feature..Aweber going the feedburner way..
Good news…I have several blog broadcast feeds going at Awber. This is a nice feature.
@LiviuX
Feedburner and Aweber do two very different things
Nice feature. Thanks for sharing
As an aweber user and follower myself, this would have the same advantages and disadvantages of showing this type of information to people, but I’d say that the advantages far outweigh the dissed ones.
That could be another post, what are the benefits of showing subscriber based information to your readers? and what are the downsides?
Just thinking aloud!
This is a good idea and should help build your subscriber list if people can see just how popular it already is.
This is something that I think could be redundant. Many blogs use the Feedburner counter, and it appears as most popular.
Of course, this is not the same, and different things being counted here, but will those bloggers add the Aweber counter? I doubt it. Unless they want to clutter their blog.
Although, I once saw a dedicated page with all the counters, widgets, chicklets, etc, concentrated at one place.
Thanks darren for your info.very useful.
Just wanted to reiterate the fact that Feedburner and Aweber are two completely different services. I wonder though how big your numbers should be before you display a counter like that. If someone sees your numbers and thinks they’re low, they may decide not to sign up for your newsletter.
I still think it’s a cool feature though. It would be interesting to see the subscriber counts of the newsletters I’m currently subscribed to, and it would be an additional way to check out your competition and whether they have an advantage over you or not (providing they’re actually displaying the counter of course).
This is a logical strategic move for Aweber.
Ever since it collaborated with Feedburner on reporting newsletter subscribers and adding them on top of the count being displayed on Feedburner’s chicklet, there has been good buzz. However, while the numbers went up because of Aweber’s new feature, it was Feedburner’s brand that remained on the front.
The new chicklet will get people noticing a new name underneath the big numbers, and that name won’t be Feedburner. It’s going to be Aweber.
Alex, yes you’re right. It is redundant but when you look at it from Aweber’s perspective, it’s a pretty smart move. Why display your Aweber subscriber numbers only on a Feedburner chicklet when you can allow another option that enables you to do so using an Aweber chicklet instead?
Aweber’s new chicklets will help Aweber’s name, brand and services get noticed by more people.
Darren,
Thanks for the tip.
It’s about time that Aweber did this – talk about being late to the (branding) party!
Now hoping they’ll work on one of my other complaints: lack of a multi-noozle signup form. Because their background is autoresponders they don’t offer an easy to use signup form where you can accept signups for multiple lists. Feedblitz and Constant Contact have been doing this for years.
Fingers crossed…
No doubt I will be testing this feature. Much like testimonials its a powerful subliminal suggestion and adds credibility.
What a timely information. I will try to set up a blog