tomkulzer

Tom Kulzer is the CEO and Founder of AWeber, a company he started in 1998 to guide small businesses in fostering more engaging customer relationships and designing effective email marketing. Tom grew the company from zero to 300,000 clients through his unique take on market strategy and team building. Due to his dedication to building a thriving and unique workplace culture, AWeber has been voted one of Pennsylvania's Best Places to Work 10 years in a row.

In this episode…

Bootstrapping can be a formidable method of financing a startup. There are many unknowns and hurdles to overcome, especially when it’s your first venture. For SaaS companies, getting your name out there and establishing a demand for your offering is also necessary.

Tom Kulzer started AWeber 25 years ago and turned a startup into a reliable software company. His email marketing strategies are already respected, but now he explains how he grew his business from the ground up.

In this episode of Ecommerce Wizards Podcast, Guillaume Le Tual invites Tom Kulzer, the Founder and CEO of AWeber, back onto the show to talk about how he nurtured his startup. They touch on the early days, how Tom cultivated his initial audience, and how he established customers. The two also discuss the potential pitfalls of a budding business and finding people to grow with the company.

Permission-based email marketing is a well-known marketing tool, but how to differentiate it from other marketing tools? In this Expert Insight interview hosted by John Golden, Tom Kulzer talks about how email marketing can help grow your business.

It’s been an interesting few weeks and in today’s show, we chat with Tom Kulzer, who is the founder and Chief Executive Officer at AWeber, a powerfully-simple email marketing and automation platform for small businesses, where he is actively involved in the company’s strategic direction, growth and evolution. Over the company’s 20-year history, Tom has nurtured AWeber from a small start-up to a robust organization that has enabled over one million customers all over the world to grow their businesses.

You’ll hear us chat about how AWeber was founded and got its name as well as how the recent turn of events has affected email marketing. We also talk about a really cool way to turn your email into an interactive web page. More importantly, Tom discusses the all-important best practices of what to do and what to avoid when sending emails to your list and the determining factors that can potentially flag your messages where they may be seen less or even be flagged as phishing emails. When you’re done listening, check out some more email strategies from Travis Ketchum and Wilco de Kreij.

“I think it’s really important when you think about the folks that you’re communicating with as actual people and not ‘your list’.” - Tom Kulzer

Some Topics We Discussed Include:

• How AWeber got its name and will the real Mr. Weber please stand up
• The Whack-A-Mole game at AWeber which makes it a better platform for us all
• How the coronavirus graph has mirrored email marketing
• Entrepreneurial mistake #1 (are you doing this as well?)
• What to do and say in your very first email to your subscriber 
• Why AWeber actually thinks your list should not be as big as you think
• What the heck is SPF & DKIM and how it relates to your deliverability
• The best ways to nurture your email list in order for your emails to actually get read
• A way to send out only one newsletter to both paid and unpaid subscribers, where the paid subscribers are not shown ads
• And much, much more!

Contact Tom Kulzer:

• AWeber.com
• On Twitter @TKulzer
• On Twitter @AWeber

References and Links Mentioned:

• Zoom
• Amp For Email
• Setting up SPF & DKIM on your domain
• Remote by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
• Are you ready to be EPIC with us?! Then grab our EGP Letter here!
• This episode is sponsored by our go-to SEO research tool, Ahrefs.com
• How To Get More Of Your Marketing Emails In The Inbox - Travis Ketchum
• How To Engineer Viral Email List Growth - Wilco de Kreij