Using AWeber - Email Marketing For Your Online Business

Justin Premick is Director of Education Marketing for AWeber Communications. He recently took a few minutes for a Q&A with Bryan Haines.

Bryan: What does AWeber do?

Justin: AWeber provides web-based email marketing software that helps businesses create profitable relationships with their customers and prospects. We've been in business since 1998, and as of January 2011 we serve over 90,000 businesses around the world.

Bryan: How difficult is it to setup an email campaign? How much technical ability is required?

Justin: We make it easy to get your first email marketing campaign off the ground. For starters, you'll find a Setup Wizard in your account that walks you through the key steps to creating a new campaign – things like writing a welcome email to be automatically delivered to new subscribers and creating an opt-in form so you can build your email list online. How-to videos accompany the steps in the Setup Wizard, making it a breeze to get going.

You can also get help getting started through ourfree webinars, extensive Knowledge Base (for example, see this “how to get started” video and article), helpful email marketing blog, and of course by contacting us directly. We provide customer support by phone, email and live chat from our Philadelphia-area offices.

Bryan: How do you help online businesses build their email lists?

Justin: Businesses can use our point-and-click Web Form Generator to build and style opt-in forms that visitors can fill out in order to join their email list. With hundreds of web form templates to choose from, it's easy to get a great-looking form for your website.

Many of our customers blog, and need a way to build their email lists from their blogs. The official AWeber WordPress plugin adds the opt-in form of your choice to your WordPress blog's sidebar.

And while most businesses build their lists directly on their websites, some also like to build them via social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. One thing I really like about our Web Form Generator is that it gives you the option to link directly to your signup forms from your social media profiles or status updates. That way, you can advertise your email list to your fans and followers.

Bryan: Why should a business use your service instead of allowing email updates via RSS feeds?

Justin: RSS is a fantastic technology that can help someone follow your blog and get notified whenever you post something new. It's a technology that I use every day.

However, even though it's been around for years, RSS isn't something most people understand and use – in fact, a 2010 Hubspot study showed that the average blog has 12 times as many email subscribers as RSS ones. So if you rely on RSS exclusively to reach customers and prospects, you're going to miss out on a lot of your potential audience.

The other powerful thing about using AWeber with your blog is that you can contact your subscribers independently of any posts that go up on your blog. You can send an email to:

• Welcome new readers
• Showcase your “greatest hits” - excellent but older posts that aren't on your blog's front page anymore
• Tell readers about new things coming up on your blog
• Or even ask for their feedback on your posts, products or ideas

Bryan: What is an opt-in list? What is the benefit / difference of opt-in verses a purchased list?

Justin: The people who are going to be most responsive to your company's offers are the people who have sought you out and asked you to send them more information – in other words, the ones who have given you permission to market to them. Building a list of these people is a key component of effective email marketing. It's also a deliberate process that sometimes takes longer than you might like.

It's tempting to try to take a shortcut or speed up the process by simply buying a list of email addresses. These go by a lot of different names (like “verified lists” or “opt-in lists” or “targeted lists”) that are designed to make it seem like a good idea to pick one up.

The reality, however, is that buying a list is a huge mistake and headache that you don't need to deal with. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the easiest way to think about it is this: do you like getting marketing emails out of the blue from businesses that you haven't permitted to email you? Neither does anyone else. (It's also worth noting that many of the addresses on these lists are typically fake, outdated or otherwise unusable.)

Building your own email list of customers and prospects who want to hear from you and do business with you, even if it's only a few of them at first, will get your business a lot further than trying to cut corners and buy an email list.

Bryan: Everyone hates spam. How big of a problem is spam for your company?

Justin: Nobody hates spam more than a responsible email marketing service likeAWeber, because it's the first thing that the non-marketer thinks of when they think about email marketing. So we work hard to make sure that the only emails being sent through our system are going to people who have come to our customers directly and asked to be on their email lists.

There's a lot of technology that goes into this, but we also train our people to identify potential problems before they happen and to educate well-intentioned but misinformed businesses about how to market themselves responsibly and ethically via email.

As a result, over the past 12 years AWeber has developed a reputation for sending exclusively legitimate, permission-based email. This helps us to continue to attract business and to get our customers' emails delivered.

Bryan: How do you prevent email campaigns from being considered “junk” or “spam”?

Justin: A number of things influence whether an email marketing campaign is treated as spam, but the #1 factor is reputation.

At AWeber, we've developed a reputation over 12+ years of sending exclusively legitimate, permission-based email. This helps us maximize our customers' email deliverability, or the likelihood that their campaigns will reach subscribers' inboxes as intended.

Getting email delivered also depends on the reputation of the individual business behind the campaign. So we educate our customers about email marketing best practices, and check their campaigns to detect issues that could hamper delivery.

The #1 thing you have to keep in mind as a business if you want to keep your emails out of the spam folder? Send relevant, valuable email to people who want to receive it from you – in other words, to your email list of your own customers and prospects.

Bryan: Should a premium (ie. free report, an ebook, video access) be offered as an incentive for subscribing to a newsletter? If so, what type of subscriber increase is typical? What type of premium/incentive works best?

Justin: Incentives can certainly improve your opt-in rate (the percentage of visitors who sign up to your email list). They're a solid way to convince people who are “on the fence” about signing up to your list to go ahead and take the plunge.

However, that doesn't mean they're always necessary or a good idea. An incentive can cause people who don't really want your emails to sign up, just to get the incentive (such “freebie seekers” may then unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam in their email account). Make sure that your offer (what people would be signing up for if you didn't have any incentive) is a powerful reason to subscribe all on its own. Don't prop up a weak offer with an incentive; fix the offer first, add the incentive later.

Before you start adding incentives, make sure you know your current opt-in rate, so you can compare it to the new opt-in rate after you add an incentive. That will give you a picture of how effective your own incentives are, and help you decide whether the increase is enough to justify the cost of providing that incentive to subscribers.

Bryan: What does the term click-through mean? What can be done, to encourage click-throughs in an email campaign?

Justin: Click through rate is a common email marketing statistic that you should be familiar with. It gives you an idea of how good your email is at getting subscribers to your website.

You can calculate it by dividing the number of clicks on your link into the number of emails you delivered to your list (but at AWeber we automatically do the calculation for you and display it in your email campaign statistics).

If you're not happy with your click through rate, the first thing you should do ask yourself why someone receiving your email campaigns would want to click through. What's in it for them to do so? If there's no compelling reason to click, they're not going to do so. You'll also want to look at:

• Whether your emails are relevant and on-topic with why people are signing up to your list in the first place
• Whether it's easy for readers to see and understand exactly what you want them to do with the email. Don't hide the link – make it obvious. Also, get to the point quickly in your emails.

Bryan: Should a company display the number of their subscribers on their signup form? What are the benefits/drawbacks of doing this?

Justin: Showing a potential email subscriber how many other people have also subscribed can make them more likely to sign up, thanks to the concept known as social proof. Basically, people are more likely to do something when we see other people doing the same thing.AWeber customers can display how many subscribers you have on your web form (the number will update as your list grows). This can lead to a nice increase in your opt-in rate; here's an example of how it helped one of our customers build his email list 32.4% faster.

I don't recommend display your subscriber count when you first start building your list, because showing someone that 2 other people are on your email list isn't going to make them want to sign up. In fact, it may have the opposite effect. But for the typical small business, once you have over 100 or so subscribers, I think it's a good idea to show that fact off.

The main potential drawback to showing your subscriber count is that people may think that you'll treat them like numbers (and not people), and then not sign up to your list. However, in my experience the risk and incidence of that is low, so I do recommend displaying your subscriber count.

Justin Premick is Director of Education Marketing for AWeber Communications. He recently took a few minutes for a Q&A with Bryan Haines.