Friday, March 18, 2011

Blogger Buzz: What’s New With Blogger

Blogger Buzz: What’s New With Blogger

Be sure to check out the new changes coming to Blogger, if you also use the blogspot platform.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Advantages of Automailer Newsletters

I Heart AWeber.com



AWeber Email Marketing
I signed up for the AWeber E-Mail Marketing Software to start an email newsletter for my main site.  AWeber is the host of an amazing email autoresponding service that you can use to improve your website.  You can do all sorts of great things with AWeber's software and automailing capabilities.

What is an autoresponder?

An email autoresponder is a program that sends emails for you.  You create the emails and Aweber sends them out for you based on all the specifications that you tailor to best feed your customers.  When used in combination with a Sign-Up Form, these 2 features alone are a great asset to your website or business.  Aweber lets you create a Sign-Up Form for your newsletter from tons of pre-built templates.  You can use the software to create a weekly or monthly newsletter.  If you are a blogger, you can set your Blog posts to automatically be mailed to the inboxes of your subscribers.

Here are a few of the things you can do with AWeber to help grow your site or business.
  1. Create e-mail newsletters.
  2. Create e-mailed coupons.
  3. Create other scheduled mailings.
  4. Create multi-day auto-mailed courses or guides.
  5. Auto-post your site's blog feed to Twitter and Facebook.
So that sounds fine and all, but how will that help my site?

Primarily you can use the software to increase traffic to your site and increase your sales conversions.  Increasing traffic will make you more advertising dollars and affiliate sales.

By utilizing the sign-up forms and email auto-responders effectively you can:
  1. Capture new visitors who may bounce and never come back.
  2. Increase traffic to your site.
  3. Increase sales of your products or affiliate products.
  4. Build your brand awareness.
  5. Drive readers back to older posts.
  6. Increase your PPC advertising income.
Although readers can simply sign up for your RSS feeds to receive your posts, a very large part of your audience doesn't understand RSS or feed readers.  They do however understand how an e-mail newsletter works.  Think of how many visitors come to your site one time, read what they were after and then leave.  With a sign-up form, you can get them to join and receive your mailings daily.  You then include links back to your site within the daily mailings and you are converting those previously bouncing readers into long term readers.  Add in a Google Adsense ad and you are now reaching each newsletter member with a potential revenue source daily.  Now imagine a mailing about your special product or an affiliate product that you promote.  Starting to see the power of this?

Scheduled Auto-Responses

Here is one of the Aweber tools that I love, timed auto-responses.  You pre-craft each e-mail item and set an interval for when you want it to be mailed out.  You can also select what times of day that you would like your mailings to be delivered so that helps to increase the chances of your mailings being opened.

Example of what you can do with the mail scheduling.

Day 1:  Thanks - After someone signs up a Thank You letter is sent.  In this letter you can talk about yourself, your site, or your businessUse this letter to ask the readers to add your return address to their safe list.  Provide them some links to areas of your site and explain the features there.
Daily:  Blog Posts - Have those daily posts appear in their inbox.  This is very useful for readers who can't access your site from work, but do have email access.
Days 2-5:  Incentive Course - Offering something free will increase your sign-up rate.  In this example we are sending a 4 part course on a specific topic, with one part delivered each day.
Day 10:  Coupon - 10 Days after intial sign-up, they will receive a coupon for a product or affiliate item.  Convert some readers into customers.
Day 30:  Recap - On day 30 we are sending them a message re-thanking them for being a subscriber.  We also include more links to vital areas or posts on the site to drive them back to the webpage.
Other Ideas:  A Monthly Recap, A Best of The Year Review, Subscriber only contests or content, etc.

Not everyone is going to sign-up on the same day.  So if you are sending a coupon to drive sales on Day 10.  If people are joining your newsletter daily, then you will have daily coupons going out to a handful of readers everyday because every day is somone's 10th day.  Once you get everything set up, you don't have to worry about it as Aweber takes care of the rest.  I hope you are seeing the great benefits that an e-mail marketing program can provide.

I am absolutely loving the potential of the AWeber Email Marketing System.  It is sooooooo powerful and worth every penny.  It's only $1 for the first month and then $19/ month after that. 

Anyone else having a great experience with an auto-responder email system?