AWeber or Infusionsoft for Email Marketing?

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Why have I been an AWeber customer since 2011? Because they provided the best and most customizable email marketing platform at the best price. In fact, AWeber was voted #1 among 25 leading email marketing service providers (ESP) by PCMag readers.

And they keep getting better! You can now add tags to customers automatically using questions in your sign up form. Really, AWeber is getting closer and closer to what you can do with Infusionsoft, at a price much more comfortable for a small business owner.

I chose AWeber originally for their autoresponder features, which I wrote about in another blog post. They also have tremendous real-person phone customer service, and helpful free resources.

Want to learn more about Growing Your Business With Email Marketing? Download your free AWeber guide and see if AWeber is right for you – or just click the image at the top of this post to start a 30 day free trial.*

By the way, I did try Infusionsoft, and it was a nightmare for me. The learning curve is very high, even with their ‘training’, which took hours of my time. When I had a problem, their customer service gave me incorrect advice, and ended up erasing an entire campaign. Finally, I concluded that in addition to the considerable amount you pay Infusionsoft, you will also need to hire someone familiar with Infusionsoft to manage it for you – adding to the cost. AWeber is a much better choice for me – and for most small business owners unless/until you have a responsive mailing list of at least 3000 that is making you money with each mailing. At that point, a comparison of AWeber or Infusionsoft is merited – although AWeber keeps adding features that make it very competitive.

*Disclosure: I earn an affiliate commission if you purchase through my link. What you pay remains the same – and I am recommending what I use myself.

Filed Under: email marketing, small business marketing, System Development

Sequential Autoresponders: The Easy Way to Follow-Up With Prospects

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Email Marketing is one of the best ways to stay in front of your prospects and clients – exactlyAutoPilot Your Income Word Cloud like I’m doing in a series of emails I created for the Women’s Economic Ventures (WEV) classes I speak to. But it’s important to find ways to put a system like this on auto-pilot, and today I’m going to share 3 tips you can use to do just that.

  1. Use a sequential autoresponder. I’m not writing a new email every day; that’s part of what is on auto-pilot. I created a unique sign-up form for the WEV class, and once you complete that form, one message in this email series is automatically sent to you daily. If you’ve ever set a vacation message in your email program [something like ‘I’m out of the office until —‘], you’ve used an autoresponder. An autoresponder automatically generates a set response to all messages sent to a particular e-mail address. A sequential autoresponder allows you to send a series of messages at intervals you control.
  2. Use material you have already created. There is no shame in re-using good content. Remember – it’s new to your prospect. In my case, I looked for blog posts I had already written, as well as checklists I use with my clients; I even pulled content from a program generally only available to my paid subscribers.  The question I asked was simply “Would this info be useful to a WEV student?”
  3. Create multiple sequential autoresponders to deliver different types of information. Here’s where using sequential autoresponders can really amp up your marketing and keep your prospects engaged. If you ran an exercise studio, for instance, you might create three separate educational sequential autoresponders for back exercises, pregnancy exercises, and strength training. Each of these topics would appeal to a different type of prospect, giving you a much better chance that you will collect more email addresses than if you created one sequential autoresponder on a more general topic. Or you could set up one series of emails to educate new clients, and another series of emails to promote a new product. 

Not all email service providers [ESPs] offer sequential autoresponders. My favorite (& the one I use) is AWeber *, which provides robust sequential autoresponder (AR) features at an economical price, and excellent (real person) telephone and email support. It also allows you to automatically pull your blog posts into your newsletter – no cutting and pasting!  [I discuss automating your newsletters here.] Additional features also make it a great choice if you want to make money directly from email marketing. 30 day trial (with no restrictions) for $1.

Constant Contact * is another popular ESP. It used to limit you to only one active autoresponder, but that has recently changed. For an additional price, you can add ‘Event Spot’, which will allow you to create an event and register attendees/collect payments for your events. No ability to automatically have your blog posts become part of your newsletter, which is a huge drawback, in my opinion. Constant Contact offers a free trial, but you can only test it with 10 email addresses, which is not very useful. Many businesses who start here grow out of it fairly quickly, and then have to spend time & energy moving to a new ESP.

Constant Contact is, however, very easy to use, and may be a good choice if your email marketing needs are unlikely to change for several years, and you only plan on sending out newsletters and/or registering people for events.  This is an area where I can help you cut through hours of indecision and understand which ESP (of the many out there) would be your best choice – and help you brainstorm concrete ideas on how email marketing can make you money.

Call me at 805-616-2466 if you’d like to schedule a phone consultation to determine which ESP would help best grow your business.

*Disclosure: I earn an affiliate commission when you purchase through my links. Your cost is not affected. I appreciate you using them, but if you prefer not to, just use your search engine. I have used these products, and recommend them because I think they are excellent products. 

Filed Under: email marketing, small business marketing, System Development Tagged With:

They Come They See They Leave: How to improve your bounce rate

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In last week’s blog, I promised you a second eye-opening real example that answers the question “How easy is it to do business with you?” – and how to take that information to improve your business. One of the ways you can measure that is your bounce rate. In this case, the bounce rate on your sign-up box.

Why is your bounce rate important?

Trampoline as metaphor for bounce rate
Your bounce rate is a measure of how many people are interested enough to come to your webpage or blog, but then leave because you don’t clearly explain how you can help them. [Okay – some percentage would leave anyway, but your bounce rate is an indicator of how easy you make it for them to understand what you offer]. The example below from the telesummit is a text-book case; people knew they wanted the free gift offered, but then changed their mind.

Here’s how we measured bounce rate:

We installed a free WordPress plug-in called Pretty Link Lite, then used Pretty Link to create a customized free gift link for each of our telesummit presenters. Every time someone clicked to download a free gift, Pretty Link kept track of it. [In most cases, the link took the clicker to a sign-up form on the presenter’s website.] We sent the click statistics to each of our presenters.  Here’s the response we got from a presenter:

If I’m reading this correctly, according to your figures 99 new people opted in for the free gift (99 new names for the data base). I use MailChimp and they send me a separate email every time someone opts in along with their name & email address. I only have 22 of those during the telesummit. What might that mean?

And here’s my response:

99 is the number of unique hits on your free gift link on the telesummit website. That would take them to your sign-up page. If only 22 completed the sign-up on your page, you have about a 75% bounce rate, so you might want to look at the description of your free gift & how clearly it communicates the benefit of what someone would get by giving you their name & email.
Also, not sure if you have a double opt-in with MailChimp, but, if so, some people never click the confirmation email to be added to your list.

The take-away here is to measure your bounce rate. If it’s not as low as it could be, look at the description of your free gift & how clearly it communicates the benefit of what someone would get by giving you their name & email. If you were a stranger seeing it for the first-time, would you give your name and email? Make changes to your copy and offer, and see if you can improve your bounce rate. Remember, your mailing list can be an important money-maker for you, and it’s important to be sure you collect as many email addresses as you can. Of course, this assumes you have a way of collecting emails on your website or blog- I worked with a client last week who was missing this key piece and losing out of a lot of sales.

There are other ways to check the bounce rate of your sign up forms. If you use AWeber, for instance, they keep statistics of the conversion rate of your sign up forms (# displays/#submissions). You can think of your conversion rate as the opposite (inverse for the math majors out there) of your bounce rate, i.e. a higher conversion rate is better.

Remember, measuring your bounce rate is the first step to improving your cash flow – because getting more of the right people on your mailing list means your offers reach more people.

If you found value in this, it would mean a lot to me if you shared it with your LinkedIn contacts!

Filed Under: email marketing, small business marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

How Partnering Can Make You Money

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I just added 900 new names to my email list and made over $1000 (and counting) – and it was only possible because of partnering with a competitor.

There was no sleazy marketing involved; CAN-SPAN rules were followed; everyone freely gave me their email address, and even confirmed their permission by clicking a link in a confirmation email. But none of it would have happened if I had not reached out to partner with someone else.

There are lessons here that can be applied to any business.  First, the specifics:

  • I had a goal to increase my mailing list size to 3000. I have read that 3000 is the ‘magic number’ where your list begins to pay off, i.e. when you make offers, you make (enough) sales.
  • Although I have held teleseminars in the past, my list size and social media reach was not large enough to add more than a few new names to my list at a time.
  • Holding a telesummit with multiple speakers was one way to increase list size. Every speaker would promote to their own list, so collectively we would all reach a larger audience that any of us could alone.
  • Although the initial idea was mine, I am very happy I discussed this with my mastermind partner and we agreed to co-host this event. In retrospect, we both agree that, had been doing this solo, there are many times we would have just given up. What kept us moving forward were the commitments we had made to each other.

Why It Made Sense to Reach Out to Competitors

On the surface, even my mastermind partner and I are ‘competitors’. We each consider ourselves business coaches, and even though we live in different parts of California, we can both coach over the phone or by Skype. The reality, though, is that we have different areas of expertise, and will appeal to different types of clients. Also, we have built a level of trust with each other over the last 2 plus years we have been accountability partners that is exceptional. Reaching out to Rachel was really a ‘no-brainer’.

As for the other 19 speakers in the tele-summit, we chose them based on two criteria: a topic of interest to business owners interested in building their business, and list size. Again, some of those we chose had at least some surface overlap as ‘business coaches’, but their topic and/or area of expertise was different enough that they could provide information to our audience in an alternative way. And, let’s face it, we all have people on our lists that never buy from us, even though we know they spend money with other providers. Sometimes it’s the novelty of hearing the information in a new way, or simply feeling more of a ‘connection’. For Rachel and I, the goal was to build our lists, and that required us to reach out to other people who shared our target market and had active mailing lists. In addition, the large number of people who registered (for free)  meant that our offer to buy the entire package of 21 recorded interviews was accepted by enough people to make us a nice profit.

Lessons You Can Apply to Your Business

  1. Be open to partnering with a competitor; consider the potential ‘win-win’ of the partnership
  2. Will the partnership help you achieve one of your goals faster than you could on your own?
  3. Be strategic – in our case, we only partnered with people with active mailing lists of at least a moderate size.
  4. How much work will you be required to do? Is the potential payoff worth it?
  5. Are the risks minimal?
Filed Under: email marketing, small business marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Automate Your Newsletters

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As a business owner, it pays to stay in touch with your customers or clients. I mean this literally; almost every time I send out my newsletter, it generates business – mostly because it brings me to top of mind. But composing and formatting can be time-consuming. Let’s look at one way to automate the process.

If you have a blog, the easiest way to automate your newsletter is to use blog posts for your newsletter content. Until recently, however, you needed to cut and paste and manually link the content of your blog into your newsletter. Now, however, you can set up a newsletter to automatically pick-up new blog content and mail it to your list on a regular schedule.

How easy it is to do this varies by ESP (Email Service Provider). I recently switched my mailing list to AWeber, because it does allow me to completely automate the process. Here’s how.

Constant Contact has made it easier to insert blog content, but you still need to manually create and schedule each newsletter.

Check with your ESP to see what is possible. Go to their help section, and enter ‘RSS’ in the search box. That should bring up the information you need.

 

 

 

Filed Under: email marketing, System Development, time management