Get Started Today For Only $1! – AWeber Communications

Here are some of the great features from AWeber and how you can benefit from them:

Amazing Core Features

When it comes to email marketing, AWeber delivers all of the basic features you would expect from one of the top providers. They let you choose from a stunning array of newsletter and email templates so you can make professional-looking campaigns without any hassle. This can really help you save time and costs on designing templates for your emails. The AWeber signup forms are also stunning – particularly because they are designed for various business modes. AWeber steps up above the competition because they let you easily design your own forms and even include animations and effects.

When it comes to autoresponders, AWeber is the industry leader for small businesses. They make it really easy to send out sequential emails to new subscribers and to track the progress of them as well.

Targeting Subscribers

In order to run an effective email marketing campaign, you will need to target based on demographics. AWeber makes this easy by segmenting your subscribers into different lists and then you can send emails to them by lists. AWeber also has a lot of split testing features which can be very useful for testing your campaigns on subscribers by demographic.

Easy To Use Tracking and Analytics

These features are what really make one email marketing service stand out from the others. AWeber stands out in this field for a few reasons. First off, they deliver the reports in real time. Secondly, the reports are all very easy to understand and even come in graph forms. This makes it even easier to analyze the progress of your email marketing campaign.

24/7 Top Quality Client Support

AWeber has won a few awards for their customer service features. This probably has something to do with the fact that they offer unlimited live support every day. AWeber also has a great knowledgebase, live webinars, and video help too. Beginners should have no problem using AWeber and making the most of their email marketing services.

The reason why Aweber is right for you!

• No contract required
• Money back guarantee
• First month is just $1
• Can import lists from other service providers
• No setup fees
• International friendly
• Good price for features offered
• Best features available
• Great customer service
• User support and knowledgebase
• Great for beginners

First off, let’s clarify that getting subscribers to your email list doesn’t have to be difficult if you go about it the right way. All you basically have to do is let potential subscribers know about your mailing list and give them a reason to join. Then, just make sure that nothing else goes wrong in the process of opting in.

Letting Potential Subscribers Know About Your Mailing List
There are numerous places where you can put opt-in forms for your mailing list: your Facebook page, your homepage, when a customer makes a purchase, etc. Surprisingly, most beginner marketers only include an opt-in form on the home page of their website and omit it everywhere else. If you want subscribers, you have to repeatedly give them the chance to sign up meaning that your opt-in form should be all over the place.

Give Them a Reason to Join
Most of us already get enough email every day that we don’t necessarily want anymore – unless you give them a good reason. Depending on what your business is, there are many reasons why someone would want to sign up. Maybe you give subscribers special discounts, valuable information, updates, daily jokes, or chances to win prizes. It doesn’t matter what you give: if your potential subscribers aren’t aware of it, they aren’t likely to join up. Make sure that you clearly and obviously state what subscribers can expect in your emails if they join.

Promise Privacy
Make sure that your potential subscribers know that you keep their emails private and will not share them with anyone else. If a potential subscriber suspects that you are going to do something shady with their emails, they aren’t going to sign up.

Make it Very, Very Easy
As you probably have realized, people have very short attention spans when it comes to the internet. If you give them some complicated opt-in form which requires them to put in their language, area of residence, favorite foods, etc, they probably aren’t going to bother filling out the form. Only make the information which is absolutely necessary required for opting in. You can ask for other information but be clear that it is optional. A good way to increase the amount of information that people are willing to give is by explaining why you need it – like that they will only get the emails most relevant to their interests.

Once you have subscribers for your email marketing campaign, it is important that you keep them. Make sure that you only send emails which contain what you promised and are always of the best quality

Use Large Fonts
Make sure that all of the most important information in your email campaign is in bigger fonts – at least 14 point. If you go for fonts that are too small, no one will be able to read your email in mobile format.

Make Sure You Know Scale
Some mobile operating systems will automatically fit your email to the scale of the mobile monitor but not all do this. Make sure that your email fits the scale of mobile phones so subscribers don’t have to do a lot of scrolling to read your email. The best email marketing services like AWeber have templates that are mobile friendly.

Calls to Action Must be Obvious
In regular emails, it is okay to be a bit discreet about your calls to action. With mobile emails though, you need to make sure that the call to action is at the center of attention. Some mobile operating systems don’t even recognize links so it will be your job to show the reader that the links are clickable. Go big with them and don’t be shy about putting it in the center of the email.

Get to the Point
Almost all emails for marketing should be KISS: Keep It Short and Simple. This is even more true with mobile emails because they are typically being read on the go. No one has time to read your ramblings before they get to the point of what you want them to do.

Use High-Contrast Colors
It may look great on your PC to have an email green text against a baby blue background – but does it still look great on a mobile phone? Most mobile phone users keep their brightness to a minimum in order to prolong battery life. When you factor in the tiny screen, low-contrast colors can become very difficult to read.

Keep Things Nicely Spaced
If you have a lot of links in your email campaign, it is important that they are kept separate from each other. Mobile screens are small and a reader could easily click on the wrong link by accident and get annoyed. Also, try to avoid any sort of clutter in your email as this can look terrible on the tiny mobile screen.

Test Before You Send
It is really important that you look at your email in PC and mobile format before you send it out. This way, you can fix any problems before your campaign is launched and get the best results from PC and mobile subscribers.

The first thing you need to realize is that content is king – even with videos. Simply adding a video to your email campaign isn’t going to help unless the video is of some value. There are a lot of creative ways to incorporate video marketing into any niche, regardless of what you sell or offer. For example, if you have a cutting edge new gadget, then make a video of how it works. If you have fun video for kids that you want parents to download, then give a sneak preview of the best parts. If you are lobbying for the environment, show a video of how smog destroys your air sacks.

Most people are more likely to watch a full video than they are likely to read a full text. Thus, making a video is a great way to get your full message across to email marketing subscribers. Plus, you can tell more with video than you can with words alone. However, you need to keep in mind that most subscribers are not going to watch an hour long video. Most won’t even watch a 5 minute long video! Always keep your videos nice and short and to the point. Never try to add fluff to the videos just to make them seem more impressive. A simple yet streamlined video is always better than a bunch of nonsense hype. If you have a long video that is worth watching to the end, give subscribers a link where they can watch the full video.

Even if you spend weeks making a stunning video for your email marketing campaign, you still need to put effort into the actual email. Foremost, spam filters will likely mark your email as spam if you don’t have any text. Further, not everyone is going to watch your video so you will need to appeal to them in words also. Don’t forget all of the requirements under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 also – like your address and the unsubscribe button.

Not everyone wants to watch a video so it is nice to tell your subscribers in advance that they could be getting video newsletters or emails. Give them an option when they opt in as to whether they want video emails or text/image emails. Just make sure that you also include an option at the bottom of each email campaign which allows them to change their mind.

How to analyze email marketing reports varies depending on which service provider you are using. While you could in theory analyze an email marketing campaign without any extra help, it is well worth the investment to pay an email marketing service provider. In addition to giving you analytic tools, the top providers give you other tools like autoresponders, cool opt-in forms, and automation features. Regardless of which provider you choose from email marketing services, make sure that they have great analytics which include:
• Tracking opens
• Tracking clickthroughs
• Tracking downloads
• How much revenue was earned per message sent
• How many people unsubscribed

We personally like AWeber’s email marketing metrics best because they come in easy-to-read graph forms and also some other user-friendly layouts. But, even with the most beautiful layouts, it can be difficult to understand what all this information means and how to apply it to your future email marketing campaigns.

The first thing you need to be looking at is your opens. There are two main things that the number of opens will tell you. First, whether your email campaigns are getting sent to spam folders. If you have very low opens, this could be the case and you need to change the format of your emails so they don’t appear as spam to filters. Secondly, the amount of opens tells you how effective your subject line is.

Clickthroughs are really important because they are indicators of how many people are actually reading your emails. It is very important to look at exactly what links are being clicked and where they are located in the email. If only the links at the start of your emails are being clicked, then it could be a sign that your emails are too long or boring.

Not enough people pay attention to the amount of revenue earned per email marketing campaign, particularly because they view email marketing as a very cheap form of internet marketing. Still, it is important to have an idea of how much revenue your emails are getting you and to focus on ways of increasing that with each successive campaign. If your revenue jumps up or down, analyze what was different about those specific campaigns.

One of the most important factors for email marketing is analyzing how many people unsubscribe. It is normal that you are going to get a good percentage of opt outs with each campaign. However, you have a problem if you are having more opt outs than opt ins. There are two main reasons why someone opts out: too many emails or boring/useless emails. Make sure that you adjust your email marketing campaign according to these metrics.

Even if you aren’t spamming, there is a good chance that your email marketing campaign finds its way into a lot of spam folders. In fact, about 15% of all email marketing campaigns wind up in spam folders – even when the recipient opted into the email list. The reason for this isn’t because the recipient doesn’t want to get your mail (they could be eagerly awaiting your email). Rather, the email provider’s spam filters automatically check emails to weed out spam.

Whenever you receive an email, your provider is using a spider to crawl through the content and determine whether the email is spam. There are many parameters which these crawlers use and they differ depending on the email provider. However, these are some of the most common features which would identify your email as spam:
• Use of all capital letters (particularly in the subject line)
• The term money occurs frequently
• Use of particular phrases which have been identified with spam, such as “click here” or “don’t wait” or “breakthrough discovery”
• Using reds or greens for the fonts
• HTML emails, particularly if they are coded badly or just an image
• Putting the word “test” in the subject

If you have some of these features in your email, don’t worry. The spam filter will assign your email points for each of the spammy features it has. A few spammy features are not going to get your email campaign put in the spam folder but a lot of spammy features will definitely get you there.

Always make sure that you pay attention to your metrics when running an email marketing campaign. If a lot of your emails are not getting opened, it is likely because they are in the spam folder. Once emails are marked as spam, you may get blacklisted in future emails, regardless of how un-spammy they are. The best thing to do is make sure you are designing great email campaigns from the get-go to avoid the spam filters completely.

1. Figure Out Your Demographics
Who is going to be receiving your email campaigns? Are they potential customers, current customers, donators, peers, leaders of the industry? Before you can figure out any of the other aspects of your email marketing campaign plan, you must know who you are mailing to. Keep in mind that you don’t have to have just one demographic. For example, you can make several different email marketing campaigns which get send out to different demographics – like men receiving one set of special discounts for your fashion store and women receiving another.

To get a better idea of your demographic, make sure you are asking yourself: “Why do they want to hear from me?” and “What valuable information can I give them?”

2. Figure Out Your Goals
Obviously, the main goal of email marketing is to get leads. However, this isn’t enough to run an effective email marketing campaign. You should consider factors like
-How big do you want your email marketing list to be?
-What sort of results do you expect from your campaign?
-How will you measure the success of your campaign?
-How will you expand your email marketing campaign?

3. Decide How Frequently You Will Email
This is one of the trickiest aspects of email marketing. In general, businesses agree that monthly emails are too infrequent whereas weekly emails are not frequent enough. However, there is a lot of discrepancy between businesses and each will have to figure out what works best for it.

Unfortunately, it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out how many emails you can send before annoying your subscribers into opting out. You may lose a lot of subscribers before you figure out the best email frequency but don’t be afraid to experiment. Divide your subscribers into groups and send each group emails on a different frequency. Use analytic tools to measure campaign results.

4. Make Deadlines
A major mistake that a lot of people new to email marketing make is forgetting to make a deadline. Then, they suddenly realize an email marketing campaign is due to be launched and rush to put it together. The result is sloppy, unprofessional campaigns which don’t get any or much results. Instead, make sure you set clear deadlines for when you will have content created for your campaign and send it out.

5. Launch Campaign and Analyze Results
Once you launch your email marketing campaign, the work is not over. You must analyze your results to see how effective your efforts are. This can be very easy with analytic tools offered by the top email marketing service providers. It takes a bit of experimentation before you get the best results so experiment with frequency, content, headlines, and other aspects to make sure you are meeting your goals.

Not Getting Permission
It is incredibly important that are of your email marketing recipients opted in. If you are just sending out random emails or collecting email addresses in some shady way, you could be violating anti spam laws. Even if you are abiding by the law, you are going to create a bad name for your company. As any seasoned email marketer knows, spam campaigns do not get any results.

Transaction Emails are Not Opt Ins
If you are selling something online, then your customers will expect emails about their transaction. But this does NOT mean that they opted into your email marketing campaign! Make sure that you ask the customers during their transaction if they’d like to receive emails with special deals or promotions. Sending the emails without permission – no matter how valuable you think the emails are – is spamming and gives your business a bad reputation.

Not Putting Time into Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is free so you can send out anything without risk, right? Wrong! One of the biggest email marketing mistakes that newbies make is rushing to get their emails out and not taking time to make a stellar email with great graphics and content. If you don’t do this, then your email will be quickly put in a junk file and subscribers will opt out. There are a lot of email marketing services, like AWeber, which can provide you with snazzy templates and make it easy and fast to send fantastic emails.

Not Reminding Subscribers of Who You Are
A very easy mistake to make is forgetting to remind your subscribers who you are. In the very beginning of your email, you should always have an intro which says who you are and why someone would want to hear from you. Never forget that your subscribers are probably getting mass amounts of emails every week and, even if they bought from you or made a donation or whatever, they may have forgotten who you are.

Purchasing Email Prospect Lists
Lots of different companies sell email lists for marketing. Buying one of these is a terrible idea and a waste of money. Even if the lists are opt-in, they are not opt-in for your business. If you send an email, then it automatically becomes spam. The only way that a legitimate email list service works is by promising to send your emails to subscribers for you. That way, they recipients will get the email from the same service for which they opted in.

First off, let’s be very clear: there is no magic number of emails which suddenly becomes “too much.” Some email marketing campaigns send out multiple emails every day and still keep their subscribers from opting out. In order to figure out how many emails you should send out, you will need to do random sample tests by sending out different amounts of emails to various groups and seeing which number gets you the best results without causing subscribers to opt out. This sort of sampling is really difficult for small businesses though because you need at least a couple thousand subscribers to your email marketing list before you can see results. There are some great analytic tools which can help you out though – even if you only have a 100 subscribers. Service providers like AWeber have some cool tools to help you determine which email marketing frequency is working best for you.

In the absence of one set model which works best for everyone, here are some tips for determining email marketing frequency.

Pretend that it isn’t free
Since email marketing is basically free, it is easy to get overzealous and send out way too many emails. Instead, pretend that you have to pay for you email marketing campaign like it was being sent by post. A decent post mailing campaign will cost at least 30 cents per recipient. So, you would obviously expect more than a 30 cent per person return on your investment. While the same parameters for mail and email marketing don’t apply exactly, it can help put your email marketing frequency in perspective when you think about it as a non-free marketing tactic.

Send Emails Before Your Leads Will Act Again
In most cases, your leads are only going to perform what you ask of them a set amount of times yearly – regardless of how often you market to them. For example, if you are running a clothing store online, your customers are probably not going to buy again every week. Instead, you should analyze when they are likely to make purchases and send out your email marketing campaign before they act – like sending out special discount coupons before the new season and before holidays.

Even with email marketing, content is still king. If you don’t have fresh, new, exciting content for your email marketing campaign, then don’t bother sending out a new email to your subscribers. If they get boring, irrelevant emails (even if infrequently), they are going to opt out very quickly.

Here are some easy ways to incorporate your email marketing with social media.

Make Sure Your Facebook Profile Has a Signup Form
Facebook is the most powerful social media tool right now. There are over 700 million members from all over the world and they are constantly sharing tidbits to all of their friends who are also on Facebook. One of the easiest ways to build up an opt in mailing list is to put a signup form on your Facebook page. The best email marketing providers even have tools to make this easier. Check out AWeber and their cool Facebook email marketing tools.

Post Your Emails on Social Media
It is never a good idea to keep the info in your email restricted to just your emails. You should put your emails from the marketing campaign all over the web – like archiving them and putting them on your social media page. This is a good way to get followers and more opt ins as people read what you have to offer.

But what if your emails have “special” deals which are exclusive only to the people who signed up? You can still find ways to share your email marketing campaign without destroying the exclusive factor. For example, you can put up a post saying that subscribers to the email list got special discounts on a certain product. If others want that discount, then they can sign up too.

Remind Email Subscribes that You Use Social Media
Just because you’ve got an email subscriber, that doesn’t mean the person shouldn’t also be following you on social media. In your emails, put a “Follow Us” link to your most interesting, relevant sites on social media.

Make Content Out of Social Media
The great thing about email marketing and social media is that it lets you communicate directly with your leads. When you combine these methods of email marketing together, you also get a chance for your leads to communicate with each other. Start discussions on social media and then turn them into content for your blogs. For example, if you are selling fashionable clothes, start a discussion about the hottest new trends and then put this info in your emails. Don’t forget to put the “Follow Us” link in the emails so anyone interested can join in the conversation!