Tag Archives ⇒ Aweber

List Building – Post OptIn/White List

· Brandon Hann

Post opt in is a process in which you have an existing email list and you import it into your email marketing campaign. In other words, these visitors did not visit your site and sign up the “usual” way. This is a common practice among webmasters who have changed websites or opened a new one and would like to begin marketing to his/her existing visitors.

White listing, in relation to email lists, is a business practice when a business has obtained email addresses of interested users from all over the Internet–usually thousands of varying websites with numerous topics. They collect all of these emails and separate them into applicable categories and lists and then sell them to other websites to use in their marketing plans.

Post opt in

Some people are skeptical of performing such a task because it’s very likely that you’re going to end up putting people on your mailing list that may not want to be there. Companies like Aweber allow the importing of email lists, but its main purpose is to provide people a means of adding large amounts of email addresses with relative ease when moving service providers.

However, it is possible to take a duplicated list that you may own and import it into another one. This is where things become questionable. For example, if you run two websites with one about cars and the other about motorcycles, you may want to integrate your two mailing lists so you can promote both of your websites at the same time. The problem is that you don’t know for sure that the visitors interested in your car content will also be interested in your motorcycle content and vice versa.

White lists

There’s a lot of debate about email whitelists. On a personal level, you may have created your own whitelist which is basically a listing of all your good emails after pruning out dead accounts or known spammers. From a business standpoint, you may be considering purchasing a white list.

Marketing firms that have harvested thousands of emails based on various topics are in the business of selling these lists to business and website owners like yourself so you can import them into your email marketing campaigns. The debate about the practice comes from the question of how these firms put these email lists together.

Some companies can be spammers themselves who have done nothing but run automated bot searches of the Internet looking for usable email addresses. Others may have legitimately obtained the email addresses, but did not disclose the fact that the addresses may have be sold to another company somewhere down the line.

With that said, you want to be careful whenever you think about adding email addresses to your email list ‘after the fact’ because you never know how those people will receive you and the worst thing that can come of this is getting marked as a spammer.

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List Building – Delivery Rates

· Brandon Hann

Here’s a little underestimated topic–the deliverability of your email campaign. It’s a wonder that some people pay little attention or no attention to this at all. Maybe it’s one of those “out of sight, out of mind” things, but it really shouldn’t be. Imagine if you sent out a message or newsletter to 100 email address and it only reached 75% of them? You now have 25 people not getting your message.

So what keeps 25 valid email addresses from receiving your message? SPAM filters are the number one reason. Another would be IP address blacklisting. It could even be whether you’re sending attachments with your email. Of course, if you have a list with some invalid email addresses, that’s a whole other issue! Let’s breakdown some of these email issues:

Invalid email addresses

List pruning is an important task and should be done periodically to ensure that you’re not sending emails to people who don’t want it, making sure that you’re not using excessive system resources and also to keep an updated count of your active list.

Better yet, let the users prune themselves! If you’re users signed up one month, but lost interest the next, they would be happy to know that you don’t have them jumping through hoops to try and get their email address off your list. This is one less thing to worry about if you’re using an email provider such as Aweber because they follow anti-spam laws to a “T”, therefore all of your messages will provide instructions on how users can unsubscribe.

SPAM filters

A lot of people have spam filters, but some may not even know they’re there and some might not have control over what comes in. The point here is not to force your users to try and find out ways to sneak your emails past the guards, but to ensure your emails are designed properly so they can get to the inbox without trouble. Have you ever been to a website that tells you how to subscribe to their newsletter and then somewhere on the same page, they tell you that before you can get anything, you need to make sure such-and-such email address in on your whitelist?

How often do you continue with that subscription and do you even remember to add the right email address? Don’t put this type of stuff in your user’s hands. They want access to your information and they want it fast and easy. The moment you let this fact out of your head is the moment you lose readers.

IP address blacklisting

If you’re not using an email service provider, you’re likely sending emails from your own system(s). Be careful as some ISPs and webhosts don’t allow the sending of mass emails over their networks. This can cause your IP address to be banned on certain ports or worse, you can be placed on worldwide spam lists. To check your IP address, you can visit some (or all) of these blacklists:

More information on how to remove an IP from these lists can be found on each page.

Attachments

Don’t send people attachments if you can help it! Even if they’ve purchased or requested something downloadable, don’t attach it. Make it accessible to download from your server and then link to it in your email. Attachments don’t always make it on the other site. Some users have automatic attachment removals, some send all emails with attachments to the trash and sometimes attachments can get corrupted.

So, unless you’re communicating with someone one-on-one, try not to attach any files.

Frequency

One sure way to increase delivery rates is to let your readers know when to expect your email(s). This way they can look for it and if it did happen to end up in the spam folder, they can make adjustments on their own to ensure that won’t happen again.

Also, by telling a user when they should expect your mailings, they can get a better idea of the “value” in signing up for your mailing list.

Following the tips above will guarantee that your messages are delivered on-time and to the right people.

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List Building – ESP

· Brandon Hann

ESP stands for Email Service Provider and it can mean the difference between a successful email manager with proper, spam-free email marketing campaigns and the “stuff” you send. It’s hard to comprehend paying for an external email service when you clearly have email access as part of your webhosting service.

However, the difference is that ESPs allow you to create and manage that email much better. As an example, if your website offers visitors the ability to sign up to a newsletter, you might have these emails being stored in a simple database and then extracted to Outlook. You probably then create a newsletter or some other content and blast off an email to all your contacts.

The problem with this is that these days there are tons and tons of spam being sent all over the world, so the element of trust is important. What this means is that you have less of a chance of your messages actually getting to your visitors when sending email from your own Internet connection.

Benefits

  • Ability to create templates for sending to contacts and/or the use of pre-made templates
  • A subscriber list, which is uploaded by the user for distributing messages. This may be enhanced with custom fields in order to hold additional information for each subscriber for filtering and targeted messaging purposes
  • A send engine, which allows users to distribute their message to the subscribers
  • Updating of the subscriber list to suppress those requesting to be unsubscribed
  • Statistical reviews of each email sent to measure the success rate of the campaigns
  • Testing of templates for compatibility with email applications
  • Spam testing to gauge the score of the email against known factors that will place the template at risk of being blocked
  • The ability to send both html and plain text formats to improve delivery success rates (known as Multi-Part MIME)

To get you on the right track, I’ll recommend the provider that I use. They’re called Aweber and their pricing is cheaper than some of the other services I’ve found out there, like MailChimp.

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Site Creation – Memberships

· Brandon Hann

You’ve seen them before–store memberships, clubs and mailing lists. It seems like you can’t go anywhere these days without being offered to sign up for this or sign up for that. As much as this might be irritating to you, don’t take it personally. These businesses are not out to steal your information or upset you in any way. They’re practicing a great business technique that really works!

Offer member incentives


When you run a business, especially one online, you have a unique opportunity to increase customer retention when you offer your them the ability to become members of your website or blog. They not only feel like they belong, but you are able to offer them the latest news, product updates, special discounts and everything in-between. As an example, on my site, you can sign up to the newsletter that I offer. This allows me to communicate just about anything I think you’d be interested in later on down the road.

The reason this is so important is that you may not come back to my site for a long time because you’re not a regular reader, but if you get updates through email, you’re not going to miss anything. Plus, I can offer you the latest tools right when I find out about them.

If you run an ecommerce site, you really want people to become members of your store because you’re inventory is most likely always changing, so it’s even more important for you to get those updates out. This will increase sales and make the customer feel more important. Offer people discounts, free stuff, special “members-only” items, etc. and you’ll win a customer for life!

Managing members

Every site structure is different, so managing your members can be everything from easy to difficult. What you don’t want to do is mis-manage them. This is especially true of email subscribers. You never want to given the impression that you send spam email. You also don’t want to have a huge list of members only to sit on it and not do anything for them.

Staying connected means sending out information, promotions and updates regularly. You’ll need to cater specific needs to your members based completely on the industry that your business is focused in. For example, if you’re in the clothing business, you’ll want to make sure that your updates and promotions are geared around style trends and seasons. You can offer great deals on summer clothing in the winter and vice versa.

Notes

I use a company called Aweber to manage all of my newsletters and mailing lists. Not only do they manage all of your members, but you can create any type of marketing materials you want! You can also setup automatic messaging to send out emails whenever you choose.

Do not waste any more time on this topic! You need to start turning your customers and web traffic into members of your business today!

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