e_Marketing

From the Linknet Power Marketing Forum - Email System Alternatives

AWeber.com is one of the most widely used and most reliable autoresponder services.

An autoresponder service looks at Email marketing from a particular point of view which, if you are not familiar with online marketing, may seem a bit confusing.

First of all, an autoresponder service assumes you will be gathering inquiries and subscriptions from your website (or some other online source) and you need some way of automatically responding to these inquiries.

The job of the autoresponder is to "respond" to these inquiries with a pre-programmed message. In fact you can create a series of messages which will be sent out in intervals of days or weeks after the initial inquiry.

Many online marketers use a newsletter sign up form on their websites. When an interested person fills in the form, giving you their Email address, the autoresponder automatically sends out a "thanks for registering" message to the registered Email address.

You can also program your autoresponder to send out a series of different messages to your sign ups. When someone signs up they will receive Message #1 on day 1, Message #2 on day 2, Message #3 on day 3, etc. Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 etc. do not have to be successive days. They can be every 3 days or every 10 days or every 31 days, or whatever.

This works beautifully when you are sending out something like an Email "course" or series of "hot tips" where the sequence of the messages is not dependent on specific dates.

But it does not work nearly as well when you want to send out time-sensitive material such as date-sensitive product specials, or newsletters which contain date-specific material (such as news of an event.)

In that case you must create what AWeber calls a "Broadcast" which is a one time message sent out to your entire list.

This works just fine, but you get the impression that "broadcasts" are of secondary importance. This can be a bit disconcerting if your primary objective is to send newsletters or "broadcasts" to your already established list.

Importing lists

Like all legitimate Email marketing service providers, AWeber is concerned about customers misusing their system to send spam. So they make it fairly difficult to import names and addresses into the program from previously compiled lists.

The program insists that each imported name be verified immediately after importing. This is done by sending a message - a message which the AWeber staff must approve - to each imported subscriber asking for their permission to send messages. If your subscribers don't verify by giving their permission to receive messages they are taken off the list of subscribers.

AWeber's primary subscriber base is internet marketers - the type who are constantly introducing new "products" and promoting them to their lists. So constraining the ability to import lists makes sense.

But this approach seems a bit cumbersome when dealing with corporate accounts who want to work with customer and contact lists assembled over long periods of time along with the inevitable database and computer system realignments that take place in corporate environments.

What may be required is a less direct method of verifying imported names - a method that does not go right out and ask people to be included in the list. This less direct method is what might be referred to as "scrubbing" a list - a task which can be performed by other techniques which still adequately guard against spam complaints.

Incidentally, AWeber.com does not offer a free trial period. They offer a guided tour which explains the system in detail by way of a series of (you guessed it) pre-programmed Email messages.

For overviews of other Email marketing services and systems, visit the Linknet Power Marketing Forum.