This Message is Being Brought to You by AWeber…Literally

Most of what I'm going to share with you in this post, will benefit those of you who are using AWeber as your email service provider. AWeber Workshop Thumbnail2

But if you haven't started building an email list yet or even if you're using another email service provider, keep your eyes peeled because there's something in this post for you too.

I'm not going to tell you how important it is for you to build an email list because I'm sure you have heard that a gillion times before, I'm also not going to give you a full blown tutorial on using email marketing or even AWeber.

But what I am going to share with you are basic principles you can (and should) use in your blog posts, in your YouTube videos and podcasts, in social media updates and more.

Calls to Action

This brings me to explain why I'm even talking about AWeber in the post in the first place. I attended one of their local Meetups back in November and one of the important topics on the agenda was:

Creating clear calls-to-action within your emails

Notice how I added bold text to emphasize the word “clear” let me be more specific with the following example:

Here's a very effective “Call to Action” I include with an annotation in some of my YouTube videos

Subscribe on YouTube

Your call to action tends to stand out and using buttons sends a clear message about the action you want people to take. Of course I already knew about using Call to Action buttons before I went to the AWeber meetup but I didn't really understand how much impact they have on conversions until I conducted an email split test.

Sending an email Split Test

The best way for me reinforce the importance of using Call To Action buttons is to show the results from a split test I sent to my email subscribers. I sent the same message to half of the people on the list which included a DOWNLOAD button and the other half got the same message without the button. Here are the results:

AWeber Split Test Results

Essentially the same number of people opened the email in both cases, however 21 people clicked the link and 31 people clicked the button. That is a 47.6% increase. I LOVE USING THAT BUTTON! (you'll see the button in action later).

You can bet I'll be using buttons in all of my emails, videos, blog posts, you name it, from now on. What about you?

[shadowbox]Get detailed information about increasing conversions and split testing from LeadPages[/shadowbox]

Creating an Email Template

After 2 years of using AWeber I never felt comfortable enough to explore creating an email template. My bad. I should have started using templates a long time ago. Templates are a huge time savers and in fact that is exactly what I used to set up the split test I mentioned above.

Create an Email template in AWeber

Watch this video and you can see how to create an email template in the AWeber interface, set up a split test and more.

AWeber 201 Live Workshop Recap: 3 Tips for Email Marketing Success

You can read the full transcript of this video below, OR you can (I warned you earlier this button was coming):

download video transcript

Hey guys this is Ileane from Basic Blog Tips!

One day this past week I attended a Live Workshop at AWeber and I promised to come back and share some of the things that I learned at that live workshop.

So here are three things that I learned at the AWeber Live workshop.I love Aweber

Okay so first thing we want to do is find out who has been opening or not opening our emails. There are several ways you can do this but one that I found a little challenging was for the follow-up emails.

Now for the follow up emails, what you wanna do, come over to manage subscribers on your subscribers tab you know there's this pull down menu you can look up a lot of things on here.
But what we're gonna do is look at message not opened. Then you click in this box here and it gives you these options.

You can either look at each one of you broadcasts or you can look at your follow ups. So you can go through here and see particularly that very first follow-up message you may wanna make sure that everybody who didn't open their follow-up message gets it a second time. So you would go in here click that on. Now I'm very sensitive about people's privacy so if I click on it's going to bring up a list a people's emails. So I'm not gonna click it but when you click that on, you would create and new segment – uh you can name it you know ” People that didn't open the first follow-up” and then send them that follow-up again. Make sure they got your freebie or whatever it was you were offering in that first email.

Moving on to our second tip and that has to do with creating a split test. Now in order to split test a message you want to create the same message but you wanna vary something. Like perhaps you're going to put a “Buy Now” button on one of them. But you're just going to use a “Buy Now” link on the other. Perhaps you're going to have a different headline. So that's what split testing is and AWeber will randomly split out your list.

If you're going to have two messages it'll just randomly send half of them the one message and half of them the other.
But I always wondered how do I create a split test and I thought it was gonna be confusing it's not – as long as you have 100 subscribers on your list. You're over here in the broadcast where it says create a broadcast but before you do that, scroll down to the bottom and you gonna say Split Test Broadcast now you're able to do up to four split tests but since we're new at doing this we're only gonna do two. We're gonna do half and half okay.

If you wanted to do four different versions of the same email you would just do 25, 25, 25, 25 or whatever percentages as long as it equals a hundred percent. And then that's when you go and you create your split test. And you go ahead and edit each message separately.

Now this last step I'm going to show you how to create a template. And since we're not designers or anything like that I think the easiest way to create a template is from an existing message. So what you wanna do is go to your broadcasts and see which ones did well. Okay you can look at percentage of opens or number of opens. So let's just go scroll down and see which one of our messages had the highest opens. Here's one right here.

Okay we're gonna look at that message we don't really wanna copy this message. What we wanna do is take the layout of that message and create a template.

So let's click Copy > Click Templates > and if you wanna keep the message content you leave that checked but in our example we're not going to leave it checked. We're going to give this template and name and we'll just call it “Google Strikes” and > Save it as a template.

That's it! That's how you create a template in AWeber.

So there you have it that's just three in the things that I learned at the AWeber 201 Live Workshop. Jay Moore, he's known as the voice of AWeber, he's a fabulous teacher. So if you're ever in the area and you get a chance to attend one of their Meetups make sure you go. AWeber is the way to go for bloggers who want to build their email list and gain a loyal following. So I'll talk to you soon. Once again it's Ileane from Basic Blog Tips.

If you learned anything from this video today please give it a thumbs up, leave a comment so we can discuss it over on Google+ I'll talk to you soon.

Peace.

Sponsors and Credits:

  • YouTube Custom Thumbnail created with Tubeslicer
  • Social Calls To Action courtesy of Appendipity Themes
  • Start Building Your List with AWeber Today!

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15 thoughts on “This Message is Being Brought to You by AWeber…Literally”

  1. Hello Ileane,

    Wonderful post, well my bad i haven’t used aweber or any other email building service I’m still stuck using a free google service called feedburner. Although now I’m planning to go for aweber.

    Thanks for the tips.!

    1. Hi Jijin,

      AWeber will let you import your list of email subscribers from FeedBurner into their service. Then you can use the Blog Broadcast feature to send out the emails. If you want to try it out, you can get a $1 trial and they will walk you through the process.

  2. If I end up switching to Genesis it will be because of you Ms Ileane the site looks great and I actually liked the old design too.

    Re: Aweber

    I have to give them credit for customer service.

    Earlier this year I screwed up my list and I called them all pissed off and the representative did an excellent job at helping me understand it wasn’t there fault without coming off like a smug jerk even though I probably was at the time.


    Also, I need to do more split testing this post is a good reminder you have to get those open rates up. Thanks for sharing.

    1. Hey Darnell,
      It took me forever to let go of the old theme which was Thesis and I waited until I found something that really appealed to me. I’m loving the fact that the Appendipity themes are responsive and this Showcase child theme is just one of them.

      The customer service team at AWeber and everyone who works there has plenty of reason to be in good spirits all day. If you get a chance take a look at pics I took of their new location at the grand opening. It’s a fun place to visit and I can just imagine how much fun it is to work there.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvpjl0hUmAc
      You can see why I love hanging out there as much as possible. It’s a real treat!

  3. Wow its really awesome to know that you participated in aweber workshop, thank you very much for sharing your wonderful experience.

    1. Sai,

      I was going to their workshops at the old location too. If you want to see some of the pictures I posted before you can check them out here

  4. Hey Ileane
    This rocks. I have been noticing a few things I am not happy about with my emails and open rates and wondering how I go about solving them. Now you have armed me with the kinds of tools I need to solve these problems.
    Thanks so much
    ashley

    1. Hi Ashley, it seems there is always room for improvement when it comes to open rates, but I think using AWeber is a step in the right direction.

      Liz Lockard did a comparison of AWeber and Mailchimp recently and based on her test, AWeber got more opens.

  5. Call to action buttons in emails is now the new thing. Warrior Forum has been using them for a while in their email promotions for WSO of the Day notifications. It kinda replaces much of the yellow highlighted callto action texts that marketers of old used to use.

    Ileane, one feature you should tell reader is about is AWeber’s ability to automatically subscribe customers who buy through your paypal link there by building you a strong customer list instead of just freebie seekers 😉

    1. Hi Caleb! Great to see you.

      I don’t use the Paypal feature so I can’t really speak about how good it is but I certainly take your word for it!

      I use the ClickBank app but I have no way of tracking those new subscribers coming from ClickBank. I blame that on ClickBank though because I think they like to hide the buyer info from affiliates for some reason. Have you tried that one?

      1. I haven’t tried the clickbank app but I do know one of the best ways to get those customers on your list is to offer a bonus where that buyer had to opt in to get.

        Of course this only brings up my much over preached sermon to always have a sales funnel. Send your traffic to a squeeze page first or at least have an optin form overlay on top of the aff offet.

        another plus to do this is that you will be able to follow up with that buyer with additional offers 😉

  6. Call to action button is the key to increase website conversion rate. I think Green and yellow are the most favored color for buttons. Mam I have included you in one of my post about how you persuade visitors to write comments for your blog. Hope you like it as it is about you. Please I request you to read it and oblige me Ileane Mam

  7. Hi Ileane,

    Thanks for sharing. I can’t deny the importance of CTA. Really! Biggest mistakes in my blogging industry is not providing good CTA which affected my conversion rate terribly.

    Learning it now and thanks for sharing!
    ~Reginald

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