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.

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

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:

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.

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):

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.

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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FIVE REASONS TO START BUILDING YOUR LIST WITH AWEBER

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