Archive for July, 2006
Post Purchase Customer Follow Up
Sean Cohen - July 28th, 2006Integrating a follow up campaign to customers after they purchase is often more important than pre-purchase follow up.
Build an Email List of Customers
Automatically building a customer list so you can preform post purchase follow up, lower your returns, deliver digital documents and up sell related products automatically without the headache of doing it all manually. Integrating AWeber with your shopping cart service can do all this and more.
Post Purchase Follow Up
Posted in : Articles & Tips | 15 Comments »Are you sending HTML without plain text alternatives?
Marc Kline - July 26th, 2006Often times when working with customers on their message campaigns, I notice they are including only HTML versions of their messages to their subscribers, with no plain text version. I politely bite my lip while I work with them on whatever issue they’ve called in for, then in an attempt to be as helpful as I can, I point a few things out to them about this:
Posted in : Email Template Design | 15 Comments »Open Rates By List Size
Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) - July 20th, 2006Ever wish you could see how your open rates compare with other publishers who have similar sized lists?
Most studies I’ve come across list open rates cumulatively regardless of the size of the subscriber base. Unfortunately that doesn’t account for the huge difference in open rates for lists of different sizes.
The data above was gathered from thousands of AWeber small business clients sending text/html format messages over the course of 2.5 years and 105,922 campaigns. You can see that the smaller the list the more tuned in the subscriber base is to the message. Over time as the opt-in subscriber base grows it gets harder to harder to achieve high open rates.
Why are open rates different based on list size?
- Subscriber Age: Smaller lists tend to be newer subscribers. If you’re a new subscriber you’re more likely to be open a message because you’re more recently expressed an interest in the topic you subscribed to.
- Content Focus: The bigger the list the more of a mass market you must appeal to. When you have a small list the content of a newsletter tends to be laser focused on exactly what they want.
- Relationships: List owners tend to nurture and build lasting relationships with their subscribers more when they have fewer of them. As a list grows many businesses lose focus that each email is being read by a single person and not 50,000 people in a stadium listening over a loud speaker.
The graph above details open rates for all AWeber clients regardless of list size. Even with the increase of image blocking over the years open rates have remained fairly steady. I could argue that the increase of image blocking actually indicates that open rates have increased over the years, although hard numbers on how much of an impact it has are nearly impossible to calculate.
Posted in : Email Marketing | 27 Comments »Backup Data Feature
Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) - July 20th, 2006Your opt-in subscriber list and the long term relationships built with subscribers is priceless. Having this data backed up in a safe place can let you rest easy at night.
We backup your account and list data on a daily basis to separate computers at our data center as well as off site locations in a secure encrypted manner. With the addition of AWeber’s backup utility you can now make regular backups of all your account data in less than a minute.
This backup utility will create a compressed zip file you can download which will contain all of your accounts different subscriber lists, follow up messages, and broadcast newsletter messages.
To create a backup, login to your customer account and click “Create & Manage Lists” in the upper right corner of the page. Click the “export all” link and select the email address to send the backup notification to.
It’s your data and you should be able to easily get it at any time.
Posted in : New Features | No Comments »We’re jumping into the blogosphere.
Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) - July 18th, 2006It’s 2006 and AWeber is finally getting a blog. About time right? Better late then never as I like to say.
The team here at AWeber has grown significantly this year and we’re all bursting at the seams to communicate more directly and frequently with customers and website visitors like yourself. The goal with this blog is to be able to easily post the little nuggets of information that we come upon throughout the course of our work. At the same time providing an avenue for you to comment and discuss those items.
We plan to include topics such as:
- Articles & Tips: Brief general tips and articles that we come upon.
- Case Studies: Specific ways customers are using AWeber to maximize their website returns.
- Email Deliverability: Tips for increasing email deliverability by avoiding common filtering pitfalls.
- Email Marketing: Methods for increasing opt-in rates, writing email content, etc.
- Email Template Design: HTML web design tips specific to email.
- New Features: Specific new feature announcements and enhancements.
Communication is the core of AWeber, it’s even part of our company name. We help thousands of small businesses like yours around the world communicate with prospects and customers on daily basis. I’m looking forward to communicating more directly with you.
Sincerely,
Tom Kulzer
CEO & Founder
AWeber Communications, Inc.
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