AWeber Email Marketing Tips

Excellent advice, which may help somone down the road to stop doubting themselves, just by fine tuning their method of payment communications skills for their own customer base. Great common sense selling!

Hey Tom,

Very interesting indeed. The funny thing is that in the marketing world I’ve always read that adding Paypal increases sales, etc…

I wonder if the testing product was in a "niche" where maybe the market is not used to having a paypal account?

Any word on that?

I tested this a while back…

And I got the same results…
I DOUBLED my sales.

It blew me away…

Testing reveals it all

I have a simple rule

Whatever you do in marketing, if you can’t test and measure it
don’t bother doing it.

Cheers

I have used Paypal as my primary source of receiving payment for products and services on my website. It never dawned on me that some folks are not seeing that you can pay without having a Paypal account. (Even though it says it right on the payment page…)

I got so excited from reading your article that I am trying this out TODAY on my next email campaign. Sometimes you just can’t see the forest for all the trees, huh?

Thanks for the great insight!

Thanks for publishing this finding Tom.

Looking forward to Rachel’s results as well.

We’re an advocate of PayPal as they will return the transaction fees if you need to refund a customer. No banks or merchant processor will do that. In fact, some processors charge you for refunding as well.

Thanks for the info everyone. It’s too easy to forget the ‘little things’ in Internet marketing simply because they are every day to us. We tend to forget that not everyone is as familiar with certain activities that we consider routine.

I work in a market that I’m educating to even use their email addresses in their advertising; so to be reminded that I need to also help them in ways to do business online has been a helpful jolt.

To date, I have had no problems with PayPal and will keep recommending them as a reliable method of receiving payments online.

Regards to all

Hi Tom,

I have also been a happy subscriber of Paul’s for many years. His emails are some of the few I read religiously, and I often buy his product offerings because he always has some great deals.

He & I have even exchanged the odd email which is cool. None of the other "gurus" (I say that tongue in cheek) do that, which makes Paul even more unique!

And yes, I have every intention of using his Paypal suggestion with the upcoming launch of my new "SEO Traffic Secrets" product.

Keep up the good work – aweber rocks (I was with your competition for a year and wasn’t overly impressed) and I recommend it to my clients all the time.

Very helpful tip, thanks for that!

You know, I bet we could write a book of
workarounds for paypal, given the way their
ordering system works.

While there are a lot of reasons to use paypal
(at least for my market), I’ve been forever
frustrated that they take advantage of MY sales
cycle to integrate THEIR account enrollment
process.

It makes me nutty that when my customer enters
in the order process through a paypal link,
that he’s not just thinking about ordering my
product, but he’s now also offered the choice
to open a paypal account.

"A confused mind never buys", and paypal
diverting my customer while s/he’s IN THE
BUYING cycle, into an account enrollment
process is contributing to order abandonment.

Then, *I* have to do a workaround.

In addition, the order confirmation page seems
to be as much a paypal account enrollment offer
as it is an order confirmation page.

I notice, for example, that paypal now puts a
big button in the intuitive bottom right corner
of the screen that says "open a paypal account
now", and a small text link in the bottom left
corner that says "return to merchant".

In my books "Return to merchant" doesn’t imply
"Click here to complete your order" or "Click
here to download the product you just ordered".
So from what I can tell (based on my customer
service logs) at least half the time, buyers
just go off page instead of to my thankyou page
where they would be able to :

- instantly download the product

- optin to my (Aweber!) customer list

- take advantage of an upsell or one time offer

Paypal’s intervention in MY sales process is an
inconvenience for the customer, a missed sales
opportunity for me, and forces *ME* to create a
back end process to accomodate paypal.

I’m having to design workarounds systems just to
have the customer activate my post-purchase
sequence, when it really should be a seamless
integration at the time of purchase.

I’d like my merchant service to be "seen and not
heard", and to help me transact sales and keep
customers happy. Instead, it feels like they
hijack my sales process and interject their
marketing to my detriment, and without my
permission.

On the practical side, my most effective order
abandonment prevention tactic was to add a
2Checkout order link in addition to my paypal
order link. I did this on some of my sales
pages and so far, roughly 60% of the orders
are going through 2CO, with order abandonment
through 2CO at about 20% of my paypal order
abandonment rate.

I haven’t done exhaustive testing yet across a
lot of sales pages…but if these preliminary
results hold, I’ll have to test the impact on
sales – and my costs of sales – of not using
paypal at all. Who knows Tom, maybe I’ll end
up on your side of the fence on this one.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the input.

I’m not seeing how that would address the issues I’m mentioning – could you explain more?

If I understand you correctly, it seems that all the same things are happening, except in it’s own window/frame, right?

It’s true that my site’s visible once the extra window/frame’s shut down, but that would be on the order page, not the "thank you" page, yes?

I wonder if what has been said above is still relevant if you have TWO payment providers on your site: PayPal and one for processing credit card payments?

On our site prospects can purchase our directory script via two alternate methods: PayPal or 2Checkout. So, if a visitor does not have a PayPal account, but has a credit card he/she can still do a purchase. So, will adding the statement (mentioned in the article) next to PayPal link help increase sales?

Vincent,
My comments/results are based on adding 2checkout to the sales page in addition to paypal, not replacing paypal with 2CO.

Tom

Any merchants you care to comment on that you’d avoid?

Hi Tom,

Paypal offers the newbie a great way to get up and start quickly taking orders, and building a ‘sales history’ – which they can then use to get approved for a merchant account. Or, for getting a new product up and running quickly. So for newbies it’s a great solution. But you have observed what I have experienced. Clarifying the actual process dramatically improves cart retention rates. Offering a secondary payment option also helps. Moving away from PayPal to a permanent ‘internet merhcant account’ is the best solution though.

My thanks to all above for the great info!

Hey, Lou, don’t you know yet that PayPal doesn’t care about you (or me or any other customer)? They still seem to have the attitude that they don’t have to care about anyone but themselves. I agree that they should be seen and definitely not heard! If they want to recruit they can do it on their own time, not ours!

I feel that any merchant who relys solely upon PayPal for credit card processing is leaving themselves and their business seriously flapping in the breeze. I’ve heard too many accounts of PayPal cutting merchants off for the most frivilous of reasons. Sometimes it’s for nothing more than a slight violation of TOS, which if interpreted one way is not a violation, but PayPal still interprets it their way and calls it a violation of TOS. What recourse would a person have? Good luck!

Something else I wanted to mention: when I was a real newbie, I wanted to buy someone’s ebook but they only accepted payment through PayPal. Well, my PayPal account only had five bucks in it, so I didn’t order the book.

Now, if the guy had accepted credit cards I would have gladly bought it, but he didn’t accept credit cards…

At least that’s what I thought before I found out that PayPal will charge it to the credit card I had on file with them if I didn’t have enough money in my PayPal account!

Of course, by the time I discovered that, I couldn’t remember where I had seen the guy’s book!

Clearly explaining the various payment options is nothing but good business. I’m glad you guys brought that up because I would never have thought about it myself.

Makes me wonder how many thousands of dollars I’ve lost already.

I used PayPal for an entire year so I had a real good idea of my monthly conversion rate and thought by switching to another on-line merchant might improve my conversion rate. So I signed up with Authorize.net, and I must say the check out was much simpler than PayPal. I ran exclusively with Authorize.net for two months an I noticed NO difference in conversions – they were exactly the same as with PayPal. So I switch back to PayPal and my conversions actually went up.

I must also say that PayPal has treated me very well, much better than A.net, plus they put all my money in a revolving money market fund and as my monthly volume increases, they lessen their transaction fees. Since they are both my merchant account and gateway, I never have to wait for funds to be deposited into my merchant account.