As you’re probably aware, we announced the release of our API several months ago, allowing developers to start creating AWeber applications via AWeber Labs.

We also released one of the first apps for our own API, a WordPress plugin which allowed you to easily add AWeber forms to your blog.

Today, we wanted to tip our hats to the folks at Unbounce, a landing page service, who have created yet another avenue for AWeber integration.

What’s Unbounce?

In case you aren’t familiar with them, Unbounce is a service which allows you to easily create landing pages for your website. You would typically use these for your promotion specific campaigns – whether it’s gathering new leads with their lead generation landing pages or sending your subscriber lists to a targeted landing page designed for conversion.

You can A/B split test different versions of the pages to find out which works best, leading to an optimized landing page and increased conversions.

You can learn more about their service on their website.

AWeber and Unbounce are a natural pairing for integration, since the core purpose of most landing pages is of course, a web form, with the goal of converting visitors into subscribers.

How Does The Integration Work?

The purpose of this integration is, of course, to have all the subscribers who sign up on your Unbounce page automatically added to your AWeber list.

Unbouce has kept things simple, so there are just a few steps that you need to do in order to sync up our two services.

First off, here’s the video walkthrough that Unbounce put together:

Just to briefly go over setting up the integration, you can look at the steps below or take a look at either the instructions on Unbounce’s website or our own knowledge base article.

1. In your Unbounce account, you can visit the page overview screen for any landing page you’re working on, and click “Send leads to AWeber” under the Leads & Form Integrations section.

   

2. At this point, we will prompt you to enter your AWeber account login and password in order to authorize the integration. This information is not given to Unbounce at any time.

   Note: If you have followed this setup process before, the “application is trying to connect” prompt may not appear.

   

3. 3. After authorizing the integration, you can choose which AWeber list you’d like the subscribers from this Unbounce page added to. Then hit the Complete button.

   

4. Next, you’ll need to log into your AWeber account. Once you’re logged in, make sure that you’re working in the list you chose to integrate with, and select Email Parser from the My Lists dropdown.

   

5. On this page, scroll down and check the box labeled “Unbounce Form Submission” in order to complete the integration.

   

Who’s Next?

Do you have a favorite service or app that you’d like to see integrated with AWeber? Leave a comment, or better yet, tell them about AWeber’s API!

If you’re a developer yourself, you can start creating your own apps and integrations today at AWeber Labs.

Brand awareness is a hugely important part of email marketing. Give subscribers a from name, a design, a signature they can recognize, and you’ll build their trust.

That’s why AWeber lets people customize settings for each of their subscriber lists. One of those settings is the company logo they want displayed in their campaign.

In the past, they’ve had to upload their logo elsewhere and provide the URL in their list settings for their logo to appear.

Well, we’ve got a little surprise for our customers. Things are about to get easier around here.

Now, We’ll Host Your Logo For You

No more hopping around to third-party hosting sites while you’re trying to get your list set up. Just upload your logo straight into your settings. Then it will appear on your AWeber thank-you page, your unsubscribe page and on all your archived broadcasts.

Here’s what the process looks like:

1. In your account, select the “My Lists” tab and choose the option to “Personalize Your List.”

2. After you add in your other company details, choose the option to upload your logo on the right.

3. Click “browse” and choose your logo file from wherever you have it saved in your computer.

And you’re done!

Supported Formats: JPEG, GIF, PNG

In order for your logo to upload correctly, you’ll want to make sure the file type is a jpg, gif or png. And keep the size around or under 80k to keep your logo looking as pretty as possible.

If you have any questions, let us know!

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Like many businesses, you may be exploring integrating social media with your email marketing campaigns. Doing so can expand the reach of your messages and grow both your fans/followers as well as your email list.

So at AWeber, we’ve made a point of helping you combine email and social media by helping you automatically share your email newsletters on Twitter and Facebook.

As some of you noted when we rolled out our integration with Facebook, it only worked with personal profiles (not fan pages) due to limitations with Facebook’s API. We knew you wanted to post to your fan pages, but it wasn’t technically feasible at the time.

Well, as the saying goes, the only constant is change. And this is a good one. Facebook has changed their API, we’ve changed our integration and you can now post your email newsletters to your fan pages.

How to Share Your Email Newsletters On Your Facebook Fan Page

Go to your List Settings page and click the “Connect To A New Facebook Account” button under the Social Media / Sharing header (this works the same way whether you have a Facebook account connected already or not).

When prompted, allow AWeber Email Marketing to manage your pages.

When you create your broadcast, go to the “Social Media/Sharing” section and choose to share the email on your fan page.

That’s all there is to it! Feel free to take a look at our Knowledge Base for more detailed information and instructions on integrating Facebook and AWeber.

Enjoy!

If you’re like most people reading this blog, you love data. Not this Data, but the kind that paints a picture of what is and isn’t working in your email marketing.

The trouble with data, of course, is that sometimes it’s hard to know which data is important and worth focusing on. Not to mention that for it to be valuable, the data has to be actionable, too.

Last week we leaked some information about a soon-to-be-released tool that not only helps you see how your email marketing campaigns perform, but also makes it easy to take action to increase your response rates and conversions.

And now, it’s here.

Announcing Broadcast QuickStats

QuickStats makes it easy to understand how your broadcasts performed by showing you:

• Opens
• Clicks
• Web Hits/Traffic
• Unsubscribes

Some screenshots of QuickStats (click to see full-size images):

Even better, you can use the data to identify responsive and non-responsive groups of subscribers – those people who:

• Opened the email
• Didn’t open it
• Clicked a given link
• Didn’t click that link
• Made a purchase (did you know that you can track email-driven sales in AWeber?)

Not Only Are QuickStats Useful and Easy-to-Read… They’re Actionable, Too!

This is by far my favorite part.

One of the most powerful things you can do when you know who clicked a link, or didn’t open an email, is segment out those subscribers and broadcast only to them:

Click to see full-size image

It’s an effective way to talk to people who are interested in a particular product, feature, part of your website or anything else you’re linking to.

Plus, when you’re able to identify who didn’t open or click, and then email only those people, you can:

• Make an alternate offer
• Find out what their objections are
• Send other targeted and relevant email campaigns to increase your conversions

Learn More About QuickStats in a Free, One-Hour Webinar

On Wednesday, August 4th, we’ll give you a tour of QuickStats, show you how it works and answer your questions about it, live!

Learn All About Broadcast QuickStats

In this free webinar, you’ll learn about QuickStats, our new tool that will make analyzing your email campaigns and segmenting your list easier than ever!

Sign up to discover:

• How QuickStats shows you how your emails performed
• How to easily segment your list in 1 click to create highly targeted, relevant campaigns to responsive and non-responsive subscribers

Plus, get your questions about QuickStats answered live!

Date: Wednesday, August 4th
3 – 4 PM ET (Convert Time)

Sign Up Now

What Do You Think?

How will being able to see at a glance how your broadcasts perform, identify potentially profitable subscriber segments, and quickly and easily create and deliver targeted campaigns to them affect your business?

We’d love to hear how you’ll use QuickStats to increase your response rates and conversions – tell us!

For the longest time in the history of forever, email analytics has been an all or nothing affair. You’re either tracking your email marketing campaigns or you’re not.

The problem: there is a ton of data that gets tracked and sifting through it all can be overwhelming. It’s like trying to find a back issue of Field & Stream in the Library of Congress. You’re better off going to your local library where they only carry the stuff that’s relevant to you.

We took that terrible analogy and applied it to AWeber’s Email Analytics. As a supplement to our full reports page, in the near future we’re rolling out Broadcast QuickStats. You’ll be able to view the most pertinent statistics for your messages grouped together on one super slick page.

Click that big grey play button in the video below to check out our design and development teams as they discuss both building QuickStats, and what it will do for you.

Broadcast QuickStats makes it easier than ever for you to not only see how your emails perform, but also identify responsive and non-responsive subscribers, and quickly segment those groups and deliver relevant, targeted email marketing campaigns to them.

Sneak Peek Screenshots

You saw a bit of Broadcast QuickStats in the video; here are some screenshots from it. Click to view the full-size images:

When’s It Coming Out?

Broadcast QuickStats will be launching in accounts with Email Analytics very soon.

In the meantime, let us know what you think!

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Have you ever wanted to show someone all the cool things you can do with AWeber before they purchase an account? Ever wanted to see your options for web form creation at a glance?

Now you can view all the possible templates and color schemes for web forms in one place with this snazzy, searchable web form template gallery.

Enjoy! And, if you have a moment, tell us what you think of the templates and the gallery!

Want to Learn More About Web Forms?

If you’re not familiar with our web form generator, our features page has a great overview of creating beautiful custom forms for your website.

Customizing your web form is easier than ever with our web form generator: take a look at our Knowledge Base or attend our free Better Web Forms webinar for more information!

Finally, skip right to the web form template gallery if you just want to check out the cool templates our design team has put together:

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Many businesses and bloggers use AWeber’s blog newsletter tool to convert RSS to email and tell readers about new posts on their blogs.

When we released this tool, our thinking was that it would be a way for you to get email subscribers back to your blog in order to read your post, comment on it and take any other actions you wanted after getting to your site. So we designed the broadcasts to include partial blog posts rather than full posts.

While this has worked beautifully for many of you, some of you have asked us to provide a way for you to include full posts directly in the emails.

Now, you can. Here’s how:

Use The {!rss_item_content} Tag

While editing your blog broadcast template, if you want to include full posts rather than partial posts, simply replace the {!rss_item_description} tag with {!rss_item_content}.

{!rss_item_content} will merge the full HTML and images from your posts into your blog newsletter.

Do You Prefer Full or Partial Posts In Your Blog Newsletter?

With this available, will you send full posts in your blog newsletters? Or will you send partial posts?

What about as a recipient? Are full or partial posts better for you?

We’ve put together a quick 2-question survey to find out what you and all of our readers think!

Once we have your answers, we’ll share the results via Twitter and Facebook, so be sure to follow or “Like” us!

Update 7/26/10: Results are now available here – thanks everyone who took the survey!

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You may already know about our Email Analytics features. These powerful tools allow you to target your list with pinpoint accuracy, sending messages that respond to subscriber activity.

Anywhere you install our analytics, you can track which of your subscribers visit that page. You can send email newsletters to subscribers who visit your order page, or who look at a specific page or product on your website.

We’ve recently taken things a step further, allowing you to track subscribers who click download links on your site.

How Does It Work?

Any download link on your website can be modified to track subscribers that use it. I came across this post on Chris Brogan’s blog, and I thought to myself that this would be a perfect place to start tracking downloads.

This kind of page, with a free download, is the perfect place to implement download tracking. We could easily follow up with subscribers who downloaded the PDF, asking for feedback on the content in the download, or even linking to related products.

Let’s take a look at the HTML for that download link as it is now:

In order for the link to tell the AWeber analytics javascript that a subscriber has downloaded the PDF, we just add a line or two:

And that’s it – when a subscriber clicks that link, it will be tracked as a page hit to the download!

What Is It For?

Now that we are tracking which subscribers are downloading the PDF, its time to put that information to work. We can now segment our list and send a message to those people.

To do so, we’ll first search our list for hits to the download’s URL – this is in our AWeber account, under the Subscribers tab, Search.

Next, we save this search as a segment so that we can refer to it later:

Now we can create a broadcast and send it out to that segment, directing their attention back to our site with links to similar resources, or maybe just asking for input on the content of the PDF.

How Do I Get Started?

You can take a look at our knowledge base article for more detail on the process – for a more “plug and play” experience, you can just copy and paste this code:

<a href="http://www.example.com/download.pdf" onclick="awt_analytics.record('http://www.example.com/download.pdf';">Download My PDF</a>

Simply replace the “example.com” URL in BOTH places with the URL of your download, place this link on a page that has your AWeber analytics installed, and you’ll be good to go!

What do you think?

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Social media is a big part of the marketing world these days. Most net-savvy businesses (including us here at AWeber) have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. That being the case, we’ve found that people are always looking for ways to make their social media and email marketing campaigns work together.

Those of you familiar with our service will know that we’ve helped customers automatically tweet their email newsletters for some time now.

Recently, we’ve updated our social media options to make combining your social media efforts with your AWeber account even easier.

Automatically Post Broadcasts On Facebook!

With our new Social Media / Sharing options you can automatically post your broadcasts to your Facebook wall.

In the spirit of consistency, you can create new connections with Twitter and Facebook through your account’s List Settings page. This is also where you can pick a default Twitter and Facebook account specific to each list.

If you want to get started with this new feature right away, you can refer to our knowledge base for a more detailed walkthrough.

Multiple Twitter / Facebook Accounts? No Problem.

As we were revisiting our options for social media integration, we decided to make it easier for our users to work with multiple Twitter accounts. If you’re unfamiliar with how Twitter works with AWeber, we have an easy-to-follow knowledge base article.

When creating a broadcast you will find the options to tweet / post your broadcast towards the bottom of the page under the “Social Media / Sharing” section. The accounts you have selected as your defaults will automatically be selected for your convenience.

Don’t Forget To Check The Preview!

So now that you’ve added your Twitter and Facebook accounts and selected a default for each, we’ve provided you with a preview of what your new tweet / post will look like. As a good measure and reassurance you can see exactly what you are about to post / tweet before you send your message.

How Does Integrating Email Marketing and Social Media Help Your Business?

Have you been sharing your email newsletters on Twitter, Facebook and/or other sites? (If not, are you planning to now?)

What have the effects been (or what do you expect they will be) on your business and marketing?

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You want a community of engaged readers. Your subscribers want interesting content in a layout they like. You’re both looking for love at first click.

As in any relationship, the best way for you to both get what you want from your email marketing is to set clear expectations from the very beginning.

An example of your newsletter goes a long way toward setting correct expectations. But how can you share one before the signup?

It’s easy, actually. Just combine two of the tools in your AWeber account – the broadcast archive and the web form generator. This combo lets you offer a sneak peek of your campaign to make sure it’s a good fit for each new subscriber.

Here’s how:

Link to a Past Email Newsletter at Signup

The broadcast archive stores web versions of your past broadcast messages. The web form generator lets you create custom signup forms where people can subscribe to your emails.

To show your newsletter to potential subscribers before they sign up, you would simply need to display a link on your web form to the archived version of one of your newsletters, like this:

Choose a newsletter to be your example

Scroll through your past newsletters Broadcast page. Choose the one you think best represents your emails. Remember, you’re trying to give the most accurate depiction of what you’ll be sending your subscribers.

Grab the link for it

Open the message you’ve chosen in the message editor. Scroll down to the “Syndicate” section. You’ll need to syndicate the message if you haven’t done so yet – this publishes it to the web.

The part you will use is the “Direct Link”. You can copy this link whenever you are ready to put it into your web form.

Add the link to your web form

Open the web form you’d like to use (or create a new one) in the web form generator. Decide where you’d like to put the link to your newsletter example.

Then decide what words to use and click on the Text icon to add them to the form. Remember, it’s an invitation, so be welcoming, not pushy.

Type the text you want in the editing box. Highlight it, click the link icon and paste in that link from Step 2. When you’re satisfied, save the changes.

If the text doesn’t appear where you want it to on the form, simply click and drag the field to the proper place.

Start Using Your New Web Form

Congratulations! You’ve just upgraded from asking subscribers to take a shot in the dark to letting them make an informed decision.

You are one step closer to a community of interested readers who look forward to your messages.

Your Thoughts

Do you share an example of your newsletter or product before asking people to sign up for it? Does this seem to make a difference?

Can you think of any cases when you might not want to share an example first? How can you set clear expectations about your emails in these cases?

We always enjoy the ideas you share. Let us know what you think about setting expectations with a newsletter example below.

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