BizExcellerated Internet Marketing: Achieve mastery in blogging, affiliate marketing, social traffic generation at Andrew Wee
Ok, that title is linkbait because I have contacts who are already doing that and hitting 6-figure months about half the time.
Using emailing as a traffic source, your 2 most important factors affecting open rates are:
If you have those two down, half the battle is already won.
While some continue to use long-form emails, consider going with simpler emails – a small (more…)
Email solutions provider Aweber has been adding a slew of new features to their autoresponder service, including email analytics and stats, and more recently, a widget-like chicklet to display the number of members on your list.
The question is: What effect does it have on your email list opt-in rates and is it significant?
Displaying your number of subscribers would make sense if you have achieved critical mass in your niche market. For a celebrity/entertainment Perez Hilton-type blog, I’d think at least 10,000 is a good number. For a specialized niche like Dog Training, a list size of 1,000 qualified customers (not leads! Or mere readers) might be the sweet spot.
I think displaying the raw number of subscribers is a good idea for mass consumer type blogs, because there’s a groupthink (or “sheep” mentality) that says “if 100,000 people are on the Britney Spears list, then it must be good to join in…”).
As an astute marketer, I’d think the power of (more…)
I had email marketing and Miva cart SEO optimization specialist Jason Henderson AKA Big Jason from BigMarketingOnline on the line this week.
Despite the intrusion of a couple of phone calls, we discussed issues like:
As well as Jason’s previous career as a pro basketball player (he’s only 6’11″…) and position as one of the Ask.com guides.
Jason is in the running for Thor Schrock’s Top Affiliate Challenge and you can check out his vote page.
He’s also giving out bonuses at his vote page.
If you’re keen to increase your sales and profits by adding or enhancing your email marketing efforts, be sure to check out Jason’s Better Email Deliverability product.
The Friday Podcast can be accessed below:
I signed up with Aweber for my email marketing solution when I started out 2 years ago and have been generally happy with their deliverability rates.
In a recent Friday Podcast, Aweber education marketing manager Justin Premick alluded to some forthcoming enhancements to their services and it looks like they made the announcement today.
Here are some of the enhanced email analystics tools:
Together with click tracking, campaign reporting, email tracking, email ROI reporting and other features.
The old package cost $179.40 for 10,000 list members for a year. The analytics-enhanced service costs $69 per month for 10,000 list members.
With about a 362% increase in their prices, email marketers will have to decide if they need the enhanced analytics functions.
In an exchange between marketer Kevin Riley and Aweber founder/CEO Tom Kulzer, Kevin mentioned in a twitter update that existing customers can choose to remain on their existing plan.
Are the enhanced analytics going to be worth the upgrade?
I’m keen to hear some feedback from other marketers before making a decision.
One of my friends mentioned that he’s built a list of 10,000 opt-in members into his mailing list within a period of 7 days…so what’s he supposed to do now, he asks.
I don’t think any responsible email marketer will give advice before finding out more information.
For example, how was the list built? Using PPC? Expired domain traffic? Co-reg traffic? Via opt-ins through Squidoo or HubPages? Via an article directory? As a result of a follow up/update list after buying a product (either an affiliate product or your own product).
Each of these channels comes with it’s own level of permission – and if you’re a permission-based marketer, you’ll realized that someone who’s just bought something from you has a higher level of loyalty and stickiness, compared to someone who’s just downloaded a free report off your site.
So back to the 10,000 mailing list – determine the source of list/lead generation is important. Are they emotionally invested in you? Have they spent money purchasing something you offer? Called into one of your teleseminars and stayed the full duration because they found the information compelling? Are they merely curious strangers? Or evangelists for your brand (also known as “raving fans”).
Once you’ve sorted that out, you need to figure out the demographics of your list too. What’s their (more…)
For most marketers out there, autoresponder services like Aweber are a blackbox…most people will have a vague notion that email autoresponders are accessed via your web browser, you get some HTML code and place an opt-in form on your website or blog, people submit their name and email address, it appears in the autoresponder database, and you send them email, and sales comes flooding in…simple right?
Oh and they help negotiate with ISPs to ensure your email is delivered, and rotate IPs on their email servers, so it doesn’t get tagged as a “bad” IP.
Actually there’s much more than that, and Aweber’s education marketing manager Justin Premick gave an insiders view of the inner workings of Aweber.
More importantly, we discussed:
It all happens here at the Friday Podcast.
Check out the audio interview below:
References:
Brian Clark CopyBlogger blog
