Author: Dan Morris

We don’t mince words. We don’t beat around the bush. If you’re looking for ways to increase the efficiency and productivity in your business,AWeber has the best automated email marketing services for bloggers and business owners.

For us, AWeber is one of the 5 tools we want every blogger to use. Not only do we use them, we love, teach and promote AWeber wherever we go. We even held a Blogging Concentrated event in their PA offices AND they’re sponsoring this post for us.

You don’t have a lot of time, and we don’t want to serve you fluff, so let’s skip the generic stuff and get to the top four features of their program.

1. 3 Different Forms of Email Communication
2. Making the Lists Talk to Each Other
3. Duplicating Campaigns
4. Automated 3rd Party Integrations

So let’s get to it.

For most bloggers the idea that there are different types of email is foreign, and the idea that AWeber has three might be daunting. But let me explain what the three are.

Follow-up Series

The follow-up series is one of the automated email marketing services that has you here in the first place. Ever join an online challenge and get the Day 1 Email in your inbox immediately? Ever download an ebook and get the download link email immediately? Ever sign up for an event and get a “Welcome email” in your inbox immediately? This is an automated reply.

An automated reply is fantastic because you don’t really want to be sending emails to people all day long saying “here’s the download link”. That would really slow down your business. In AWeber a “Follow-up Series” email is that automated reply. But what’s even better is that you can create an entire sequence of emails that automatically lands in your audiences’ inboxes.

Our 21 Day SEO Challenge is just that. We wrote 21 “Follow-up Sequence” emails which start going to the buyers one day at a time right after purchase . . . I don’t have to be involved at all.

It’s called a “follow-up series” because it is how you follow-up with the audience member after they’ve engaged with you. That means you can go on vacation and they’ll still get emails from you.

The thing with a follow-up series email is that everyone gets the email no matter when you sign up. If you sign up today, you’ll get the first email (How to tie your shoe) today. If you sign up next week, you’ll still get that same first email (How to tie your shoe) that everyone else got. Perfect if you want to give the basics to everyone who signs up.

The Broadcast Email

The Broadcast email has a different use. We used a broadcast message today when we wanted to tell everyone in our audience that our BC Prime membership was on sale. Instead of being part of the follow-up sequence, this is something that we came up with today and wanted to share with our audience right away.

Broadcasts don’t have to be right now either, you can schedule them. If you’re going on vacation and want to be reaching out to your audience while you are away, you can create some broadcasts and schedule them to go out when you want them to go out.

I love Broadcasts for things that expire and things that won’t be relevant a short time later. An event announcement would be a perfect use for the Broadcast. What makes a broadcast different from a follow-up is that you only get the broadcast if you’re on the list today. If you join the list tomorrow you’ll get the first follow-up series email, but you won’t get the broadcast I sent out yesterday.

The RSS Blog Broadcast

Finally, the Blog Broadcast is the RSS feed powered email. When you write a new blog post, the RSS feed on your blog is updated. AWeber’s blog broadcast email gets automatically sent out to your audience when you write a new post. Of the automated email marketing services, it’s the one most commonly used by bloggers. For many, this is the efficiency they are looking for.

The automation rules functions are one of the strongest reasons to use AWeber. As far as automated email marketing services goes, the automation rules will drive your revenue the fastest. As you can see in the screenshot above, the 3 dropdown options make it easy to implement.

But what does it do?

Suppose you decide to write and sell an ebook. You create the page, advertise it on Facebook and send an email out to your newsletter subscribers. And someone buys it. Of all the people in your audience, this one person is now different than the rest of your audience. This person is a buyer.

When someone buys the ebook they get added to the Ebook Buyer list, and using the automation rules they can be automatically taken off the original list. That means you can continue to market the ebook to the old list and you can market your second ebook to the new list. Putting them in separate lists means you can speak to them more personally. . . in a way they can really resonate.

And this is something that automatically happens when the audience member buys the ebook. You don’t have to be involved.

Think about this, if you send an email to your newsletter audience about why they should buy your ebook but half of them already did, they’re not going to feel like you know what you’re doing. The automation rules inside AWeber take care of that headache for you. Boom!

I wish I would have known about this long before. I think I was an AWeber client for 4 years before I even noticed this one of their automated email marketing services. Remember the Ebook Buyers list and the automation rules that put the people on the right list? Well when you do that, you end up with a second list.

Some people say, I don’t want to manage multiple lists.

But you do, you just don’t realize how easy it is. With their “duplicate campaigns” function, you can take all the emails you wrote for one list and copy them to another. In our example above, take out the emails about buying the ebook (they just bought) and replace them with joining your Facebook group and voila!!! brand new targeted email campaign.

Integrations are vital to the success of your campaigns, sales,shopping carts,list building, business future. . . pretty much everything.

AWeber’s marketing materials indicate they’ve been around since 1998. I think that’s nice but to me it only matters for one reason. They have had time to work with, learn with and integrate with all the software you’re going to use to grow. Do you want to have to change email providers just because you add a shopping cart? No. . that’s crazy! You want a service that will integrate with everything you’re going to use to build your business.

Just for grins, here’s a quick sample list of their hordes of integration partners:

• Etsy
• Facebook
• Eventbrite
• SumoMe
• Rafflecopter
• WooCommerce
• Clickbank
• PayPal

See something you might be using? Don’t forget to think about that. You don’t want to grow next year only to find out that your email provider doesn’t integrate with your new stuff. AWeber integrates with all the big dogs and more all the time.

Other than that, even though they have lots of tutorials, free webinars and live phone/chat support you should know that we are 100% committed to helping you make AWeber a successful part of your business. We have tutorials in BC Prime, do webinars every quarter and will gladly chat with you about any questions you have.

For the price, for the ease, for your business it is the best value for your money. If you’re considering a free service, then really think about how serious you are about your blog. Free is great, but not for the most important parts of your business.

I urge you. If you are a blogger and you aren’t using AWeber:

P.S. If you want to get a chance to meet the folks at AWeber, come to the BuildYourInfluence Summit in the Pennsylvania Poconos on September 26th. Aweber is a sponsor and will be on hand to answer questions.