AWeber - 6 Painful Lessons Learned
I really should have become more familiar with AWeber before launching Traffic Rush! Oh well, that is exactly why I had a launch discount - I knew I was going to screw something up! Almost all of the problems I have had with the launch have revolved around Aweber. This post describes all the lessons I have learned from the experience.
1) The First Message in the Sequence is Sent Immediately
One of the things I have implemented in the last couple of days (something I should have thought of and planned for before the launch) is some extra messages to check in with people who are taking the lessons, see how they are doing, ask if they need help and so on. For those that have bought the full course, this would be the first message in the list but I didn’t want that email to be sent straight away but perhaps a week later.
With AWeber when you start to create your autoresponder sequence, the first message in the list is sent immediately. I find this annoying because if somebody has just bought my course I really don’t want to immediately start bugging them with email.
2) Only One Email Per Day Can Be Guaranteed
For the list that manages the free lessons what I wanted to do is have a welcome email sent first and then follow that up straight away with the first free lesson. This didn’t work and I couldn’t understand why and then I read that AWeber will not guarantee more than one email to be sent in one day. Presumably this is an anti-spam measure. Thus, the lesson to take away from this is simply to ensure that all your emails are set at least 1 day apart.
3) Don’t Put Line Breaks in Variables
I setup a custom variable to hold the price of the course so I could increase the price without modifying a ton of messages but in some of the messages that I sent out the variable was not substituted as it should have been. It turned out that when I had clicked the button to reformat the message to shorten long lines that it has inserted line breaks in between the opening and closing brace that holds the variable. This prevents substitution.
4) Don’t Insert Messages Into a Sequence That You’ve Started
Each message in the autoresponder sequence has a number and for each member on the list AWeber keeps track of which message they last received. So if a person last received message 3 then the next one they will receive will be number 4. What happened to me when I inserted messages is that I pushed the lessons out so that the new number 4 was a lesson that had previously had a message number of 3.
Now when I inserted the new messages I altered the timing so that the lessons would still be delivered every 3 days as planned but of course this only works for new people who join the list. All those who had been signed up for a while received lesson #3 twice! So it’s important to really think carefully about your autoresponder sequence before you start signing people up to it because once they are on it any additions can mess things up!
5) You Cannot Automatically Subscribe a Person
When people talk about email marketing they often discuss having a prospect list and a buyers list. So in my case my prospect list would be all those people who have signed up for the free lessons and the buyers list would obviously be those people who bought the full product. What I wanted to do was ‘move’ somebody from one list to another. You can’t do this and now that I think about it, that makes sense.
If somebody enrolls for the free lessons they have given me permission to send them those lessons. Just because they choose to buy the full product doesn’t mean that I now have the right to email them about anything else by putting them on a buyers list. Instead I had to setup a whole new list and ask buyers to sign up so it remains permission based. I’ve done this now and almost everybody who bought the course has joined it.
Don’t worry I have nothing else to sell so I won’t be sending you promos hehe!
6) You Can Setup Automation Rules
With my buyers list setup, one thing I could do was automatically unsubscribe somebody from the list for the basic lessons once they had subscribed to the buyers list. This is setup very easily under List Settings -> Automation. In this way people who have bought the full course won’t continue to get free lessons with annoying messages asking them to buy what they have already bought!
I’m Sure There’s Lots More to Learn!
I am only just scratching the surface of Aweber. One thing I’d also like to do here is to thank a few people who have been particularly helpful over the last few days. Suzie Cheel asked me how the launch was going and when I mentioned my worries about setting up an affiliate program she immediately pointed me towards Barbara Ling who has spent a lot of time helping me over the following day or two. Josh Spaulding and Flaming Lacer helped me test out my affiliate program and I also had many other offers for help.
Lastly, yesterday for no reason at all Aaron Abber emailed me to offer help with Aweber. So thanks very much to all of you, it is much appreciated!
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Carol Deckert
July 18, 2008
Hi Caroline,
Thanks so much for sharing this information with us. I’ve been tossing around the idea of setting up an AWeber account and actually sending a networking course through the system. I’ve been an affiliate for a short while, but have never actually used the system myself.
Unfortunately for you, but fortunately for the rest of us - your lessons learned will be helpful for those of us thinking of setting up an account or who have recently set up their own account.
I do believe in sharing this type of information as it benefits a great number of people. Thanks so much for being so open and honest with your posts!
Happy Netweaving,
Carol Deckert
Netweaving/Networking Coach
RUNLancaster.com