Integrating An Autoresponder With a Membership Site
I have hit a problem on my software project and I’m hoping that I might just find the solution from one of my lovely readers :-) First of all I’ll explain what it is I’m trying to do and why.
The Freebie PreSell Using Email Lists
Recently I described how I like to make money using email lists that give something away for free and promote something within the free information. I intend to use a somewhat similar model for the membership site that I am building for my software project. The basic business model is this: I’ll have a paid membership site costing $xx a month which will provide various tools for members. In addition to the paid version I shall also offer a free membership which will have a cut down version of one of the tools.
Now of course the idea here is that I use the free membership to attract potential customers but attempt to sell the paid version to those free members and I intend to do that selling via an email list. The content of the email autoresponder sequence will be different to something such as my Bloggers Bible as I’m not offering a course this time. Instead I’ll have tips on how to use the software, show what advanced features are in the paid version etc.
But there is a problem with this approach and that is that customers are in charge of the email they receive and may unsubscribe at any time.
Integrating Email Subscriptions to Memberships
Email spam has become a huge problem in recent years and so now we have all sorts of laws in place to control it. If you are somebody who emails people using any kind of list then you need to be aware of these laws. If you use a service such as AWeber to manage your list then they are taken care of for you. There must be an unsubscribe link in every email, you must include a real postal address in every email and so on.
That unsubscribe link puts the customer in control and so if you want to keep people on your lists you must give them a very good reason to stay subscribed. That is why I have never been a fan of just giving people a free report as an incentive to sign up to your list because once they’ve downloaded it what other incentive is there to stay subscribed? I myself have frequently joined a list to get some freebie and then immediately unsubscribed. So there needs to be some inherent value in staying subscribed to the list.
In the case of my membership site what I want to do is tie in the email with the membership itself (for the free members this is). Ideally I would like the customers email address to act as their login into the membership site so the idea is that as long as they want to be a member and enjoy the benefits of the free tools, they agree to receive my emails. Now of course, because of these anti-spam laws the customer always has that option to unsubscribe from the email list at any time – that will never change but what I want to do is have that unsubscribe integrated with my site so that if the member chooses to unsubscribe from my email list, their membership is suspended at the same time.
What I’ve Tried So Far
I know this is possible because I belong to various membership sites myself that do this so I’m not sure why I’m having such trouble with it. There’s two halves to the solution really – the email list manager and the membership manager of my website. Now for the membership manager there are two ways I can do this. Firstly I can build my own system and I have already built a basic system so I know it works. This gives me full control over what happens to members on my site but to be honest I would rather use a third party system such as aMember to manage members as they have a lot of features such as integration with payment processors which will save me a lot of development work.
The other solution is to try and integrate with a third party email system such as AWeber. As it happens, AWeber is famed for its email deliverability statistics – they get more emails through than any other provider but the downside is that they do not like integration and make it impossible to do what I want to do. When a subscriber unsubscribes from an email list there is no way to setup any kind of automation rule which I could use to notify either aMember or my custom software that they have unsubscribed. I have asked GetResponse if they can do what I need and they cannot.
The aMember Email System
On the day that I started typing out this blog post the support guys at aMember got back to me and gave me some help with their email system. I have since installed the aMember trial software and started to set things up and test them out. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that they do have a decent auto-responder built into their software.
You can setup a sequence for each product you wish to protect and you can even setup a separate sequence for members who allow their subscriptions to lapse. The bad news is that the system is setup to allow the members to unsubscribe from the email list independently of their accounts. This is to be expected for a paid product but in my case I only want this integration for my free product so I am still stuck.
Is This a Problem That Doesn’t Need to Be Solved?
I once had a colleague years ago who always came out with words of wisdom and one particular gem that I always remember is that when you have to try that hard to solve a problem, you’re probably trying to solve the wrong problem.
In essence, what I am trying to do is force the users of my free tools to receive my emails. Do I really need to do that? When I wrote my post on email list marketing one of the first things that I explained is that there will always be a huge majority of people who are simply ‘freebie seekers’ and who will never buy. If somebody really does not want to receive the emails that come with the software (they will be instructional, not just sales pitches) then am I really losing anything if they unsubscribe? Probably not.
Also, email is not the only selling mechanism. Anything I want to put in an email could probably go onto the website itself. I could have a place where I show training information, announcements of new features, special offers right there on the site in a place that would be seen when they login. Plus of course the software itself is a selling tool – if the users like what it can do then that will encourage them to upgrade if they are interested in the advanced features.
So for the moment I have decided to forget about this problem and just use the in-built autoresponder that comes with aMember. However it would still be interesting to know if others have come across this problem and how they solved it if they were able to. If that’s you, please leave a comment. Also, I will post a general update on the software project next week.
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angrymarketer
April 23, 2009
Bit of a roundabout way of doing things, but anything is possible, soooo…knock up a php script that logs into aweber, runs an unsubscriber report for the previous day and downloads it (curl is your friend here), and does the necessary in your amember db (maybe amember provide hooks to do this, if not, got direct to the db). Shove that in your crontab and you’re golden.