Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

Converting from Mailchimp to Aweber

by

image of email newsletter

(This post contains my Aweber affiliate links, for which I earn a commission)

When I first started in affiliate marketing, I created my mailing lists on Aweber like pretty much every affiliate I knew. I always liked the company itself. However, as I started integrating my lists into my sites more, I ran into some problems with using RSS feeds that they couldn’t fix at the time. So I moved everything to Mailchimp, where things were great for 6 years.

However, over the last 3 years, my Mailchimp monthly fees have gone up 40%. That’s a considerable increase, especially considering I only use 4 of my 5 lists once a month. First there were some annual increases which I could understand because everything was going up. But after repeated increases and now the discontinuation of a 10% discount, it’s time for me to save some money and move back to Aweber. Here’s my process for converting all of my lists.

Create Your Aweber Account

Obviously this step is going to be important because you can’t do anything without your new lists being ready to go! You’ll need to create an Aweber account (you can sign up for free to start off until you start adding lists and likely need to upgrade to Aweber Pro). You’ll be able to create your first list profile of up to 500 subscribers free just to get the lay of the land. After that, you get an unlimited number of lists and monthly email sends when you start with the $19.99 monthly plan. That price drops considerably (as much as 20%) if you pay quarterly or annually.

Create Aweber Campaigns

This is the part that took me the longest. I needed to create all of my different lists in Aweber plus re-create all of my content, which includes drip campaigns and RSS feed integrations.

While I was able to do some of this myself, I did end up taking advantage of Aweber’s free migration service. I set up a few of the basic campaigns myself but then had them move over my automated campaigns. It took a few days but they were constantly in touch with me about the migration and I was then able to see what they did to pattern my other campaigns after them.

I won’t lie…. I messed things up a couple of times by jumping in too quickly before I read exactly what each different type of email campaign did. There are some slight terminology changes from Mailchimp, so just be sure you take a look at their documentation if you choose to move everything yourself. I don’t think I will have any problems going forward now that I am familiar, but there is (as expected) some learning curve.

Turn Off Signups

The next thing you need to do is turn off any type of opt-ins you have on your site so that you can temporarily stop people from signing up to your Mailchimp list. Depending on how many signups you get a day, you may need to do this on the weekend or late at night. Don’t forget embedded forms, pop-ups, integrations with giveaways, comment subscriptions, and any other place that you are currently getting people to sign up for your list.

Move Current Mailchimp Lists to Aweber

While your data collection is temporarily stopped, grab those lists by doing an “Export Audience” to a csv file for each one.  The csv file will contain a lot of junk that you don’t need anymore (I have no use for latitude and longitude) so you will need to do a little cleanup. After that, you will need to import each of these lists into Aweber.

Replace Your Signups

Now that you are ready for people to sign up for the new lists, you can put all of your popups and embedded forms and all that back. Aweber has a lot of integration options, so you won’t have a hard time finding even more places to entice people to sign up for your lists than you had before. I’m still working on maximizing these opportunities on all of my sites, but the one that is the most intricate (my daily deal newsletter on Sunshine Rewards, which triggers my members getting SR credits when they sign up for it) worked beautifully.

If you are on my mailing list for this site, you will notice that your emails are now coming through Aweber. If you haven’t signed up yet for my newsletter, why not? You’ll get my 30 Affiliate Marketing Tips in 30 Days series!

Was It Worth It?

So far, so good! I’m saving almost $40 a month and haven’t had any major issues. It was really just the time in switching everything over, which I will easily recoup as time goes on. I’m also investigating their Push Notification options, which might be another whole post in the future.

I’ve been running all of my lists on Aweber exclusively for about three weeks and with the exception of just a little bit of overlap in terms of RSS automated emails, I have been really happy. In fact, they have even let me secretly test a little bit of new functionality that is going to make their campaigns even easier to set up. I love that they reached out to me when they saw my account and knew exactly what I needed before I even knew it. It’s been super easy to communicate with them, which is a HUGE plus when you are a non-tech person dealing with tech!

I’m incredibly happy about my switch to Aweber and hope that you will consider them if you are starting new email campaigns or tired of paying too much for your old ones!

Need a Mailing List? Aweber Free Trial

by

Aweber Free Trial

I’ve been using Aweber for my mailing lists across many of my sites for a number of years. I have an internal list processor that I use for Sunshine Rewards (combined with Mandrill for delivery), but I use Aweber for everything else. I know a lot of affiliates and bloggers go back and forth on which newsletter companies to use, but here are some of the reasons that I keep my list on Aweber.

Customer Service

I won’t lie and say that I haven’t had any problems at all with my newsletters. When I have had problems, Aweber has given me MULTIPLE ways to contact them. I’ve talked to them via email, on Twitter, and even on the phone when I was really having problems. When I am paying for a monthly service, I want to be able to get in touch with someone to get my problems resolved! So far, they have helped me resolve every problem that I have had.

Affiliate Marketing

Aweber is a pretty integral part of the affiliate marketing community. Their terms (unlike some other newsletter providers) do not exclude affiliate marketers. In fact, they exhibit and speak at Affiliate Summit, have their own internal affiliate program, and even allowed me to moderate a panel on affiliate marketing at their first conference last year (ASCEND Summit). When affiliate marketing is your business, it’s good to have partners that understand as much about it as you do.

Reputation

I’m not alone in my love of Aweber. I see so many of my friends using them and when I ask other people what they use, Aweber is one of the top 2 or 3 that always get mentioned. The ones who do NOT use Aweber usually say it is because their list was not double opt-in. But Aweber has done away with the requirement that imported lists be double opt-in. So I bet even more people will now be switching.

Tools

I’m not incredibly high tech, but I have some high tech demands for my sites. I need WordPress integration, widgets, light boxes, blog broadcasts, and more. In fact, I even found a way to turn my deal posts in my VBulletin forum into an RSS feed that is now a Daily Deal email on Sunshine Rewards. Talk about repurposing content! (You can see how I did that in my post Combine Tools to Streamline Work and Reach Customers.) I also like the archive pages for my newsletters and the ability for them to be shared easily.

Price

When I started out, my lists were VERY small. It was nice to be able to pay a small monthly fee when I wasn’t making much off of my lists. As my lists have grown, I have not moved up very much in my monthly fee but I have been able to really expand to offer multiple lists for different sites. I can control my costs by deleting out unsubscribes, undeliverables, and people who just aren’t interacting with the emails (especially for my niche sites where I use contests to generate signups).

And what is the very best price? Free!! Because that is how much their trial is now. You can sign up for free and get in there and really get your hands dirty seeing what it can do for you. You actually get an entire month free (which is longer than a lot of free trials these days). Or you can take an even bigger discount by getting a whole quarter for only $32.67 (versus $49).

So what are you waiting for? Jump in there and grab your free trial and see if Aweber is the email marketing solution for you.

What I Learned from Aweber (#ASCENDSUMMIT2014)

by

Sometimes I get in a rut of talking to the same people all the time and doing the same things over and over. Last month I was given the opportunity to get out of that run by traveling to Philadelphia for the first ASCEND Summit, sponsored by Aweber.

I use Aweber for a number of my newsletters, and I was asked to moderate a panel about Affiliate Marketing. I viewed the conference as an opportunity to get a little more speaking experience and participate in a panel of really smart people in my industry. I didn’t expect to actually get a lot out of the conference because only a small part of my business is email.

I was absolutely, completely dead wrong. I got more out of the conference than I have in a long time. There were various reasons for that.

First, I was out of my element. The conference wasn’t about affiliate marketing. Everything I was learning was something new. Second, there was only one track of presentations and I didn’t feel comfortable skipping things. So I attended sessions I would not otherwise have attended (almost out of guilt!). Third, I was with a whole bunch of new people I had never been around before–never learned from or shared ideas with.

What I Learned About My Business

As much as I think I know, I still have a lot to learn. Ann Handley gave me ideas about generating better content. Wil Reynolds helped me understand the importance of branding on SEO. Andy Crestodina taught me that I am not using Google Analytics enough. Justine Jordan made me completely rethink the way that my emails appear on mobile devices. Oli Gardner and Brian Massey showed me that my landing pages are pretty much crap.

That’s all just the tip of the iceberg, but you can see how all of those things would greatly impact my affiliate marketing business. Did you know about 50% of people open their emails on mobile and 30% of people who unsubscribe do it because they just don’t like the LOOK of the email? Did you know that having social icons on your website just leads your customers AWAY from your website to a point that they will probably not come back? Or that telling people you will not SPAM them just makes you think about spamming them?

I also learned about some really cool stuff that Aweber is doing that I should have been paying attention to. If you have a mailing list and are serious about growing it and making it convert, you need to check out their tools.

What I Learned About Myself

I need to get back to the basics that got me where I am. I need to attend more sessions at Affiliate Summit instead of looking at it only as a networking event. And I need to go back and watch videos of sessions I didn’t get to. I need to attend more small conferences as well so that I can grow my network and learn from new people.

I consider my affiliate sites a business. I don’t just blog for fun (although I usually have fun doing it!). Yet I have really been missing some huge opportunities to learn and grow my business the last couple of years. I always think that I don’t have the time to spend listening to speakers or attending more conferences. But what if I were learning things that would 1) help me save time in my work, and 2) grow my business more so that I can hire more employees? Wouldn’t it be worth that time investment?

Two Challenges for You

I have two challenges for you.

Challenge One: Check out the ASCENDSummit2014 hashtag and either follow a couple of the speakers or click on some of the resources they provided. I guarantee you can learn something.

Challenge Two: Go learn something new this week. Either attend a webinar, watch an Affiliate Summit video, or find a local meetup. Spend just an hour learning something new that might help your business–even if it means one less hour you have to get work done!

Did you attend the conference and learn something that will change the way that you do business? When was the last time that you DID learn something like that?

Combine Tools to Streamline Work and Reach Customers

by

Aweber Daily Deal EmailI’ve been a full-time affiliate marketer for 7 years and during that time I can never remember feeling like there was enough time to do everything that I want to do. Part of my problem is that I am always coming up with new ideas that I want to try out. Knowing that 1) my merchants are increasingly sending more daily deals, and 2) my customers are always looking for them, I wanted to find a way to reach as many of my members as I could in different ways while also allowing for non-members to find my deals.

I started brainstorming how to make it happen without a lot of programming. I have a programmer on staff but I didn’t want to invest a lot of time in something that I wasn’t sure would even have a lot of return. I liked the concept but couldn’t justify creating a whole new system to make it happen. That led me to looking at the existing tools that I was already using to see if I could use them in new ways.

In less than 24 hours and without any programming help I was able to create the Sunshine Rewards Daily Deal newsletter. My process was interesting both in terms of the general way in which I approached it as well as the specific results I have achieved.

Using Tools I Already Have

I have a forum that runs on vBulletin, and I have a subscription to AWeber. Surely there would be a way to combine the two such that when I post in the forum it could get piped into a newsletter? It turns out that it is quite simple. I created a new forum on Sunshine Rewards specifically for Daily Deals. I then set permissions such that only employees could start new threads. We enter each deal as its own post, including an image.

We took the RSS feed for that forum and created a new AWeber newsletter via Blog Broadcast that would pull from that feed once a day Monday through Friday.

AWeber Blog Broadcast

We used a basic template to keep it simple. We also included a place for one “Featured” offer that would be available only in the newsletters and not in the forum. Now our members have the choice of finding the offers in the forum or waiting for the newsletters.

DealMail

Benefits of the Project

With very little work we can use the same content in two places because we know that we have members that like receiving content in different ways. Members are getting the very best deals in one easy place. We have a new feature to use for leverage with our merchants in exchange for increased commissions or exclusive deals. With an average open rate of over 25% during non-holiday shopping (and higher during peak shopping times), we know that people are paying attention.

We asked for consumer feedback recently and it was terrific. We have very low unsubscribe rates and the list continues to grow well. Members like that they can comment on the posts to either get more information about the deals or comment on the deals if they have already tried them. The user-generated content is a nice addition to the deal. And the AWeber analytics help us to tweak which deals we are posting based on where we see interest (or not).

Brainstorming the Logistics

I am thankful that I have my Mastermind Group to help me come up with solutions like this. Even if you do not have a group like that, you can still get creative on your own. My best suggestion is to visit the AWeber blog frequently and see how other people are using the service. Think about your own problems and how their ideas can become your solutions as well. One of the biggest keys to being a successful affiliate marketer is learning how to make the most with what you have and spend your time wisely. Combing different technologies is a great way to do that.

Have you used AWeber in a unique way or combined it with other technologies? I would love to hear about it!

Using Aweber Lightbox for Newsletter Signups

by

I’ve been using Aweber for the newsletters on a few of my websites for quite a while and like it for a number of reasons. I don’t pay for any traffic to those sites, and my lists are building slowly. I happened across a post on Facebook recently (and can’t even remember how!) where they were talking about using Lightboxes. I started investigating and discovered that the Lightbox option is where you get a pop up of sorts that isn’t really a pop up asking if you want to sign up for a newsletter. I had mixed feelings about implementing it but have been pleasantly surprised so far.

Here’s a chart that shows daily signups over the course of a month. It’s easy to see when I implemented the Lightbox:

The blue show people who unsubscribed (luckily not many!). Green are people who subscribed and verified their subscriptions. Yellow are those who subscribed but did not verify. I can understand why the yellow increased so much. Some people just entered an email address in the box to get it to close rather than hitting the “close” button. However, you can see that my verified subscriptions have tripled. Interestingly, this is from a site that actually has much less traffic now than it did in December, and the December subscription numbers were consistent with those first eight days shown in the chart.

Clearly I am getting more newsletter signups. However, there are two potential downsides. First, are people hitting the back button on the site after the Lightbox pops up? I have it set to a delay so that they will find the content and start reading before the Lightbox pops up. Conversions on merchandise are definitely down a little bit, but it is also not a month in which I would expect to see high conversions. The second issue is the number of people “complaining” about the newsletters. My “complaints” (which can be defined as many different things in Aweber) have gone up from about .08% to .24% this month. Could it be that people are signing up just to close the box but then also verifying and not really wanting the newsletter? That seems odd, but possible.

I’ll be continuing to watch the trends over the next month or so regarding newsletter signups, site visits, and merchandise conversion rates. The one thing that I want to stress is how easy it was to create the Lightbox in Aweber, including modifying the template as well as the appearance itself. Next up I will be doing some A/B testing on Lightbox differences (graphic v. text).