Email Autoresponder

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Name: AWeber (Email Autoresponder)
URL Location: www.aweber.com
What Is It For? Email autoresponding, managing your list of newsletter subscribers.

This article review is to detail why you might require the services of an email autoresponder on your art website or blog, and as to whether AWeber would be the most suitable for you.

But for those of you who are unfamiliar as to what the job of an email autoresponder is, allow me to give you a brief explanation.  

An email autoresponder can be used to send email messages to your clients and customers at set time intervals. Additionally you can use an autoresponder to look after your online newsletter distribution, people on your mailing lists and subscribers to your products and services.

Your subscribers simply fill in their details into a sign up form on your site or request to be a subscriber via an email address you provide that they can simply send an email to join your list.

Let's Have Look At An Example

If you head to my Art Marketing Newsletter page, you will see a sign up subscription box requesting the name and email address of the visitor to join my Art Marketing Newsletter.

When they have submitted their details they are automatically sent a confirmation email to their email client's inbox. In this email is a confirmation link requesting they click the link to confirm they have requested information from my site. This is called a double opt-in, and the purpose of this procedure is to protect myself from SPAM complaints.

After my subscriber has confirmed their subscription, they are automatically send a welcome email. A few days later my autoresponder will send out another message with art marketing information for my subscribers that I have already programmed to send. 

This procedure continues each month and is completely automated. All I have to do is load the information into the system and the autoresponder does the rest.

The beauty of using an autoresponder is; you can personalise your messages with the subscribers name and provide your own name as if you were writing to a friend. I can do this with all my pre-set messages and let the email autoresponder take care of the communication, giving my subscribers a sense of personal interaction with me. 

This of course helps to build a relationship with my subscribers on autopilot.

Why Do I Use An Aweber Email Autoresponder?

I once read somewhere that a person with a product to sell must first concentrate on building a relationship with their prospects before their prospect will decide to purchase.

Now in regards to continuity sales, art is not the easiest product to sell online if you are looking at securing high prices…particularly if you don't have a famous reputation. There is an element of "Who are you?" in the mind of your prospect. Having an email autoresponder helps your prospects to build trust and confidence in you and your product.

Additionally, art is a "want" product. Art definitively is not a "need" product. So therefore, in some respects an artist has to work that little bit harder to sell their work online if they are opting to do it independently from their own site and not through online galleries.

So with all this in mind, I knew that my most valuable asset was the relationship I had with my collectors. But in order to develop that relationship, I needed to collect the email addresses of people who I regarded to be in my target market.

When I first started looking for an email autoresponder, I have to admit, I was overwhelmed with the amount of options available. 

Some services had shopping carts; affiliate software and many additional extras incorporated to their primary email autoresponder product. In addition to this, I had business friends who were recommending their choice of email autoresponder products. The choices were beginning to swamp me.

A Bit Of Research Goes A Long Way

In the end, and after much research I decided to sign up with AWeber. It was clear to me that all I really wanted was a way to stay in contact with my clients, customers and collectors. I didn't need any of the extras like shopping carts and tracking devices etc.

I really needed to keep it simple because ultimately I wanted to spend more time on my art and my business. Also, I quickly realised that by simplifying my choice and opting to go with AWeber, I would be paying considerably less because I wasn't going to be paying for all the added extra's that I didn't need to use.

So essentially I was reducing my potential price of $29.95 a month with a more comprehensive system, to $17 a month by using AWeber (As of writing this, AWeber currently bill me US$53.85 every three months).

The only potential negative I came across when I was researching AWeber was that some marketers didn't like AWeber's double opt in rule. 

The reason for this was because they were losing a lot of people who were perhaps a little lethargic about clicking the "confirmation" link in the first confirmation email. This ultimately meant the subscriber would not officially subscribe and therefore the marketer could not build a relationship with their potential client. This of course meant fewer sales.

But my view was, that if the client had decided not to click the confirmation email, then they were obviously not seriously interested in what I had to offer anyway.