By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
May 29th, 1999

See Also   The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet   Alternative Payment Solutions   Fraud Prevention Tools   Top Tools to Help You Boost Customer Service   iV-Caller Verification Service   Make Your Price Sell!   FindWhat.com   Make Your Knowledge Sell!   HumanClick   Netship   iFulfill.com   Nexchange   Nothing But 'Net   Netwhistle.com   Bigstep.com   Make Your Site Sell!   AWeber   GoTo.com   Constant Contact   WebAdverts   PersonalStore   SiteInspector   LinkExchange   ClickTrade   Safe   eCHARGE   MilliCent

Product	AWeber Follow Up Autoresponder
Description	Autoresponder with automated follow-up facility
Available	Now
Pricing	$17.95 - $19.95 per month

Whichever way you look at it, the selling of goods or services on the Web is still in its infancy, and most of us are still trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work. Naturally, the starting point for many online entrepreneurs is to try and adapt real-world marketing techniques to the Internet, and this has been done with varying degrees of success.

Probably the most successful marketing technique to cross the boundary from the real world to cyberspace is direct mailing, with the Internet's "killer app" of e-mail taking the place of the paper flyers and glossy brochures previously sent by snail-mail.

Now before I go any further I need to clarify one point. I am NOT talking about spam but rather responsible e-mail marketing to mailing lists where every member has "opted-in" and requested to be sent further information.

One of the core theories of real-world advertising is that it can often take a prospect seven or more exposures to an advertiser's message before they respond and make a purchase. Now like many Web merchants I have limited experience of real-world marketing and therefore cannot really comment on the accuracy of this figure of seven exposures. But I think we can all agree that most customers will require exposure to a marketing message more than once before they reach a purchasing decision.

So how do you expose your prospective customers to repeated e-mail messages? There are three basic approaches: manually, semi-automatically and automatically.

Mounting a manual campaign is straightforward. First, you need to build a list of e-mail addresses of past customers and other people who have requested to be kept informed of developments in your Web store. Then all you need to do is to send each of these prospects a personalised e-mail message detailing your offer. However, whilst this method is straightforward to implement it is also very time-consuming. And once your mailing list grows beyond a few dozen names, it becomes almost impossible to manage.

That's why most people mounting a direct email campaign use a semi-automatic approach. There is not room in this article to explain in detail how this is done, but basically it involves building a database of email contacts and merging it via an e-mail program to produce personalised e-mails. Although this is a far superior approach to the manual method, it does still require some manual intervention.

Potentially the ultimate solution for direct email marketing is a totally automated system. One product that has been designed to do just that it is the AWeber Follow Up Autoresponder.

Initially an AWeber autoresponder works just like a traditional autoresponder with one important difference -- it can capture the name of the person who makes the request and use this to personalise the e-mail response that it sends. However, it is what happens after the first message is sent that makes AWeber so special.

AWeber can be configured to automatically send up to six or more follow-up messages at varying time intervals. The contents of each of these messages can be varied at any time as can the time interval between each message. And very importantly, each message includes unsubscribe information so that the prospect can easily remove his or herself from the process at any time.

The AWeber system is very easy to set-up. Ordering is done online via a secure form and your account access information is e-mailed to you almost immediately. Once this information is received a simple Web control panel is used to mange your account or unit as AWeber refers to it. This control panel has three key functions: lead management, message management and lead statistics.

People who have been added to your AWeber database are referred to as leads. Leads are added when someone sends an e-mail to the autoresponder or completes a small form that you can include in your Web site. It is also possible to manually add, delete or amend leads. A useful feature is that the leads database can be exported to your local computer at any time for analysis.

The message management screen allows you to specify how many of the six follow-up messages you wish to use, what the content of each message should be and when it should be sent. There are two features of note here: the subject and body of each message can be personalised with the lead's name; and the ability to easily test each message by e-mailing it to yourself for review.

The control panel also has a summary of the number of current leads and details of how many have been added over the last two days. It also provides access to a simple report that shows graphically how many leads have been added on a daily and monthly basis.

There are a couple of downsides to the system though. The ability to personalise messages is limited to adding in peoples' names. One glaring omission is that it is impossible to specify any date field. This is vital for time sensitive offers where, for example, you wish to include in the message that if the customer orders by certain date they will receive a bonus or discount.

The system is not cheap either, with each unit (i.e. an initial autoresponse plus up to six follow-up messages) costing from $14.95 to $19.95 per month depending on how far in advance you are willing to pay. The question of cost is a relative one though: for example, it is possible to obtain good-quality Web hosting for this price and compared to this a single autoresponder even with these additional features does seem expensive. However, most Web merchants will be able to recoup this cost by making just one extra sale per month, a figure that should easily be achieved.

Verdict: The secret to your success with direct e-mail marketing is not the technology that AWeber provides, good though it is. Rather your success will depend on the perceived value of the offer you are making and the effectiveness of the ad copy you are using to make it. That said, AWeber is certainly a very useful tool and worthy of consideration by anyone planning an e-mail marketing campaign.