Aweber is an auto-responder and is one of the foremost of its kind on the web. There are others, but we’ve used this one exclusively for over three years and like it (mostly).
Three good things about Aweber: it’s fairly cheap, easy to use, and can be implemented into your website to start collecting leads and sending out messages within about an hour. That’s essential these days as no one wants a service with a high learning curve. You don’t have an auto-responder service? Stop reading this article right now and go and get one. Yes, they can be that crucial for your success. They capture information from visitors to your site and this info gets sent right to you (great, huh?) Your visitors fill out a little form (usually to get a free report or ezine packed full of your special secrets) and you get their precious info to keep marketing to them.
The trick to using this system well is to make sure your forms are well-designed and easy to fill out. A long, convoluted form is a sure way to drive away prospects. Keep it short and sweet and make your free offer enticing and you’ll get lots of sign ups pretty quickly.
Second: Have your messages pre-written and scheduled to go out before you ever implement your auto-responder. Your prospects will receive the first one immediately upon confirming their request for it (in their email) and you should have it ready to go. You can write additional messages (this is strongly encouraged) to be sent weekly, monthly or how often you choose.
Tip #3: Send messages weekly or a few times a month, but we strongly urge you not to email everyday. Many online marketers do this, but it just irritates the heck out of us and clogs our email boxes. If messages come too often (some nervy clueless wonders send several a day—how quick can you say “unsubscribe me”?) You don’t want unsubscribes unless you can help it. They are those who decide they don’t like you or the horse you rode in on and want to not receive any more messages from you. Keep your messages informative and send them in an appropriate timeframe.
Aweber works fairly well. We’ve used it for lots of autoresponders, lead collection, and sending pre-scheduled broadcasts (messages sent out to everyone on your list-great if you have an extra special promotion going on). Unfortunately, it always seems to load a bit slow and the process of loading photos and new messages is sometimes irritatingly pokey. We’re not sure why this is, but it’s been like this for as long as we’ve used it so we just grin and bear it. Hopefully they work on this.
Basically, it’s a decent, well-performing service and one we can recommend. Do you own homework and make the choice that is right for you. Aweber is but one choice, and for our money, it’s the one that works for us.