An autoresponder is like a salesman that automatically pitches your leads without you having to life a finger.
However, setting up an autoresponder in one of the most popular email management solution, Aweber, is often challenging and confusing.
This post will show you how you can easily create an Aweber autoresponder that gets results.
No technical skills required.
Lets get started.
Assuming that you have already setup your Aweber account, your first step is to click the create and manage list button. And what that will do, it’ll allow you to create a list of people that are actually going to receive your autoresponder sequence.
Your next step is to click create a list. And by default Aweber gives you an ugly list name and so you want to make it something that’s branded and that you can remember.
Something like “Quicksprout2” and you can give it a little description like “Quicksprout newsletter”. So then when people are about to unsubscribe it has a little description and maybe it’ll entice them to actually not unsubscribe when they remember what it is.
Next add your address and your contact info (you want to make sure that’s all accurate) and then if you want to receive notifications every time someone signs up, you can put your name and e-mail and you’ll be notified of each new signup. If you have a really big list you definitely don’t want this feature because you will be notified multiple times a day which can be annoying.
Then click on save settings and that will take you to step number two which is where you can brand your e-mails.
Now you can do this with the editor and that’s actually what I prefer, but if you want these branded things to be automatically added to your e-mails you can add your company name, the URL and a little signature that will go on every e-mail. And then under social media sharing if you want to also tweet that you just sent out a broadcast, you can do that. But I find that to be a little bit pushy so I generally don’t do that and most Internet marketers don’t do that.
And then under global text snippets this is more an advanced feature and if you’re going to be making a lot of changes to something from your business like if you have different hours or different offers, this is something you might want to incorporate. But if you’re just going to have a basic autoresponder sequence with helpful information, this isn’t something that you want to do. Then click on save settings…
Okay, so once the settings are saved click on confirm options. And this is the message people will receive when they opt in to your list. So you can modify this however you want and generally the one that’s here, that Aweber gives you is actually pretty high converting.
You can insert the person’s name if you have that as part of your e-mail opt in form. Their first name, their e-mail, whatever that you want to add.
Next you can choose one of the pre-approved subjects that they give you which is basically different variations of confirm your subscription. Or you can create a custom one and you have to wait a day or so for Aweber to approve it and then you can just say something like this, we received your request, thank you just have to confirm an order to receive.
If you want a success page (the page the subscriber sees after they sign up) you can put the URL in the settings too and hit save.
Once you’ve done that your list is actually all set up and now it’s time to create your autoresponder sequence.
So once it’s all set up, hover over messages and click on follow-up series. Next click on the create your first follow-up button and when you do you’ll be taken to the Aweber message editor and now going to walk you through the most important part of the editor and how to use them. So at the top we have the subject line and this is the subject line of the e-mails that your subscribers will receive and in general you want to make these benefit driven.
So especially for the first e-mail that people will receive after confirming, you want to put something like here’s your free report if you did give away a free report in exchange for the e-mail or here are your free tips. Something like that so then they get into the habit of keeping an eye out for e-mails and opening your e-mails.
Now underneath the subject line is the actual body of your e-mail and by default Aweber gives you the sort of plain e-mail template and actually this is the template that most Internet marketers and e-mail marketers recommend. This is the one that I use because it’s the template that’s easiest to read on the most amount of browsers. Now if you want something a little more fancy than what they give you here, click on the blue templates button.
When you click on one it’ll added here and that will obviously can be modified and it’ll look a little bit more fancy than the plain one but it may not be able to be viewed ideally using different devices.
Now in terms of the content, it is actually very easy to add and modify. It’s very similar to a WordPress post. So if you wanted to add something about why they should stay subscribed. Just type it in like that, you can hover over it, make it bold, make it bigger, change the font, whatever you want to do just like you would with then Word processor. So once you add all of the content that you want that’s thanking them for signing up and reminding them why they should stay in your list and offering to be there for any questions, it’s time to send out your test e-mail. Okay, to do that click on test and then put in the e-mail address you want to send it to and then click send test.
You’ll be surprised that even though it looks good right here you can get some funky looking e-mails in real life and in an actual e-mail inbox and especially links can be wrong sometimes. So you definitely want to test every e-mail before officially adding it to your autoresponder sequence. But if you go to check your e-mail and everything looks good, click on back, then click on settings. This will determine when the e-mail goes out and in this case because it’s your first e-mail, it goes out immediately after the person confirms. Okay, so that’s automatic for the first e-mail and once that’s done click on save and exit. And you’ll get the message that your message has been saved and here is the first e-mail.
Now obviously you want more than one e-mail and your autoresponder sequence and in my experience, the easiest way to add them is not to click create another follow-up, it’s just a copy the one that you already have. Just click copy and this will copy this template that you already set up for your next e-mail.
Under the settings button at the top you’ll actually have a few more settings. So the interval is how many days the e-mail sent after the first one. So if you want to send it two days later you can put two or three or whatever you want to do, there are different opinions about what is best. So leave that to the experts, but I prefer to send about one a week but most people send him more often in the beginning and then would people get into the habit of opening them they make them less frequent.
You can also choose only to send them on specific days or times. Such as only Mondays or Tuesdays between a certain time. And the reason that works really well is because people are more likely to check your e-mail at certain times.
Next enable click tracking. This will track how many people click on the links within your message. That’s important for conversion rate, optimization to see whether or not people are actually engaging with your e-mails. And once that’s all set up click on save and exit.
Once that’s done you’ll see that your second autoresponder e-mails here and if you want you can always change the settings by clicking the edit button and if you want to switch them around you just drag one to the top of the other and it’ll automatically switch them. Then if you want to add more click copy and change the contents within the e-mail and do the same thing.
So that’s all there is to setting up an autoresponder within Aweber. Pretty easy right?