You’ve spent months carefully carving out a list of potential customers who might be interested in your product or service. And you’ve worked hard to get these subscribers to trust you enough to open up their inboxes to your messages. But now you have to ask yourself: what happens when you have so many emails in your inbox that you can’t respond to them all?
You’re in luck because AWeber has you covered. Launched in 2012, AWeber is an email marketing platform designed to make subscriber handling easier for businesses of all sizes. While the product is quite popular, especially among startups and smaller businesses looking to grow their email presence, it still can be used by businesses of all sizes.
If you’re looking to grow your email marketing and haven’t tried out AWeber yet, then this article is for you. We’re going to teach you how to create a segment list in AWeber, the importance of each segment, and how to automate your email marketing using the tool.
The Basics
Before you get started, it’s important to note a few things about AWeber.
For starters, if you’ve used any other email marketing platform then you’ll feel right at home with AWeber. Whether you’re a Gmail user or a Hotmail user, you’ll find the transition from one to another seamless.
Another advantage of AWeber is that it supports both Apple Mail and Gmail, as well as a variety of other popular email clients. This is especially useful if you have a large customer base that uses either of those two platforms.
AWeber is also fully optimized for mobile devices, so you can send out mass emails to your list anytime, anywhere.
Now that you’re familiar with the basics, let’s dive into how to create a segment list in AWeber.
Create A New List
In order to create a segment list in AWeber, you’ll need to first head over to the tool’s dashboard. From here, you can create a new list or join an existing list. If you have a list that you’ve previously created and have no plans to ever send email campaigns using that list, then you can choose to delete it.
For the purpose of this article, we’re going to create a new list named “Leads.” When you’re ready, hit the Create list button.
AWeber will guide you through the list’s details including the list’s name, description, and email template.
Customize The List’s Subject Line
The subject line of your email messages can have a significant impact on your email open rates. AWeber provides you with the opportunity to edit the list’s subject line up to three times. You can also add a new subject line for each email you send out.
To best practice email marketing, you should send out emails with a subject line that is relevant to the content of the email itself. For example, if you’re sending an email about your new product and the subject line is “10 tips for using your new product,” then the email’s content should include tips on how to use your new product.
On the other hand, if you’re sending an email blast to announce a new piece of legislation or government initiative, then you can use the subject line “Important announcement:” to draw more attention to the important nature of the email.
Segment The List
You’ve worked hard to build a large list of subscribers who might be interested in your product. Now it’s time to put that interest to the test by dividing your contacts into subgroups and sending out personalized emails to each of them. The first step is to click the list’s name from the dashboard and you’ll be presented with a list of options for segmenting the list.
From here, you can choose to create an interest group called “Demographics” or you can create a custom interest group. You can use the demographics segment to target folks based on their geographic location, language, and other demographic information. For example, you can send emails containing product information to folks in the US, and you can also send emails containing blog articles to English speaking users globally.
If you’d rather target your content to a specific interest group, then you can do so using the Custom Interest Group feature. Here, you can enter a keyword or phrase and AWeber will scour your entire list for matching contacts and send you notifications when new matches are found. For example, you can send an email to your list containing the keyword “real estate” and AWeber will target those emails to any users who are interested in real estate. This feature is extremely useful for attracting leads to your business and growing your account.
Name Your List And Schedule The Sending Of The Emails
After you’ve segmented your list and customized the emails you’ll be sending out, you need to give each email a name. This is pretty self-explanitory as each email now has a purpose beyond just being an email blast. To create an email template, click the email icon from the dashboard and you’ll be presented with a blank email editor. From here, you can add your own template or choose from AWeber’s library of ready-to-use emails.
Once you’ve made your selection, you can preview and then click the Send button to send out the email. You can also set a date and time for the email to be sent out. If you forget to set a date and time, then the email will be sent at the next scheduled time.
Use The AWeber Connected Apps
If you have an iPhone or iPad, then you can take advantage of the tool’s mobile apps. Two of the biggest benefits to using these apps are 1) they make it much easier to manage your email from anywhere and 2) they make it much easier to schedule emails to be sent out at certain times. Let’s take a look at each app in turn.
The Mail app, accessible from the App Store, is the foundation for all of your email marketing through AWeber. This is because all of your email messaging will be transported to your subscribers through the app. If you’ve ever used Mail, then you’ll feel right at home with AWeber’s implementation. That said, if you haven’t used Mail before, then you might want to try it out before continuing.
From the dashboard, click the Mail icon and you’ll be presented with your list of emails. From here, you can choose which email to read first using the list’s navigation menu at the top of the screen. You can also click the email’s Subject line to read the entire email in your inbox.
You can do most anything in the app that you can do in the web-based email editor. Besides sending out emails, you can choose a phone number to call or a URL to visit in the future. You can use emails in a variety of ways in the app including 1) subscribe people to a list, 2) send people important news and information, and 3) send people special offers and product demos.
Since the app is integrated with the rest of your marketing and sales channels, it’s a great place to collect leads, follow-ups, and more. You can assign email IDs for each lead, customer, or partipant in the app to create a correspondence list. If you’d prefer to work with a group email ID, then you can set that up in the app as well.
Calendar
The Calendar app, also available from the App Store, works in a similar fashion to Mail to allow you to plan out your emails’ schedules. Once you’ve set your plan in the Calendar app, you can click the blue dots on the right side of the day to view all of your available appointments. From here, you can click on any date to be taken to the day’s schedule.
Just like with Mail, you can use the Calendar app to send out emails. But since it’s a mobile app, you can also use it to receive feedback from your audience via phone calls, emails, or other forms of contact.
The most important things to note about the Calendar app are the following: 1) you can add as many emails as you want to your schedule, 2) you can add events to your schedule from the Calendar app or the web-based email editor, and 3) you can hide or show events on your schedule as needed (if you have events that you don’t want folks to know about then you can keep them hidden and prevent them from being accidentally revealed).