The tutorial on GETTING STARTED WITH EMAIL MARKETING is live!
I need to add this more formally to the site, but I have indeed completed my first step-by-step tutorial. This one will tell you exactly how to:
• Sign up for a list service
• Add contacts manually or via import
• Create a form
• Put a form on your blog or website
• Send a message
In short, all of the basics. Check it out, and pass it along if you know anyone who would find it useful!
Check it out here!
The first tutorial. Soon… soon…
I’ve decided that the first action I’m going to take toward addressing the findings of my survey is going to be to create some step-by-step tutorials.
To get an idea what I’m talking about, just look at how I laid things out in my free e-book. I want these to be stupidly easy. Not because I think you’re stupid (though that’s possible — have you ever walked into a closed screen door?), but because I like to make things crystal clear. I also know there are a lot (LOT!) of people out there who get overwhelmed by the plethora of choices out here in Internet land. You start to worry about clicking the wrong thing because there is too much going on, and it keeps you from doing anything.
So I’m going to start work on one of those hopefully today. The first one will be for iContact, because a whole lot of you said you wanted to know more about email marketing. I know I said I’m switching from iContact to aWeber, so you may think endorsing iContact is a strange choice. But I have my reasons, and here they are:
1. Most non-pros would be perfectly satisfied with iContact’s services and options.
i.e., it’s “enough” for most people’s needs. Most people who aren’t internet pros have ONE list, and they send ONE newsletter. They may need to segment that list some, but they need nothing fancy, nothing too highly customized.
2. It’s simple.
See above re: my thoughts on simplicity. aWeber is fantastic; don’t get me wrong. I will sing its praises from the roof soon, and will make tutorials upon tutorials about it. But aWeber is more complicated. If one of iContact or aWeber is going to confuse you, it’s going to be aWeber.
3. It will work with a “dirty” list.
Like “milk, cheese, condoms, lube, octopus porn.” Or like a list that isn’t “clean” by aWeber’s standards. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: aWeber are list Nazis. I’ve tried numerous times to import lists into aWeber and had them rejected because the lists are “stale” or “dirty.” Basically, if you haven’t been meticulous about managing your email list (if you have one), your list will register as stale or dirty. A “clean” list is ideally double opt-in (someone signs up, then has to click a link in their email before being added to the list), does not have addresses on it that have bounced more than once, handles unsubscribes immediately and unceremoniously, has a zero-tolerance spam policy, etc.
iContact, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to give a shit. You take a list, you import it, it’s there, you send stuff to it. End of story.
I’ll give you two examples of cases where I’d unreservedly recommend iContact over aWeber:
ICONTACT CANDIDATE #1: My wife’s boss
My wife works part time for a company that sells manufacturing equipment. The owner has a list of clients’ email addresses and wants to be able to send them email, and to sort it by company, city, etc. If he imported this list into aWeber, it would be rejected because a handful of email addresses on this large list are likely to be old and stale. But on the off chance that it wasn’t rejected, the system would send an email to everyone on his list asking them to opt-in. Because he collected these addresses casually, his clients would be annoyed that he seemed to be asking them to join a list, and none of them would opt in. He’d lose 90% of his list.
But by using iContact, he could just import the list and be done with it.
ICONTACT CANDIDATE #2: My client on a legacy email system
A while back, a company I work for built a proprietary email system. It’s like a shitty iContact. It sends email in the same way, but offers no reporting, doesn’t manage bounced emails, etc. As a result, this list SUCKS. I’ve recommended moving the list to a real email management system, but I’m recommending iContact. aWeber would laugh at this shitty, non-opt-in, stale-as-fuck list. With iContact, we’ll import it and use it. Done.
So if any of this sounds like you, you might want to head over to iContact and sign up for their 15-day free trial now, in advance of my tutorials, so that you can poke around. You don’t have to enter credit card info, so you won’t have to remember to cancel if you don’t like it.
