I’ve tested it time and again and the results were the same – my Aweber autoresponder outperform my 1ShoppingCart / Marketers Choice autoresponders every time..

That’s the main reason why I’m now trying to move away completely from 1SC. As good as they are, if my emails are not getting delivered then all the other bells and whistles don’t really matter.

Anyway, if you’re a 1ShoppingCart user you may want to take notice of this email they sent out recently, about their emails getting flagged by SpamHaus:

As of May 7th, 2007, we have identified a SpamHaus listing against our email service. SpamHaus, a third-party European based internet interest group, operates and monitors a list of potential Spam IP addresses online and provides that list to small ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) worldwide. This list is used by recipient ISP’s to help filter out Spam email.

We first encountered SpamHaus’ no-warning brand of justice in May of 2006. At that time we took their listing as a word of caution and began implementing new list management policies to better enforce ‘best practices’ amongst all our merchants. We have joined several email organizations such as Habeas and ESPCoalition to draw on their resources and research to provide the best possible permission based email services and tools.

We improved and expanded our opt-in process and made the double opt-in a default for all new accounts. We have provided better tools in the Autoresponder and broadcast sections to help opt-in old clients. We initiated feedback loops with major ISP’s worldwide to actively fight Spam as it happens. We have adhered more closely to CanSpam by implementing several changes, such as adding a signature to all outgoing mail and NO email leaves our system without a viable opt-out link. We even implemented a two-tier email system where legitimate businesses which adhere to email best-practices are rewarded with a ‘cleaner’ IP address from which their email is sent.

We are constantly working to improve and better your service.
Yet, despite making every effort to meet SpamHaus’ best practice policies, they have again made the decision to block all of the IP’s we use for our business and disrupt thousands of active, legitimate business owners who adhere to the recommended double opt-in procedure with their email lists.

And, while we sympathize with and otherwise encourage SpamHaus’ core goal to help track, prevent and stamp out Spam, we cannot agree with or support their machinations to indiscriminately disrupt legitimate business owners as a haphazard solution to preventing unwanted bulk email from a very few offenders.

After all our changes over the past year we would like to feel we can hold our chins up, having put forth our best efforts to provide a reliable, responsive, and professional service with integrity, and would like to apologize to all our merchants that you may have been caught up in this and had your businesses adversely affected by such an unreasonable action of this self-policed organization.

The good news is, SpamHaus is used primarily by smaller ISP’s worldwide and not by major email providers. And while no blocked email is good, our monitoring of the situation so far has shown that less than 15% of outgoing email is being affected.

We are currently endeavoring to clear this block against our service by utilizing the limited channels provided by SpamHaus. As an immediate measure, we have changed the IP addresses and domains utilized by our Confirmed Email Tier (everyone who uses the double opt-in procedure), as well as those that handle all Opt-in Confirmations and Order Notices.

Despite their acrimonious measures, it is SpamHaus’ remorseless actions we disagree with and not the message they claim to work under.

We have always, and will continue to strongly encourage following email best practices to ensure a responsive, clean mailing list. As many successful business owners know, using a double opt-in system will eliminate suspicious signups and help ensure that only those people who WANT to be on your list remain.

We will continue to work through this challenge and keep you updated on our progress.

I have one important question – are your email marketing campaigns working?

For a long time, I would not have been able to answer those questions myself. Why? It’s easy – because I did not track my campaigns.

Here are a few sub-questions:

1. If you just build a list, and send out an email promotion, are you guaranteed to make money?
2. What offers do your list respond to, and what do they ignore?
3. Are longer emails better than shorter emails?
4. Is it better to have more than one link in an email?
5. Should you put your prospects’ name in the header?
6. Do your emails get delivered on time, to your prospect’s inbox instead of the spam folder?
7. If you’re also marketing the same affiliate link with Adwords, email signatures, forum posting and text links, how do you know if the sales you’ve made are from your email subscribers?

It’s safe to say, that if you cannot answer those questions, you haven’t really understood your own email marketing effectiveness. And the tricky part is that I can’t give you the answers either, because it depends on many different variables such as:

1. How persuasive is your writing?
2. Are you in tune with your style of writing yet?
3. How much hype do you put in your emails, and how do your customers respond to that?
4. How good is your offer?
5. How well does the affiliate product convert?
6. How did you build a list in the first place? By offering free stuff or by selling products?

So, the answer is you have to do your own testing. But how you say?

Step 1: Get A Good Autoresponder / List Management Service

A good autoresponder will save you a lot of headaches later on. You can read about Aweber, my recommended autoresponder and list management service.

Next..

Step 2: Understand How Email Marketing Works

Enough of other people telling you that “the money is in the list”. It is most definitely not in the list unless you understand how email marketing works. Read my lengthy post on the topic here.

Next..

Step 3: Create Your Own Tracking System

Besides the built-in tracking tools in Aweber, I also recommend John Reel’s GoTryThis software. It has helped me understand my own email marketing campaigns better and revealed a few things that I would have never found out otherwise.

Now that you have the tools, you need to create your own system. Look back at your affiliate marketing campaigns, and see if you can:

• Create separate & unique “redirect” links for each email you send out. This will help you identify if the sales are coming from your email marketing campaigns or elsewhere.
• Create tracking IDs in your affiliate software manager. For example, in Clickbank and PayDotCom you can create separate tracking links. Create a separate tracking id for your email marketing campaigns.
• Use The Split-Testing Broadcast Feature in Aweber. Split your list in 2, and send 2 emails to each half. Every time you do this, test only ONE element.

Ok, lets get to some examples.

How fast do your emails get delivered, and how fast does your mailing list respond? If you just sent out to different lists, which one responds faster? How fast do you get 100 clicks? How does your email marketing traffic trends compare with other marketing methods?

Almost all these questions can be answered by creating a good tracking campaign and using the GoTryThis software to create unique links to separate and track different traffic sources.

With the software I create one redirect link that masks the affiliate link, which means that you see my link instead of the actual affiliate link. Then, I can add a unique tracker on the fly easily. I usually add “b” to any links I put on this blog, and “a” for my Aweber campaigns and “m” for my Marketer’s Choice autoresponder.

From my own tracking, I can see this trend:

• What my traffic sources are, and how many clicks I get from each
• Aweber delivers my emails faster, and I got more clicks from my Aweber list compared to my Marketers Choice list, even though they are equal in terms of the size of subscribers.
• How fast an email marketing campaign fades out, as compared to putting an affiliate link on my blog

Now again, the data you get may be significantly different depending on your own business model.

Now, you can also do some pretty important tracking in Aweber or any other decent email autoresponder program out there. You can:

• Deliverability rates – the % of your emails that successfully finds it way to your prospects inbox (don’t rely on the company’s data, do your own testing to verify this)
• Track “open-rates” – However, since this usually involves sending out a HTML email, I only use it periodically
• Click rates – How many people click on your email links, and which links they clicked on

But the good thing with Aweber is that you can create something called Split Test Broadcast.

With this feature, you can send out 2 different emails to the same group at the same time. It is extremely good for testing:

• Headline A vs Headline B
• Long email vs Short Email
• Single link vs Two / three links
• The effectiveness of putting the name in the headline
• Hard sell vs presell

And a lot more.

So basically you can do all these simple things to really make sense of your own email marketing campaigns.

Stop listening to what others say work or don’t – test it out for yourself, and you can definitely improve your email marketing income.

If someone hands you their namecard offline, does it mean that they are giving you permission to add their name and email address to your mailing list?

NO.

That’s something people get wrong most of the time. Just because someone gives you their name card it does not mean that you can add them to your mailing list or autoresponder.

Here’s what Justin Premrick wrote on the Aweber blog:

There’s a difference between providing contact information to be subscribed to a newsletter and say, providing it so that I can call you back about setting up a meeting. And there are a whole lot of reasons in between.

So lets explore a few situations when it would be ok to add an offline contact to your mailing list, and when doing so is not only wrong, but is also considered spam.

1. Someone casually passed his namecard to you at a seminar – Not OK
2. Someone you met an an event liked what your business is about – Not OK
3. Someone passed you his namecard and aksed you to send him more information about your business – OK
4. You call or email the person who gave you his namecard, and got his permission to be included in your mailing list – OK
5. You distribute an “attendence sheet” during an event for attendees – Not OK, but arguable
6. You distribute a “join our mailing list” sheet during and event for attendees – OK
7. You bought a “database” of a few thousand names – Not OK

You can get a list of other do’s and don’t here.

In “permission based” email marketing, you need to:

• Get permission form the user to send him commercial information – called “Opt-in”
• Provide means for that person to stop receiving emails without having to ask you to do it – called “Opt-out”

If you don’t do all that, you’re basically spamming.

Do it right, and the easiest way is to get an Aweber autoresponder. They have very good reports on spam complaints and a very good opt-in / opt-out.

Does Viral Marketing really work?

The checks above amount to RM888 or USD246. It’s the total amount I spent for getting over 3,400 targetted opt-in subscribers to one of my viral marketing sites, in just 30 days.

I could have been more if not for the problems I had with my hosting script being shutdown, and also the lack of dependable Internet access for over 20 days when I moved to a new home.

So yes, viral marketing works, and here’s how you do it without affiliates or high-profile JVs:

1. Create a product – in my case, it was a case-study of a project I did
2. Give it away for free - instead of charging for the product, give it away for free.
3. Ask for referrals - ask new members to refer others. In my case, they have to refer 5 people to get to the VIP level, which gives them access to more stuff the free members don’t get
4. Hold a contest - instead of paying per-lead, I held a contest for 30 days, and offered prizes and cash rewards

In my example, I was not charging for a product. Therefore, I cant reply of affiliates to make it work. I could pay everyone per-lead, but that would have cost to much to implement. So I knew I had to reply on people referring their frieds.

I got a call from my ex-colleague who heard about me and my “Internet thing” from a co-worker who wanted to fill his 5-friends quota. What a suprise! It finally proved to me that viral marketing is a real thing.

If I had not targetted such a small market (Malaysians only) I might have got much more opt-in subscribers. But I had a reason to do this, as I wanted to build a massive Malaysian list for a product (and a physical book) I had planned for 2007.

And that’s the final lesson for viral marketing – do not just build a list, if you have no definate plan for that list. The list would otherwise be wasted eventually.

Aweber is one of the best autoresponder and mailing list services out there. But with every great service, there are some gaps that cause problems.

The main one I had was with Aweber’s double-optin procedure.

Once a prospect has already subscribe and verified to a mailing list, if he subscribes via the same form again he’ll get an error message like the one above.
To avoid getting this rather unprofessional message, you need to enter the following code into your optin form via HTML:

< input type=”hidden” value=”http://www.example.com/thank-you-already-onlist.htm” name=”meta_redirect_onlist” />

With that code, you can safely just redirect the user to your sales page without causing confusion. Remember that the same user may have forgotten that he had previously opted in to your website, and may decide to opt-in again.

However, the option above does not put the user back to the first message of your autoresponder, which I think is a feature that the good folks at Aweber need to have a look at.

Was reading the Aweber blog, and they just published some tips on integrating their Aweber system to Paypal and Clickbank.

With this integration technique, you can automatically subscribe paid customers to Aweber without asking them to fill-up a form (that’s what I do) after purchase. After the payment is made, Paypal / Clickbank “parses” the email address and name of the paying customer to Aweber, automatically subscribing him / her to your autoresponder.

• View: Integrate Paypal with Aweber
• View: Integrate Clickbank with Aweber

If you do this successfully, you ensure that one one “accidentally” gets on your customer list unless their payment is legit. I’m still not sure if it’s worth all the hassle.

If you’re from Malaysia and want to learn how to use PayPal, here’s the best place to get video tutorials: PayPal Malaysia