How To Create An Email Newsletter Using AWeber

Running a small business often means that you do not have the time or money available for online marketing avenues such as pay-per-click advertising, banner ads or an email newsletter. If your chief concern is limited resources, however, creating an email newsletter may be the best option for your small biz.

What many small business owners need is simply a push in the right direction to make it happen. This article is that push!

Understand the Terminology

There are a few terms that you will want to be familiar with before you start.

Email list. Your email list is the people that have agreed to receive your newsletter.

Opt-in list. An opt-in list is just a list of email addresses of people who have agreed to receive emails from your business.

Double opt-in. Double opt-in means that when a person signs up for your email newsletter, they will then receive a confirmation email, which they have to acknowledge, to ensure that they want to receive marketing materials from you. A double opt-in list is going to be the safest opt-in email list for you to build.

Opt-out option. The opt-out option on your newsletter allows subscribers to remove themselves from the email list any time that they choose by clicking an unsubscribe link. Most countries require you, by law, to put an opt-out option on your subscription emails.

Editorial Credit: Warren Price Photography / Shutterstock.com

Spam. The word refers to unsolicited messages delivered via the Internet by advertisers, generally email, but it has grown with technology to mean any sort of electronic communication. The usage was inspired by a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant where the majority of the menu items contained the canned meat product, Spam.

Before you create your email newsletter, there are legal requirements for opt-in and opt-out features that you should review for U.S., Canadian, or European subscribers, so that your publication will not become Spam.

Why an Email Newsletter is Ideal for a Small Business

There are two reasons why you would want to try running an email newsletter for your business.

First, since your email list will be composed of people who have subscribed, you have an audience that is actively interested in your product or service.

Second, you can set up your marketing email to be a passive source of advertising by tying it into your website, allowing your newsletter to automatically be generated when you add new content to your website. This is the least time-intensive way to market to your email list.

It’s important to realize, however, that you will receive what you put into your newsletter marketing efforts. If you take the minimalist approach and send out newsletters generated by the new content you add to your website, you’ll see minimal results. If you take a more active role and design each newsletter to be unique and useful to your subscribers, there will be a much better return for your work.

The product or service that you offer is also going to have an influence upon the effectiveness of your newsletter marketing. As an example, a restaurant offering daily specials, or that which has regular events, will probably see better results than a business that does not have the flexibility to provide similar high-interest content.

It’s a newsletter. Consider what your readers will consider to be newsworthy.

Why AWeber?

There are many product and services that you could use to create an email newsletter. AWeber has one of the easiest learning curves, which why it is a popular platform for novice marketers.

There are some alternatives to using AWeber. ConstantContact is one of them. It provides an identical service to AWeber for the same price with similar response forms and templates. Where AWeber stands out from the competition is in their ‘RSS to Email’ feature, which is what allows a business owner to “set it and forget it.”

With AWeber, it’s as simple as plugging your RSS link (every blog has one, for WordPress, it is found by adding ‘/feed’ to the end of a website’s domain name or URL) into the form and setting the frequency that you want your emails to go out. The same can be accomplished with ConstantContact, however, you will need to use their API to accomplish the same goal. This can be more difficult for beginning users.

What You Will Need Besides a Website…

If you decide to go with AWeber, there are a few requirements. You will need to sign up for an AWeber account and the pricing depends upon the number of your newsletter subscribers. The base price is $19 a month for up to 500 subscribers, which is a good starter package.

You will need to decide if you are going to set up and run your AWeber email list on your own, or if you are going to hire a webmaster. If you are familiar with adding content to your website, you should be able to add an AWeber newsletter without any outside help. AWeber has a very good web interface, which allows users to easily design the sign-up forms, newsletters and thank you emails that will be sent to newsletter subscribers.

Above all, recognize that your email newsletter will become more effective over time.

Attracting people to sign up for your newsletter may seem agonizingly slow, at first, but as more people sign up, you should see improved results. Setting up a newsletter will take some trial and error, on your part, to determine what works best for your specific audience. Something as simple as changing the color of your sign-up button can drastically increase the subscription rate. Take things one step at a time to determine what works best for your message, your audience, and your business.