Tips
Many sites benefit from offering a "tip of the week" signup. Visitors submit their email address and you can email them on occassion with helpful tips. Its a great way to convert visitors into members for your site. This is all handled with an "Autoresponder" service. Membergate intentionally requires an outside service if you wish to have an autoresponder. There's a very important reason which you can read about in this article.
- Autoresponder - This allows you to also send out a "broadcast" email at a specified date (such as a tip of the week) but you can also "preload" your messages for new signups to receive as well. For example on day 1 of signing up they get your "welcome aboard" email, perhaps on day 3 you send some helpful tips, on day 7 you can send more tips, day 14 you have a follow up etc. These responses happen automatically, hence the name "Autoresponder".
A Listserv does not have this ability to preload messages that get delivered in a sequence.
Most any autoresponder service can be used on a Membergate site. They will typically give you the code for the signup box. That code is then pasted into the "Tip of the Week" category box from your control panel. Not all autoresponder services are equal. A big factor is their delivery rate. That means, what percentage of the emails they send actually make it to the inbox of the recipients. We have found one of the most effective autoresponder services to be AWeber. Here are some of the benefits of their service:
- Their emails get through - Our experience has shown that AWeber has one of the highest delivery rates that we've seen. There is a reason for this. AWeber is not only a leader in autoresponders, but they have a very good relationship with major Internet Service Providers. They meet with companies such as AOL, Earthlink etc and have worked out a mutually beneficial arrangement. That is, if anyone reports an AWeber email as being spam, the reporting parties email address is immediately removed from all of the lists of that AWeber customer. No questions asked. Because of this instant and effective response to a spam allegation, the major ISPs keep AWeber's mailservers off of their blacklists. Other autoresponder services who don't take these proactive steps typically suffer lower delivery rates due to spam complaints.
- Well Documented - AWeber has well documented tutorials to help you use their services. Their videos are similar in nature to the online video tutorials which are available to your at Membergate.
- Testing and Tracking - AWeber has many added functions built into it to let you test and track your sign up boxes. You can find out how many people are clicking the links in the emails that you are sending out as well as which signup boxes are performing the best for you.
- Value - You can have as many email lists that you want with one AWeber account. You could use one account across multiple sites or for multiple purpose within one site if you want. All of this for under $20 month.