This week, we’ve been talking about how “the money is in the list” – your email marketing list.
Today, let’s focus on creating the foundation for your very first email marketing list. (For the purposes of this post, I’m assuming you’ve set up your aWeber account – but haven’t gotten much further).
Now, before we get started, there are a couple of things you need to do first:
1. Figure out exactly who your target audience is. The more clear you can be on this, the better because it will allow you to craft content that “speaks” directly to their specific needs.
2. Decide what you want to accomplish with this list. Figure out what value you plan to deliver to your audience. (In other words, why would they WANT to receive emails from you?) Then, decide how this aligns with the overall purpose/objectives of your business. (How are you going to monetize or otherwise leverage this process to enhance your business?)
These two steps are important because ultimately this process will boil down to creating and supplying CONTENT – and you need to know who you are talking to and what matters to them before you write a single word.
Okay, so once you log into your new aWeber account, you are going to see a menu across the top that looks like this:
If that is hard to read, what you are looking for is a link just left of the center of the screen that says “Create and Manage Lists” – and click on it. That will take you to a new page – and off to your right there will be another link (in green) that says “+Create a New List” – and click on that.
Setting Up Your List:
Step 1
The page you land on will ask for basic information across 4 areas:
- Essential Info – List Name, List Description, and who the messages are “From”
- Company Branding – Name, URL, logo URL and your email signature if you choose to use one
- Social Media/Sharing – access information for Twitter and Facebook profiles
- Notifications – the email address where you receive a heads up re: new subscribers.
Once you complete this information, simply click “Save List Settings.” Then, “Go to Step 2”
Step 2
This is where you customize your confirmation message. One pointer is to look closely at the auto-generated version. Here is what it looks like:
Notice how it says “the Buildinglists10 group?” Sounds kinda wanky, doesn’t it? So, I changed it to read “from WebCopyResults.com.”
(In case you are wondering – I am creating a new list for a 5-Part eCourse on the Basics of List Building to go along with this series – stay tuned for details! 
)
Then – this is important, so make a note of it somewhere – there is a field for “Success Page URL” – this is where your customers will land once they confirm their subscription. We are going to create this page in a bit, but let’s go ahead and enter the URL of the page we are about to build.
I recommend keeping this simple – for example, I might add http://www.webcopyresults.com/Success7 – or something else along the lines of /Welcome15 or /Congratulations21. (I just add numbers to make it a little tougher to guess – I don’t want this page to be visited by the world – only those who subscribe to my list).
(We’ll cover how to create this page and what to include on it in a later post).
Once completed, again hit “Save List Settings” – and your new list set-up is complete. Now, it’s just a matter of 1.) getting your “Thank You” or “Success” page in place, 2.) setting up follow-up messages and 3.) creating and installing your web forms.
We’ll take a look at each of these over the next several posts.
Til Next Time,
PS Too busy or too frustrated to set your email program up yourself? I am currently running a special promotion for WebCopyResults.com readers where I will do all these steps for you – you could have your email campaign up and running before you know it! Click here for more details!
{ 1 trackback }