You’ve heard it said a million times before – the money is in the list.
OK – so that means we have to build a list the instant we get the chance… in other words, the first thing you send your traffic to is an opt in box. You get them onto your leads list, and follow up with them as a prospect.
Now, at some point, ideally very soon, but very possibly not-so-soon, that prospect is going to hopefully become a customer.
What happens then? I mean, from a nuts and bolts perspective, do you keep that customer on your prospect list and continue sending them promotional material for your offer?
Nope – chances are (ask me how I know) they’re going to get pissed off if you do this.
You need to now treat them as a customer, which means an entirely different approach.
For that, you’re going to need a new list.
Right – so we’ve got two lists now: a prospect list, and a customer list.
Here’s the question of the day: How can you automagically move people from one list to the other, without spending half of each day in Aweber?
Setting Up Automation Rules In Aweber
Thankfully, Aweber understands simple problems like the one we’re talking about here, and they’ve provided a way to easily take care of this automatically.
You’re going to have to have your two lists setup in Aweber already, and you need to have a way to automatically subscribe people to your customers list immediately after they buy something. That part should be pretty easy – pretty much all e-commerce solutions provide you with some sort of option along those lines.
The next step is to login to Aweber, and find the Automation menu (see pic at right).
After you’ve found the automation menu, you’re going to need to use a tiny bit of logic.
Don’t worry, they’re only going to give you three options, so you shouldn’t need to use up too much brain steam on this one.
Make sure you’ve got your prospect list selected (see top left corner of your Aweber account for the Current List selection box).
Now, think about what you want to do with that lead. When that prospect subscribes to your customer list, you want them to be automagically unsubscribed from the prospect list, right?
That means you need option 1 – “Unsubscribe from list XXXXXX when lead subscribes to” and then you need to select your customer list in the box to the right (see pic below).
After you’ve done that, make sure you save, and then you’re done.
Keep in mind that for this to work, your prospects need to be using the same email address to purchase as they’ve used to sign up for your free information. The only thing Aweber has to go on is that email address – they don’t look at names or any other information. So if your customer has used two different email addresses, he’s going to be on two different lists simultaneously. I hope that is about as obvious as it gets, but you never know…
Ok – one other thing to mention / caution. In my travels, I’ve sometimes found Aweber to fall down on this particular little rule. I had a batch of customers squeak past the automation rules recently, which caused a bit of a pain when I had to go back and explain why they were getting discount coupons to buy a product they’d already paid full price for (in case you’re ever in need of a downer, this often works better than Valium. I recommend taking with coffee).
That said, it does work 99% of the time, and that 99% is going to save you a heck of a lot of time, headache and frustration.
