Brighter Marketing

The new website was launched on 17th November and we didn’t want this to go unnoticed, so we developed a promotional email to go out on the following day 18th November. We have been building an email marketing database for over two years now, made up from people we meet to people who have subscribed via our website, however they all have one thing in common, they’ve requested to be on our mailing list and can unsubscribe at any time. We use a couple of very inexpensive and easy to use tools to email our list they are Livewire Campaign (www.livewirecampaign.co.uk) and Aweber (www.aweber.com).

Aweber
Aweber is the most powerful of the two, for around £11 or $24 per month you can send out email campaigns using their software and servers. The main reason we use Aweber is that they have a facility that completely automates the email marketing process. For example, you will notice that you can subscribe to our 52 marketing tips, one for every week of the year, and this is all taken care of by Aweber.

1. You design the web form you want to appear on the website and it will automatically generate the HTML code or script that you need to put on your website for you form to appear.

2. You edit the email that is sent to person to confirm that they really do want to subscribe to your list.

3. You can link to a thank you page on your website once the person has confirmed they really do want to subscribe to your list.

4. You write the follow-up email that you would like to be sent out automatically to the subscriber following confirmation e..g thanks for subscribing here is the information you asked for.

5. You can then write as many follow-up emails as you want and time them to go out at certain time. They can be in HTML or they can be in plain text. For example, we wrote 52 emails each with a gap of 7 days, so that no matter when someone joins our 52 marketing tips list, they will be automatically sent out a marketing tips email every 7 days.

There is more functionality in Aweber, these are just the basics, but it is a great little tool that can completely automate your email marketing process. What’s more you can see who has subscribed to your email list and individuals can unsubscribe whenever they want just by clicking the link at the bottom of your emails to them.

Livewire Campaign
Livewire Campaign is a much simpler tool, but just as effective and you pay as you go – to send 1000 emails costs around £25, so if you don’t want to subscribe to a service like Aweber you can use Livewire just when you need it. In fact if you only want to send 50 emails then this is free. You can design your email based on a range of templates, have links to your website and include images, it doesn’t offer the automated email features that Aweber does, but you can download some HTML code to put on your website so that when people sign up to your newsletter, their details are automatically added to your Livewire database.

What did we do?
To promote the book we decided that we would give away two chapters of the book, this might sound like a risky strategy, but we thought that if people read and liked what we had to say, then when we launched the book in January, they would be more likely to want to buy it. It is a little bit like getting a sample of cheese, or a dip at one of those country fairs, once you have tasted it, then you usually end up buying some. It has worked well for us, the email went out an got a good response, using Aweber to automatically send out the two chapters to those people who recommended it.

We are currently working on a plan to make The Brighter Marketing Bible for Small Businesses a best seller on Amazon, so there will be more of that in our next blog on the book launch.

Here are some links to more of our book launch diaries

How to launch a book

Book Launch – Amazon Best Seller?

Book Launch – Website fun and games

Marketing Book Launch

Book Launch – Harder than it looks