Rory Hansen

Everyone seems to be using Aweber nowadays, from Darren Rowse for ProBlogger.net to John Chow to half the blogs I subscribe to. From all accounts, it seems to be the defacto standard for e-mail newsletter delivery.

I’ve been researching Aweber this morning to see if it would be a worthwhile service to sign-up for. It costs $19/month to use their newsletter services, but with estimates of newsletter subscribers “worth” at least $2/year each, a newsletter subscriber list of just a hundred people could already offset the Aweber annual costs. And, with A-List bloggers like Darren and John compiling newsletter subscriber lists in the 10,000 to 20,000 range, it’s clear that you could earn huge profits from a successful newsletter strategy.

The one Aweber feature that has gained a lot of attention in the last couple weeks is the ’Pop Over’ signup form, which has been proven to improve newsletter signup rates by as much as 1000%. The common usage of the Aweber ‘Pop Over’ so far has been to have the pop-up appear on page load over-top of your blog’s regular content, enticing the user to submit their email address. Testimonials suggest that accompanying your newsletter sign-up “call-to-action” with an image (such as the SLR camera photo on Darren’s photography blog ‘Pop Over’) helps to sell the idea to your site visitor.

The Aweber website also suggests you can increase sign-up rates by:

• Changing the pop-up delay. Instead of having the pop-up appear directly after page load, try changing the delay value to 15 seconds, or 30 seconds, or higher. Of course, whether this will be successful will largely depend on the “Average Time on Site” for your user base. Google Analytics does a good job of compiling metrics like this, so I’d suggest taking a peek at that value before playing with the pop-up delay.
• Changing how the pop-up appears. The pop-up can be configured to either immediately appear, or you can add some nice transition effects to make the pop-up fade or slide into the page. These kinds of transitions are obviously a little more intrusive, but depending on where your users are concentrating their attention on the screen, they may be more appropriate for your blog.

Of even greater value is to read over the comments section for this particular post, as newsletter owners have submitted a wealth of feedback about what has worked for them.

I haven’t yet reached a decision about Aweber, but it’s clear from Google research that they are in a class of their own for newsletter management. I just need to determine if I can build a subscriber list in a timeframe that would offset the $19/month service cost.

Are you using Aweber? What has your experience been so far?