How to Start with AWeber and Set Up Your Email Newsletter

AWeber is an email autoresponder that we recommend our clients use for email marketing.

It is a good way to manage your regular newsletter or other email messages to a specific audience:

• visitors to your website can subscribe and receive your current newsletter straight away - fully automated
• to send out a new newsletter you do a broadcast to all your subscribers
• subscribers always have the option to unsubscribe - this is fully automated

AWeber has very good deliverability rates. This means email sent from your AWeber account is less likely to get filtered as junk mail or spam. (And just because you have permission to send email doesn’t mean email providers such as Yahoo or Hotmail will respect that).

Setting up your Aweber account

You should own your email lists.

So while we could offer to outsource this to you, we don’t. We recommend you buy your own account, then we make it easy for you to integrate this with your OM4 site.

Please feel free to use our affiliate link to sign up for AWeber: AWeber

You can pay by the month or annually.

Setting up your AWeber account for the first time

There are a few fields to fill out to set up AWeber for the first time. Note: see below for links to AWeber tutorials to learn more about these steps.

1. Log in. Log in to AWeber using your username/password
2. List Settings. Go to the List Settings tab and set your List Settings, Company Branding and Reply Address
3. Verified Opt In. Go to the Verified Opt In tab and set your Verification Message and Confirmation Success Page (hint: set up a page in your website for this purpose, and enter its address here)
4. Create Web Form. Go to the List Settings, Web Form tab and click the Create Web Form tab. Give the form a Form Name in the Form Defaults tab, then go to the next page, hover over the Name field and click the Green + button to add it to the Email field already on your form. Click Save.
5. Get Web Form Details. Notice the form you have just created and click Get HTML. Copy the non-javascript text shown here to a temporary document somewhere, you will use it to add your sign up form to your website.
6. Create Message. Go to the Messages, Follow Up tab and create the first follow up message. This is the message sent out to subscribers when they first sign up for your list. So if this is a Newsletter list, make this the current version of the Newsletter. If this is a multi-part email series, you can create several messages and set the number of days that separate the automatic sending of each message.

You can create multiple lists and web forms in your Aweber account. And you can add multiple sign up forms to your OM4 website.

To create a second list, notice the Managing List: default1235 (Add New) item at the top of each page and click (Add New). Repeat the steps above.

Add your AWeber List to your OM4 Website

To add your AWeber sign up form to your website:

1. Create AWeber Widget. On your OM4 website, go to Dashboard, Design, Widgets. Scroll down to AWeber Mailing List and click Add. Your AWeber widget now appears under Current Widgets on the right of your screen.
2. Configure AWeber Widget. Using the details you copied from your AWeber Form (using Get HTML), click the Edit button for the AWeber widget and enter the details requested.

To help you find the right bits of code to enter into your widget, here’s an example:

<center><form method="post" action="<a href="http://www.aweber.com/scripts/addlead.pl" target="_blank">http://www.aweber.com/scripts<WBR>/addlead.pl</a>" target="_new">
<input type="hidden" name="meta_web_form_id" value="1708888287“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”meta_split_id” value=”">
<input type=”hidden” name=”unit” value=”newsletter-signup“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”redirect” value=”<a href=”http://www.aweber.com/form/thankyou_vo.html” target=”_blank”>http://www.aweber.com/form<WBR>/thankyou_vo.html</a>” id=”redirect_f1256e3d9788b275c0<WBR>8a3e67ce6d0ff3″>
<input type=”hidden” name=”meta_redirect_onlist” value=”">
<input type=”hidden” name=”meta_adtracking” value=”">
<input type=”hidden” name=”meta_message” value=”1″>
<input type=”hidden” name=”meta_required” value=”from”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”meta_forward_vars” value=”0″>
<table>
<tr><td colspan=2><center>Subscribe today!!<br /></center></td></tr>
<tr><td>Email:</td><td><input type=”text” name=”from” value=”" size=”20″></td></tr>
<tr><td>Name:</td><td><input type=”text” name=”name” value=”" size=”20″></td></tr>
<tr><td>State:</td><td><input type=”text” name=”custom State” value=”" size=”20″></td></tr>
<tr><td align=”center” colspan=”2″><input type=”submit” name=”submit” value=”Submit”></td></tr>
</table>
</form></center>

The unit is highlighted in blue (i.e. newsletter-signup), and the form id is highlighted in orange (i.e. 1708888287).

So you would enter newsletter-signup in the unit field and 1708888287 in the form id field.

Learning how to use Aweber

There are some excellent video tutorials available from Aweber to familiarise you with the system.

Here are a few we recommend to get started with:

• Getting Started (30 mins)
• Email Newsletters (3 mins)
• Import Subscribers (4 mins)
• Collect Subscribers with a Web Form