Adding Advertisers to Autoresponders
One of the most common requests from our beta-test was for an option to add your Advertisers to an Autoresponder ‘automatically’ when they submitted an Ad.
It had been in our initial ‘specs’ but the further into this we got, the harder it became to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution for the Members that would also work for AdCards as a whole, and the individual Advertisers.
I had two major concerns with this…
- If we set things up to add people to an autoresponder for you when they submitted an Ad, they would still have to opt-in themselves. With the new EU privacy laws it has to be their decision, so the days of just adding them and hoping they’d confirm are over. We’d have to warn them that was happening and what to expect, how to opt-out etc, and ask them to ‘check the box’ if they were OK with that.
- Once that was done, we have no control ‘how’ the individual Members woulds treat them… and if a few Members did the wrong thing… ie blanketing their new subscribers with marketing emails… the person on the other end is only going to remember that it all started at AdCard.com… and we’d bear the brunt of any spam complaints etc.
So while we’re getting started, we’ve got a bit of time to toss a few ideas around and make sure we get it right.
It should be obvious that a big part of the value for you here is building your list. So we do need to provide a mechanism that will let you contact those people and get them onto an appropriate mailing list or autoresponder, as quickly and easily as possible.
These days that will almost certainly require a good offer on your part… and an attractive lead capture page… to get them to opt-in, so there’s a few possibilities:
1. Set it up as an integrated part of our process. Let you submit code for a specific autoresponder service and let you choose to insert the opt-in page into the sign up process if you want. As mentioned, we’ve pretty much decided against this approach for now.
2. Create a standalone Optin page on our site. It would be set up so you can edit it with your own offer and copy, then it’s up to you to use the direct email option in your Dash get the advertiser to visit and hopefully opt-in.
3. Leave it up to the individual member. So you can set these up wherever and however you want, and then you can send your advertisers to the page via direct email invite or from Ads on your AdBoards.
4. Add an offer to the Ad Manager Page. This would be a small ad leading to a pop-up optin form, your choice of autoresponder. We’d add it to the ‘thank you’ page they see after the ad is created, and also on the Ad Manager page if they log back in later. You’d just need to set text and a graphic, and your autoresponder code. and we’d do the rest.
5. AdBoard Pop Up with Optin Offer. A fourth option that’s been floated is for a pop-up when a visitor arrives on site, offering a free Add-On Coupon, sent by email once they opt-in. You’d either enable/disable this for your own AdBoards.
6. Auto Follow Ups Pushing Optin. A final suggestion is to set up a short ‘follow up’ email sequence that goes to your advertisers automatically, that you can edit to direct them to any offer/page you like. (This is another one we’ve pretty much ruled out, but I’m including it in case it leads to a better idea! )
My general preference would be for a combo of #2 and #4… we’ll set up something basic here to get you started, and then you plug in your own lead magnet, autoresponder and thank you page.
A number of members are already working #3 and getting pretty good opt-in rates just by offering a free Add-On in return for the sign up so that would work, except it’s very hands-on… you need to monitor the opt-ins and then login to add the Add-On to their account… and you do need to know how to set up squeeze pages and mailing lists etc.
However we do it, my main concern is that we cannot let AdCardz.com get a bad reputation for spam etc… so we do not want to set this up as any sort of bulk email site and any permanent solution will have to use your own third party email services.
So there are no plans to let you email all your advertisers at once.
You do have the option to email individual advertisers though, directly from your own email account/client. Plus we might add a login-ad option so you can get a message to your advertisers when they login,once we’ve been running a while and we can see that advertisers are in fact going to log back in with any regularity!
So you can see there are lots of possibilities, so I’m looking for a bit of input from as many people as possible!
Any ideas or thoughts, please leave a note in the comments below!
Right now everyone’s Advertiser lists will be quite small, so we’ve got a bit of time to brain-storm on this, but I do want to get something in place and tested BEFORE this takes off and people start to build some much bigger lists.
