Create Forms: No CGI or ASP Needed!
I have been thinking about contact lists for quite a while now, most of my sites have a form which people fill in and then it runs a perl/CGI script or some ASP to send out emails. This is OK and I could use the emails to generate lists etc. Then if I wanted to chase customers up I would have to send mass emails to many people. If one person complains I could lose my ISP altogether. I can't afford for this to happen so I have chosen to use a third party solution and let them handle it.
Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can.
You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person's need for information quickly! But, after you've delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information? If you are like most Internet marketers, you don't.
When you don't follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him. Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn't receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.
Bearing this in mind I decided to put Aweber to the test. I have just had a conversation via the chat facility on the Aweber web site
My Chat with Marc Kline at Aweber
Rick Lomas: Can the output of the form be sent to multiple email addresses (eg 4)?
You are now speaking with Marc Kline of Customer Service.
Marc Kline: Rick Lomas, Welcome to Live Support.
Rick Lomas: hi
Marc Kline: You may set up an unlimited number of "Confirmation" addresses on the "List Settings" page under the "Autoresponder Admin Email" table.
Marc Kline: Hi there.
Marc Kline: This will send these notifications to as many addresses as you'd like, with the information filled out in the form.
Rick Lomas: ok that sounds good
Marc Kline: Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Rick Lomas: is the HTML produced for the form valid HTML or XHTML?
Marc Kline: HTML, but it can be easily modified to be compliant with the XHTML standards.
Rick Lomas: ok and i can use forms on different sites etc
Marc Kline: Yes, you certainly may. Provided that each website is your own, you can set up as many campaigns as you'd like each with an unlimited number of web forms for your pages.
Rick Lomas: is there any limit to how complex i make the forms? for example I may need to replicate this http://www.motorhomesdirect.co.uk/forms/mhd-booking-form.pdf
Rick Lomas: as a form
Marc Kline: Typically, AWeber forms are used to capture information relevant to the e-mail campaigns of a customer.
Marc Kline: That said, it certainly wouldn't be out of the question to generate a form of this complexity.
Rick Lomas: ok i think you have a sale...do you ever have any special offers?
Marc Kline: Great. We look forward to working with you then.
Marc Kline: We don't run any specials. Instead, we try to keep our prices as affordable as possible for projects of all scales.
Rick Lomas: ok - i thought i'd ask anyway...one more thing....
Rick Lomas: i have potential lists stored in folders in outlook, how easy would it be to extract the info to import into aweber?
Marc Kline: There should be an export feature for your address books in Outlook to make it easy to put your contacts into a spreadsheet or CSV file (either of which would be sufficient for our import feature).
Rick Lomas: ok all sounds good, thanks for your help and have a great day
Marc Kline: You're very welcome. It was a pleasure chatting with you.
Marc Kline: If there's anything else we can help you with, please just let us know.
Rick Lomas: Bye
Marc Kline: Bye now.
Your party has left this session.
