How to Send a Daily Deals Email Using Avantlink and Aweber
One thing that I’ve struggled with since starting this blog and purchasing Aweber is building a sizable list and selling to that list. For example, with this site I probably have about 25 subscribers to my list. With my top niche website, I have about 55 members on my list. In the internet marketing world, those numbers are small and probably not worth much of anything.
With that being said, I’m not sure I even know what I would send to my lists and how I would even use those lists to make money, assuming I had a large number of subscribers. (Don’t worry, I don’t plan on trying to monetize the list for this website – I’m speaking only about my niche website lists.)
That’s where my new “outdoor gear deals” website comes into play (EverydayGearDeals.com). If I am able to drive traffic to the site, I have the perfect opportunity to have people sign up for daily “deal of the day” notifications. Rather than stopping by the site each and every day, I’ll just email you a list of the current deals and you can pick out what you like.
Sounds like a good idea, but how do I go about doing that?
Step1: Aweber Blog Broadcast
If you are not familiar with Aweber – it is an email marketing program that allows you to build a subscriber list and send mass emails (newsletters) to that list. It keeps various statistics about each mass message that you send, such as number of emails sent, number that bounced, how many were opened, and how many links were clicked.
One feature that I just became familiar with is the Blog Broadcast.
Unlike a regular Broadcast, which is basically just a mass mail message that you send to your list one time – the Blog Broadcast allows you to populate the content of your message from an RSS feed. It also allows you to schedule reoccurring monthly, weekly, or daily broadcast messages.
In the case of the “daily deal” email, we obviously want to choose to send our message everyday. You can even choose what time of day to send the message. If you know the reading habits of your list members, you can try to align your message scheduling with them to maximize the percent of opened emails.
NOTE: Aweber is a paid service, so this method assumes that you are a member of the service.
Step 2: The Avantlink.com Daily Deal RSS Feed
Avantlink is an affiliate marketing company that I’ve just come to really enjoy working with. Besides offering the normal affiliate banner ads and text ads, which you are probably used to from other affiliate programs such as commission junction, linkshare, and amazon, they also have some really innovative affiliate tools with many different types of feeds to choose from. These include product feeds, coupon feeds, and dynamic daily deal feeds. They even let you receive the feeds in a variety of ways, including text only RSS, HTML formatted RSS, custom RSS, javascript, tab delimited, comma separated, xml, etc.
Side note: Another awesome thing about Avantlink is that many of their merchant cookies last up to 120 days!
For this example, we’ll want to focus on the daily deal feed with a custom RSS formatting.
Setting Up Your RSS Feed
I’m going to assume that you have already signed up for Avantlink and that you have been accepted as an affiliate for a merchant that has a Deal of the Day. (Use the merchant filter to filter by merchants that offer a Deal of the Day and apply to the ones that match your niche.)
Once you have logged into the site head to Tools and then down to Deal of the Day Sign-up. Choose your website, the merchant website, and then select the option to customize your own RSS.
Next, press the Edit Advanced Layout Templates button. This will open a pop-up window that will allow you to stylize your deal of the day advertisement to look however you would like. You must be somewhat familiar with HTML and/or using a simple WYSIWYG editor in order to customize the ad placement. By default, you will see the merchant’s sample template. If you do not feel comfortable making changes, then you may leave it as it is.
When you are happy with the look of your ad, press the Accept button. This will close the pop-up window.
Finally press the Get Html button. Your RSS link should look something like this:
http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?module=DotdFeed&affiliate_id=33297&merchant_id=10060&website_id=48705&custom_tracking_code=&output=rss&layout_id=17155
Step 3: Bringing it all Together
Now that we have our RSS feed, it’s time to head back to Aweber and setup the Blog Broadcast. From the Blog Broadcast page, you’ll want to click the giant green button labeled Create New Blog Broadcast.
Now you’ll want to do is to paste the RSS feed url from the previous step into the RSS Feed URL box.
Next you need to choose an email template. Browse the available templates and press the Load Template button to load the selected template into the email message box. Aweber will automatically load place holder variables into the body of the message. When the message is sent to your list, these variables will be populated with data from your RSS affiliate feed.
You can modify the message to look however you want, but it’s a good idea to start with one of the available templates and then design from there. I would suggest that you leave everything as it is for your first test just to get an idea of how things work and what variables do what.
Once you are happy with your broadcast message, you can find the scheduling options just below the body of the message. For a daily deal site, you’ll probably want to schedule the message to send every day. You can also optionally have a link to the posted message be broadcast to your Facebook and Twitter pages, which I think is a great idea and another way to connect with your customers. Once you are happy with your message, you can press the Save Blog Broadcast button.
Finally, before the message is set to go out to your list, I’d make sure to hit the Test button and send a test message to yourself to make sure it looks OK. To be safe, uncheck the box for Send Automatically when you are saving your Blog Broadcast.
And that’s it. If the message is sent successfully, your user’s will get a dynamically generated message in their inbox each day with your daily deal – including your affiliate link! Here is an example of how the test message we just created looked in my Inbox.
Example of how the email will look in your Inbox
Taking it a Step Further
Since my site is a collection of deals from the outdoor niche, my initial issue is that I wanted to send out an email that included multiple deals in one email (16 to be exact). I won’t go into complete details about what else is needed, but you’ll need to know a bit of PHP coding.
If you’d like to include multiple deals in one email, you’ll need to write a PHP script that reads in feeds from each deal site and then formats them all into a nice little list or table. From there, you’ll need to create and format your own RSS feed. I used PHP to create my RSS feed and there are plenty of sources online that explain step by step how to do this. I used this one as my example: Create an RSS Feed with PHP.
Once you have your own custom RSS feed, you can go back and plug that into Aweber as we did in Step 3 – and now you have a daily email with multiple affiliate links from Avantlink. Stop over and sign up for my list if you’d like to see it in action: EverydayGearDeals.com
Good luck!
Related posts:
- Programming My Own Deal of the Day Website – Everyday Gear Deals
- Increase Your Aweber Signups with the ViperBar WordPress Plugin
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Mike,
Great how to post and blog design.
I think there probably is some type of critical mass thats needed for a list to determine if it is worthwhile or not.
Might have to do with a combination of niche type, cross marketing potential and #s of people interested in the niche.
Regards
Mark