Quantcast

May 22, 2012

Are You Alienating Your Subscribers?

How irritating is this? You get an email offer or see an offer (for something you actually want) on a website, click the link and end up on a page that says something like, “Offer not available in your area”.

Otherwise, you send out an offer like the Maxim magazine offer (pictured left), and your non-U.S.-based subscribers get redirected to SurveyScout instead.

Residents of Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand (or anywhere else that isn’t the U.S.) end up on those pages far too often when marketers send U.S.-only offers to their entire list of newsletter subscribers.

There are two big downsides to this.

First of all, you may lose those subscribers through alienation.

Secondly, your affiliate manager may terminate your affiliation with their program when they receive thousands of invalid clicks which then wrecks their EPC.

If you accept newsletters signups from all over the world, subscribers from countries other than the U.S. probably represent a HUGE percentage of your list.

Here are a 3 ways you can avoid losing those subscribers and your affiliations.

  1. Be specific. If you include an offer that is only valid for U.S. residents, clearly mark the offer as such.
  2. Offer an alternative. Include another offer in your newletter that is available worldwide or add offers that are valid in specific countries.

    For example if you really want to promote Maxim magazine offer which is good only in the U.S., look for other offers to include in your newsletter that are available to a wider audience.

  3. Segment your list by country based on IP addresses. This is the BEST option and you can do this when you use Aweber’s autoresponder service.

    To do this, go into ‘Leads’, then ‘Search through Leads’ and select ‘Country (from IP)’ from the dropdown menu and enter the name of the country whose leads you want to dislay, eg. Canada.

    Once those leads are returned, you’ll want to save that ‘view’. In this case, you would type ‘Canada’ into the text box beside the words “To save this view, name it and click “Save View”:” and click Save.

    Now when you have an offer that is only available to Canadian residents, you’ll be able to send it to just your Canadian subscribers.

    To do this, click on ‘Messages’, then ‘Broadcast Edit’ and select ‘Canada’ from the dropdown menu beside ‘List View’ (as shown below).

    Enter your message as usual, and you’re done! :-)

Set up Country by IP Views in your Aweber’s autoresponder account and stop running the risk of losing your valued subscribers.

About Rosalind Gardner

Rosalind Gardner is a blogger, speaker and Internet Marketing consultant, best known for her "Super Affiliate Handbook", (referred to by industry professionals as the 'bible' of affiliate marketing) and Rosalind Gardner's Academy - a multi-media version of the book.

Comments

  1. Keith says:

    Wow, What a great tip Roz. I didn’t know I could do that with Aweber.

    Thanks,
    Keith

  2. John Uhrig says:

    Great set of tips Rosalind,

    I’ll start this asap within my Aweber account.
    Regards,
    John

  3. I’ve never think about this. I will try to be careful from now when I send messages.

  4. Choix Melchoir says:

    You’re absolutely spot-on on this one! Yes Roz, one can certainly lose subscribers from around the world who would feel alienated. We always want to be sensitive to all our subscribers.

  5. geoCPA says:

    You can also come at this from the other angle too. There are various ‘geo-targeting’ scripts out there too which let you create links that will automatically split off traffic by country – sending each to an offer they can actually apply for.

    Happier customers (they HATE that ‘Offer not available in your area’ message) AND you get paid for more of your traffic of course!

  6. Alex says:

    Superb tip, I had no idea you could segment a list by IP and speaking as a Brit it is WILDLY annoying to get these idiot messages – “not available in your country…”

Disclosure: We are compensated for our reviews. Click here for details.