Email marketing is essential for building relationships with potential customers in order to drive growth. But managing campaigns, organizing subscribers, creating quality content, and analyzing data takes a massive amount of time. That‘s why savvy email marketers leverage automation to streamline repetitive tasks and focus on more meaningful work.
AWeber is a popular email service provider used by over 250,000 businesses worldwide. Its drag-and-drop editor, segmenting tools, and integration capabilities make it easy to create targeted campaigns. However, without workflow automation, you can still waste hours on manual data entry and mundane upkeep.
In this guide, you’ll learn 5 methods for automating different parts of AWeber, including:
- Lead capture
- Onboarding emails
- Broadcast emails
- Subscriber organization
- Analytics with webhooks and Zapier
Implementing just one or two of these techniques can save you 10+ hours each week. Once you automate your entire AWeber workflow, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it!
Let’s dive in…
1. Automate Lead Capture Into AWeber Lists
The first step in email marketing is growing your subscriber list with targeted leads. But collecting contact information from web forms, chatbots, landing pages, and other sources can be time-consuming.
Rather than exporting CSVs and manually uploading data, you can automate lead capture to instantly add any new contacts to your AWeber lists.
Sync Online Forms to Auto Add Leads
Website visitors who fill out forms and download lead magnets signal their interest. Don’t lose these leads due to human error!
Choose a form builder app like Wufoo that supports AWeber integrations. Create Zaps in Zapier to automatically add new Wufoo entries as AWeber subscribers. You can map form fields to subscriber details like name, email, phone number, etc.
This automation ensures every lead safely lands on your list rather than getting lost along the way.
Import Contacts from LinkedIn Outreach
In addition to inbound leads from your website, look for outbound opportunities. Tools like Dux-Soup and Lemlist help you identify prospects on LinkedIn to cold email or message.
When they respond with interest, use Zaps to automatically pull their information from your outreach tool into customized AWeber fields. This builds targeted mailing segments so you can follow up in a personalized way.
Track Web Analytics to Trigger Workflows
Understand how prospects interact with your website using analytics tools like Google Analytics. Based on visitor behavior like:
- Pages visited
- Time on site
- PDF downloads
You can trigger Zaps to automatically add visitors to certain AWeber lists or tag existing subscribers. For example, if someone spends over 2 minutes reading your pricing page, they may be ready for a product demo. Analytics automation spots these hot leads instantly compared to exporting batched reports.
By automatically capturing leads from forms, outreach, web analytics, and more, you can effortlessly grow targeted AWeber lists. Now let’s look at effectively onboarding new subscribers…
2. Automate Subscriber Onboarding & Welcome Emails
You finally captured a promising lead, but how do you make a great first impression? Dynamic welcome emails that provide value, incentivize engagement, and collect feedback are key.
Yet few have time to personalize emails for each new subscriber or schedule effective follow-up sequences. That’s where AWeber automation comes in.
Personalize Messages With Merge Tags
Avoid sending batch welcome emails that blast every new subscriber. Instead, personalize your outreach using merge tags that dynamically insert subscriber details like:
- First Name
- Company
- Title
You’ll stand out from other generic emails and show you care enough to customize messaging.
In AWeber, create an automated welcome series using merge tags to tailor your tone, offers, content recommendations, etc. based on what you know about each person. Use segmentation to send different series to customers vs. prospects.
Schedule Autoresponder Sequences
Timed email sequences are extremely effective at lead nurturing, but they require consistency. Rather than manually triggering each message, build autoresponder flows in AWeber to automatically deliver a predetermined series.
For example, create a 5-email sequence where new subscribers receive:
- Welcome email on sign-up
- Resource recommendations on Day 3
- Discount offer on Day 7
- Satisfaction survey on Day 15
- Special content offer on Day 30
This predictable outreach trains contacts to expect and engage with your emails.
Segment With Tags and Custom Fields
Beyond basic personalization with merge tags, you can leverage custom fields and tags for more advanced subscriber segmentation.
Perhaps you offer various content upgrades on your website like:
- Ebooks
- Whitepapers
- Cheat sheets
- Webinar invites
When visitors download an asset, use webhooks to automatically:
- Add them as an AWeber subscriber
- Tag which upgrade they downloaded
- Update a custom field tracking their marketing persona
Follow up with segmented autoresponder tracks based on their interests and characteristics for better conversions.
Onboarding is often glossed over by marketers anxious to promote their products. Yet patiently nurturing new leads is what transforms sign-ups into loyal customers. An intelligent mix of personalization and automation sets your AWeber contacts up for long-term success.
Now let’s ensure you have a streamlined system for sending compelling broadcast emails at scale while saving time…
3. Automate Broadcast Emails and Campaigns
While you’ll likely focus most of your energy on welcome sequences, don’t let one-off broadcast emails fall through the cracks. These promotional messages, digest campaigns, event reminders, and other one-to-many communications should match your onboarding quality.
But coordinating individual emails while sticking to a consistent calendar is extremely difficult without help. AWeber’s automation tools allow you to systemize broadcasts for better reliability and efficiency.
Schedule One-Time and Recurring Emails
Promotional calendars often highlight special sales like Cyber Monday or product releases that require unique broadcast emails. While you might craft the messages ahead of time, don’t trust yourself to remember to hit send on the exact date.
Instead, use AWeber to pre-schedule emails so they automatically deploy at the perfect moment even if you’re out of office, asleep, or otherwise occupied when D-day arrives.
For recurring digest campaigns like monthly newsletters, schedule those to deploy on the same weekday and time each period. Consistency and reliability is key for training your audience.
Syndicate Blog Posts as Emails
If you maintain a steady cadence of helpful blog posts, why not get more eyeballs on that great content?
Apps like Revue and Substack make it easy to convert blog content into rich emails for broader reach. Embed images and video, customize layouts, and transform posts into newsletter campaigns.
Use Zapier to automatically send new blog post emails to your AWeber lists as well. This "set it and forget it" solution means you never have to copy-paste content across channels.
Plan Sequenced Journeys
Promoting via one-off emails is effective. But smart marketers weave communications into nurturing journeys with timed touchpoints to progressively move subscribers closer to a desired outcome.
Within AWeber, visually map multi-step sequences blending various promotional emails with key subscriber actions like:
- 7 days after a missed webinar signup – Reminder email
- 1 day after missed webinar – Send webinar recording ASAP
- 2 weeks after missed webinar follow-ups – Renewed signup invite
This sequenced promotion is far more successful than isolated outreach. Plan it once in AWeber then let automation deploy each timed message without ongoing effort.
With scheduled broadcasts, blog syndication, and subscriber journeys handled by automation, you’ll enjoy consistently smooth email campaigns. Now let’s explore how to leverage automation for organizing all those subscriber details in a scalable way.
4. Automate Subscriber Data Organization
Between managing bounces, monitoring engagement metrics, cleaning lists, importing new leads, and segmenting by criteria, taming AWeber’s subscriber data can dominate your week!
Let’s apply some workflow automation to handle the busywork while you focus on big-picture list growth and optimization.
Use Tags and Custom Fields for Segmenting
Earlier we discussed using subscriber tags and custom fields during the onboarding process. These same tools are perfect for ongoing list segmentation as well.
You may tag subscribers by:
- Lead source – ex. Organic search, LinkedIn, tradeshow booth
- Content upgrades selected
- Activity metrics like email open rates
Custom dropdown and text fields allow you to track details like:
- Signed up for demo yes/no
- MQL score from 1-100
Create groups, manage permissions, customize follow-ups and more based on this clean segmentation.
While you can manually tag and update records for small subscriber volumes, use Zaps to automatically set this data at scale. When custom fields or tags meet rules you define, workflows can segment subscribers without ongoing overhead.
Archive Outdated Records
Don’t let outdated records clutter your lists. Set up automation rules to:
- Unsubscribe contacts who haven’t opened in 6+ months
- Remove subscribers who bounced multiple times
- Label inactive users based on email interactions
Constant list cleaning ensures you message the most relevant targets while respecting user preferences and maximizing deliverability by scrubbing risky contacts.
Smoothly Import and Export Subscriber Data
Transferring subscriber data between systems is necessary but notoriously messy without consistent formatting.
Tools like Segment can create a “canonical” customer record in a data warehouse by consolidating contacts and attributes from all your sites, tools, etc. You then pipe cleaned segments from this master list into AWeber.
For sending data outward, use Zaps to export subsets like high-value subscribers from AWeber into other platforms. Avoid devoting hours to managing one-off CSV dumps and imports.
Subscriber list hygiene is a tedious but critical task. doughnut Automation gives you back the hours otherwise wasted on constant record updates and mundane list cleaning. Now let’s wrap up with a bonus use case demonstrating automation with AWeber’s webhooks and Zapier for advanced workflows.
5. Automate Analytics With Webhooks & Zapier
Beyond core email functionality, AWeber integrates with 1000+ business apps via Zapier and offers webhooks for connecting data with internal tools.
These capabilities avoid isolation by tying email metrics into your broader stack for holistic tracking, advanced workflows, and smarter subscriber management.
Monitor Performance With Webhooks
Exporting batch analytics reports only provides periodic insights on your email program. For immediate notifications about metrics like:
- New subscriber growth
- Email delivery issues
- Click-through-rates on a campaign
Configure AWeber webhooks to fire on events or data thresholds. Push notifications into business intelligence dashboards, project management platforms, support tickets, Slack, and more.
Stay on top of email success metrics in real-time without constantly monitoring dashboards or plowing through reports. Get alerted to dips in performance or surges in engagement the moment either happens.
Build Workflows Between Tools
Mixing the strengths of different apps through workflows is how modern teams efficiently run complex operations.
For example, you could build a Zap Workflow that:
- Triggers when new form submissions arrive in Wufoo
- Adds the contacts to an AWeber list while tagging the source
- Sends welcome email from AWeber
- Logs form data into Google Sheets for monthly roll-up reporting
- Creates HubSpot deals for sales follow-up
Connecting your tech stack creates functionality greater than the sum of parts. Skip duct-taping CSV imports and exports, manually notifying teammates across platforms, etc. Automated workflows handle complex multi-step processes in the background.
Handle Edge Cases and Support Tickets
No automation is 100% perfect out of the box. You still need workflows to handle exceptions and continuing supporter needs through channels like email or chat.
Use Zapier’s filters to route one-off issues to appropriate staff, create tickets documenting problems, or flag contacts needing special attention. This acts as automation quality control allowing you to spot gaps and continually improve systems.
Example:
Tag subscribers who complain about not receiving a confirmation email. Create Zaps that automatically notify your support agent and opens a Zendesk ticket when this tag is added so the problem gets immediately investigated.
As mentioned earlier, don’t overlook the human element! Automation should complement staffers by minimizing avoidable surprises and boring work.
When managed manually, AWeber and email marketing can become an endless series of laborious one-off tasks. But by combining intelligent automation with this powerful channel, you gain huge time savings alongside reliable and effective campaigns.
In this guide, we explored 5 methods for automating core facets of AWeber:
- Capturing leads at scale
- Personalized onboarding sequences
- Broadcast emails and complex journeys
- Organizing dynamic subscriber data
- Connecting workflows across tools for a holistic view
Pick your biggest email marketing pain points and use solutions like Zapier to eliminate hours wasted on repetitive work. Invest time saved into strategy, creative messaging, and subscriber relationships for next-level results.
What tedious parts of AWeber are you ready to automate? Start with the quick-win options outlined below:
To instantly add more leads:
- Sync web forms to add sign-ups
- Import contacts from outreach efforts
- Track analytics and behaviors
To create consistent welcome workflows:
- Personalize with merge tags
- Schedule autoresponder sequences
- Segment using custom fields
To streamline sending/tracking emails:
- Calendar one-time and recurring sends
- Syndicate blog post emails
- Visually map subscriber journeys
To maintain subscriber lists with no overhead:
- Auto tag and update custom fields
- Archive inactive contacts
- Smooth data import/export
To monitor campaign analytics and connect tools:
- Get real-time metric alerts with webhooks
- Build multi-step Zap workflows
- Automate support for subscribers
Now that you have ideas for getting started, what are you waiting for? In just an hour or two, you can deploy automation to eliminate 10+ hours of grunt work every single week.
Sign up for a free Zapier account and start saving time on boring email tasks today! Within a month I guarantee you’ll be achieving more while working less thanks to intelligent automation.
What tedious parts of your AWeber workflow are you ready to automate? Let me know how it goes or if you have any other questions!
