AWeber, the preeminent mailing list/autoresponder site, has another feature that many may not know about: an amazing blog in which all manner of Web 2.0 customer relation/contact development issues are discussed.
Not only “discussed,” mind you, but “discussed in clear, concise, jargon-free terms, complete in many instances with demonstrative how-tos and even video.” You really should sign up for email alerts and add it to your RSS reader.
The article that caught my eye today was about creating surveys and using the AWeber tools to mail them out.
Believe it or not, you can create forms using Google Docs. Normally, unless you use a free service like SurveyMonkey (which I have in the past, and with fairly decent results), it costs money to create a survey and send it out.
With the Google Docs approach, you can use Google’s free tools to create the survey form and AWeber to send it to the folks on your mailing list.
The step-by-step on how to do this is conveyed in the video in the post. And it really is quite simple — take a look at the comments below the post to see others’ reactions (universally, “this is great, and very easy”).
Why is this important? You need to send out surveys every once in awhile to the folks on your list to make sure that the information you’re providing is the information they want to see.
Think about it like this: would you rather slog away at your blawg, writing post after post in “FAQ” style, wondering why your numbers aren’t going up, thinking it might be your writing that’s at fault?
Or would you rather send out a simple survey and find out for sure what the problem is — namely, that your readers actually prefer the more newsy posts?
Of course, that’s just an example. There are lots of uses for surveys.
Explore and experiment, and think about how you can use surveys to more carefully target your blawg’s content to the people you want to reach.
