Best way to ethically promote a sale in an Aweber sequence

8 replies
Hey everyone,

I'm trying to figure out the best way to roll a time-limited promotion into an email sequence. Like most people, I use Aweber and Wordpress.

ETHICS: Although tech-savvy people can always get around this, I want the promotion to actually be time-limited for each subscriber on my list. So if the sale is 4 days, when they click a link on the 5th day it takes them to a page telling them the sale is over.

ONE IDEA: I think this is one example that might work, but I'm open to suggestions.

The idea is to create a URL such as www.MySite.com/sale.php

When I tell people about the sale via autoresponder, I link to that same site but I also insert a date variable afterwards using Aweber's customization code {!date sd+0}

So the link would look like www.MySite.com/sale.php?2-2-2012

Now, the redirect script would extract the date and calculate the time difference between the current date and the extracted date embedded in the URL.

If it was 4 or less, it redirects to a sale page.
If it was 5 or more, it redirects to a page that says "Sorry, the sale is over".

THE OBVIOUS: The smart person can easily change the URL manually. Once redirected, the smart person can simply copy down the actual URL of the sale page.

But we have to take imperfect action, and to me this is one way to implement something like Frank Kern's 4DCM into Aweber.

Any other ideas?
#aweber #ethically #promote #sale #sequence
  • Profile picture of the author TopKat22
    That looks like it would work to me.

    I use the time limit in aweber all the time using their variables but never thought to take it to this extreme by changing the pages that it directs to.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kelly Verge
    Originally Posted by Chris Kent View Post

    I don't understand why so complicated.

    Can you not just tell them on day 5 "the sale is over"?

    Forgive me if I'm missing something here...
    If Chris wanted to do the sale in broadcast messages, it would be easy to do as you suggest. However, doing it within the autoresponder sequence requires a different approach.

    I think you're on the right track by embedding the message date into the URL. With a four-day sale, you'd need to handle each email's URL differently (i.e. Day 1 URL would be "good" for four days...).

    I've done the 4DCM on several lists and it always works well. I've never considered adding it to the autoresponder sequence though.
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  • Profile picture of the author Chris Thompson
    Hey Kelly - you're absolutely right. The first day the email would have a date code for today. The second day you'd insert "today-1" (or whatever the proper code is).

    And so on.

    I think because I can't get an exact time stamp out of aweber, I'd do a 4 day sale and measure anything less than 5 days from the date code as a "sale still available" condition. That way I'd account for time zones, delivery times, etc.

    I ran this buy my partner on another business who is super tech savvy. He could code this up in probably 10 minutes if he had the time, but unfortunately he doesn't. But he said it's definitely among the best solutions given the limitations with aweber.

    So my pseudo code for hiring a programmer will be:

    Input: I give you a URL with a date embedded in it.
    You write a redirect script that:

    1) Grabs the date code from the URL
    2) Grabs today's date somehow
    3) Calculates today - ULRdate (call this "date delta")
    4) If date delta is less than 5, redirect to SaleURL
    5) If date delta is 5 or more, redirect to SaleExpiredURL

    That's my starting point. I think there are some other features I'd like to build in. For example I'd like the SaleURL to only ever work if the referral source was the redirect file. Any other source of traffic would not work. I am not sure how to do that part.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael Travis
    Chris,

    You could capture the date the person signs up using a custom field if necessary. Then just compare that date with today's date similiar to what you have above. I think that should work.

    Michael
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  • Profile picture of the author Chris Thompson
    Interesting idea, Michael. I like the thinking. I would still prefer it the way I described mainly because I may choose to have certain emails in my sequence delivered according to day of week rules, so I could not predict with certainty when the sale should happen relative to their opt in date.
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  • Profile picture of the author Chris Thompson
    I found out that Aweber already gives you access to the customer signup date, so if anyone needs to ever use this idea, the signup date is available as a standard variable.

    Definitely suitable if you can predict, with accuracy, when people will be getting your sale promotion emails.
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  • I would simplify it, the more complicated the harder it's to get it to perform.
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