Saturday 17 November 2012

How to get started on building your own mailing list

Recently we learned about how to engage your e-mail list subscribers. Building your mailing listBut how do you build your mailing list in the first place? Before you can draw benefits from your e-mail marketing campaign you need to have a solid and validated e-mail list with you. For many businesses and entrepreneurs this can be the most daunting task, and also the most time-consuming.

According to this blog post at social triggers, if you aren?t building an e-mail list for yourself, you are stupid. And the writer is not wrong. E-mail marketing is the most effective way of reaching out to your audience.

Why build a mailing list for your business?

  • It doesn?t cost much: You can easily start building a mailing list either using a free service or a very low cost option. For instance, for our own blog, we recently started using MailChimp, that allows you to maintain a list of up to 2000 subscribers free of cost (even after that you have to pay a minimal amount). If you are a blogger and if you maintain your RSS feed via FeedBurner.com you can use this feature to create a mailing list free of cost.
  • When people subscribe to your list, they actually want to hear from you: People are very sensitive about their inboxes, so if they are submitting their e-mail ids to your subscription form, they really appreciate hearing from you and they believe that you are not going to spam them.
  • You can keep them notified regularly: No matter how awesome your website or blog is, it is simply not possible to visit your various links on a daily basis. By sending your subscribers regular updates you can give them a reason to visit your website.
  • You can generate more traffic to your blog: When you are publishing a blog, page views matter, and you need to exploit every source at your disposal. E-mail marketing is one of the cheapest forms of disseminating your information.
  • More than 99% people hooked on to the Internet have e-mail accounts.

How to build your mailing list

  • Create a list: This is the first thing you need to do in order to start building a mailing list. As already mentioned above, you can use paid as well as free services to create and manage lists. It is advisable to use a service rather than maintaining your mailing list on your own because then all the standard features such as subsections, unsubscriptions and broadcasting is taken care of by the service rather than you manually spending your time on these mechanical activities.
  • Put the subscription form on every page of your website or blog: This can be achieved by either putting the form at the top or on the sidebar. This way no matter where people are on your website or blog, they will notice your subscription form, and if they want, they will subscribe to your updates.
  • Use social media to get more subscribers: You can promote your mailing list form on websites like Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter to get more subscribers.
  • Use double opt-in: It means after having subscribed to your mailing list people will have to check their inbox for the confirmation e-mail from you (that is automatically sent by your mailing list management service). Only after they have confirmed, they will receive another message from your mailing list, and if they don?t, they won?t. It increases credibility of your mailing list. If you have this feature, and if you let it be known to your prospective subscribers, they will feel more assured.

These are the fundamental steps you need to take in order to start building your mailing list. Remember that success of your mailing list depends on the quality of content that you broadcast through it. Lacklustre content is going to attract lacklustre response. So be regular, post high-quality content, and promote your subscription form as much as possible, in order to start building your mailing list.

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Source: http://www.howtoplaza.com/started-building-mailing-list

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