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Establishing Your Private Mailing List
Private mailing lists enable you to create one-way communication to
your target market and are a tremendous vehicle for building relationships
and a sense of community. Generating your own mailing lists is
highly recommended because a targeted opt-in list has many marketing
uses. The list can be used to maintain dialogue with customers and potential
customers regarding updates, support, specials, and so on. It can
also be used to distribute corporate newsletters, price lists, new catalogues,
product updates, new product announcements, and upcoming
events. In this chapter, we cover:
• Why have your own mailing list?
• The issue of privacy
• Managing your mail list
• Building your mail list
• Promoting your mail list
• Tips to stay under the spam radars
• Recent legislation.
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Why Have Your Own Mailing List?
There are numerous reasons to own and use your own mail list. They
include some of the same reasons that make it imperative to join someone
else’s list. Running a private mailing list can be beneficial in many
ways, including:
• Permission-based marketing
• Establishing yourself or your business as an expert in your field
• Networking
• Conserving contacts
• Building repeat traffic to your Web site (as discussed in Chapter 3)
• Branding
• Promotion of your business’s products and services
• Potential source of revenue.
Permission-Based Marketing
Permission and privacy are critical to the success of any e-mail marketing
campaign. Although unsolicited direct “snail mail” might be
generally accepted or at least tolerated by many consumers, the rules
are completely different on-line. Unsolicited e-mail (known as spam)
runs the risk of damaging your company’s reputation, not to mention
the very real possibilities of flames, public blacklisting, hack attacks,
or having your Internet services revoked. For serious spammers, recent
legislation adds the possibility of prison. Online consumers are
quick to let you know when you have crossed the line, and unsolicited
e-mail definitely crosses the line. Because of this, online marketers are
using many techniques to get their customers, potential customers,
and Web site visitors to give them “permission” to send e-mail on a
regular basis.
Permission marketing is really a win-win situation. Recipients receive
information that they asked to receive, and the marketer is com-
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municating with an audience that has expressed interest in what is being
marketed. Online marketers claim that permission e-mail marketing
is one of the best ways to improve customer retention and boost sales.
Permission e-mail marketing generally yields response rates ten times
that of banner advertising.
So how do you get this coveted permission? Generally you have to
provide something of value and of interest to your target market. There
are many opportunities on your Web site to ask for permission. The
more repeat-traffic generators on your site, the more opportunities you
can provide for visitors to give you the permission. (See Chapter 3 for
repeat-traffic generators.) You should leverage repeat-traffic generators
with permission marketing that “sells the sizzle” and accelerate responses
with a call to action. On my Web site I have a call to action that says
“Sign Up Now” for Susan’s biweekly newsletter filled with Tips, Tools,
Techniques, and Resources to assist you in achieving your Internet
Marketing goals. Here are some typical examples:
• “We change our coupons every week! Click here to join our
mail list to be notified as soon as we update.”
• “Click here to join our mail list and receive our biweekly Internet
marketing tips, tools, techniques, and resources newsletter.”
• “We have new specials on a regular basis. Click here to be notified
by e-mail when we post our new specials.”
• “We have a new contest every three weeks. Keep checking back
or Click here if you’d like to be notified by e-mail every time we
begin a new contest.”
• “We constantly update our Calendar of Events. Keep checking
back or Click here if you’d like to be notified by e-mail every
time we update.”
• “Join our e-club to receive our member-only specials, our great
newsletter and advance notice of upcoming events!”
You get the picture. Almost every page on your Web site provides
an opportunity for you to offer permission marketing. Of course, when
site visitors click, they are taken to a screen where they add themselves
to your mail list. Your mail list program should keep track of the ele-
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ment the visitor gave you permission to send. Your mail list should be
integrated with the Web site so when someone gives you permission his
or her name is automatically added to your database.
Permission marketing enjoys its success because it is personal, relevant,
and anticipated. Your messages should be personalized, enhancing
the one-to-one relationship marketing element.
Privacy is a very big issue when a Web site visitor is deciding whether
to give you an e-mail address or not. It is very important to assure your
visitors that you will not pass on their e-mail address to others or use it
for anything but the purpose intended. Your privacy policy should clearly
be evident on your Web site. The privacy policy can read like a legal
document or be short and to the point.
Benefits of Private Mail Lists
• Establish Yourself as an Expert. By operating your own private
industry-specific mailing list and offering your advice to members
of your list, you can establish yourself as an expert in your field.
As a result, you can quickly earn the respect and admiration of
your peers and develop new business contacts and clients.
• Networking. Having your own private list permits you to network
closely with others in your industry and with current and
potential clients. Very often, new business relationships and opportunities
develop when people with similar interests are
brought together. Use your mailing list to create these sorts of
relationships. It could be that you find new business partners,
establish new clients, or start another business venture.
• Conserving Contacts. You develop many great contacts every
day in business. Often businesses develop a relationship with a
client firm, complete a project with it, and then lose contact as
time goes on. Starting your own private mailing list enables you
to stay in constant contact with these individuals. This helps
you to maintain these relationships in the long term, and ultimately
results in more business and a stronger reputation for
your business.
• Branding. Once you develop your own private mailing lists and
generate a loyal list of subscribers, people relate the value of
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your list to your company’s products or services. Mailing lists
are an effective way to brand your business’s products and services
on-line. If you send messages to your subscribers on a regular
basis, they will be exposed again and again to your corporate
ID and products and services.
• Promotion of Your Business’s Products and Service. It is important
to remember that people are subscribing to your mail list to
receive valuable information that helps them in some way. If
your mail list messages consist solely of blatant advertising, the
retention rate of your subscribers will drop dramatically. However,
to take advantage of your mailing list’s potential as a branding
tool, you should always include a call to action that
encourages a subscriber to click through to your Web site and
learn more about your products and services. This is a great
way to generate exposure for your products and services.
• Potential Source of Revenue. Once your list becomes established
and has many subscribers, you might be able to sell advertising
to people interested in marketing to your list members. Needless
to say, a mailing list becomes an excellent revenue source as
its credibility and membership numbers expand. In the end, the
time and effort you exert nurturing your list to prominence can
pay for itself and more. If you are already a member of a publicly
accessible mailing list, take note of the number of advertisements
that appear in each posting you receive from the list.
Administer your own private mailing list and earn advertising
revenue for yourself. However, be ever mindful of the number
and type of ads you have in your mail list. The ads should not
detract from your message or your credibility.
• The Issue of Privacy. Privacy is a growing concern among many
online users. You can boost your mailing list’s sign-up rate by
guaranteeing that subscribers’ e-mail addresses are kept confidential
and not sold to anyone else. If you cannot assure them
that your company will use their e-mail address solely for your
correspondence with them, they will not feel comfortable giving
their e-mail address to you. Provide people with your privacy policy
statement. Make them feel comfortable about divulging their
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e-mail address to your business. To do this, you should place a
link to your business’s privacy policy in a prominent location on
your Web site, especially on your mail list sign-up page.
You should never add someone’s name to your mailing list without
his or her permission. People really resent receiving unsolicited mail,
even if you give them the option to unsubscribe.
Where We Need To Be
There are only two ways to do more business on-line:
• Have more people to receive your offer.
• Improve your conversion rate of Web site visitors to Web site
customers.
There are only a few ways to have more people to get your offer:
• Increase the number of visitors to your Web site.
• Increase the number of people whom you reach with your online
marketing in newsgroups, public mail lists, affiliate marketing
or any of the 101 ways in this book.
• Increase the number of people in your mail list who have given
you permission to send them e-mail on an ongoing basis.
Ideally, where we’d like to be in terms of mail list marketing is:
• Have the right mail list technology.
• Grow your mail list through permission-based marketing as big
as you can as fast as you can.
• Provide consistently valuable content to your list on an ongoing
basis.
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• Learn as much as you can about everyone in your list, building
a profile on each person, so that you can send more targeted
communication.
The Right Mail List Technology
There are several ways that you can manage your mail list:
• Use your e-mail program (not recommended)
• Use mail list software
• Outsource your mail list management.
Using Your E-mail Program
Although managing your mail list through your e-mail program might
look like a great option in that it doesn’t cost you anything and is run
from your desktop, giving you ultimate control, there are limitations.
Your e-mail program doesn’t easily afford you the opportunity to segment
your mail list—those who asked to receive your newsletter versus
those who asked to receive notification when you update your What’s
New section, for example. Your e-mail program doesn’t generally provide
the technology to quickly and easily personalize your communication—
that is, insert the recipient’s first name in designated areas within
the e-mail. E-mail programs do not provide much in the way of tracking
information, either. It would be nice to be able to track such things as
how many people opened your e-mail, how many sent a copy to a friend,
how many clicked through and visited your Web site. The tracking technology
is generally available only through mail list software or from the
third party that manages your mail list marketing if you choose to
outsource this activity.
Another drawback is the administrative headache of manually managing
all the “Subscribes,” “Unsubscribes,” and “Changes of e-mail Address,”
particularly when you have multiple sign-up opportunities on your
Web site—for example, someone wants to unsubscribe from your e-spe-
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cials but still wants to receive your newsletter and coupons. The time
really has come when you need to invest in mail list software or outsource
if you want to take this element of online marketing seriously.
Using Mail List Software
There are numerous mail list management software programs available
to help you organize your list distribution. This software enables you to
easily add or remove subscribers. Mail list management software enables
you to draft and send properly formatted messages directly from
within the software. Mail list software generally allows you to personalize
your e-mails quickly and easily. Most of these programs can be
integrated with your Web site so that people can add themselves to your
list right from the site. You can also use this software to set up notification
mechanisms to reply to subscribers confirming that they have been
added to the list. This makes running your mail list less time-consuming,
as the software does most of the work for you.
Using your own mail list software requires an initial investment to
purchase the program or an ongoing cost if you use an Application
Service Provider (ASP)—a company that develops the mail list software
and provides it to you as a monthly or annual service rather than as a
product. The major advantage to this model is that as new bells and
whistles are introduced they are immediately available to all users of
the software.
The cost to purchase software can range from an entry-level program
at $99 to a robust, full-featured program at $2,500. The ASP
model could cost you from $30 a month to several thousand if you use
an application that charges you per e-mail sent and you have a very
large database.
Some of these programs run from your desktop; others have to be
run from your server or through your Internet service provider. Many
of the ASP model programs are run from the ASP’s server. Most of these
programs are sophisticated enough to allow you to segment the e-mail
addresses in your database so you know who has asked to receive what
from your Web site.
Most of these programs today have the personalization capability
to allow you to insert a recipient’s first name throughout the correspondence
and in the subject line of the message as well. For this
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to work, you have to capture the first names for each e-mail address
in your database. Keep this in mind when asking people if they’d like
to give you permission to send them e-mail for whatever reason—in
addition to their e-mail address, have a mandatory field for their
first name.
More and more of these programs are incorporating tracking features
to let you know what’s working and what’s not. From an administrative
perspective, many of these programs do a great job of adding
new “Subscribes,” deleting “Unsubscribes,” and managing undeliverable
addresses. This feature alone is worth its weight in gold.
Features to look for in mail list software include:
• Personalization capability—You want to be able to personalize
each e-mail by inserting the recipient’s first name in the subject
line, salutation and throughout the body of your message.
• HTML capability—You want to be able to send HTML e-mail
(e-mail that looks like a Web page rather than text), which gets
much higher readership than text e-mail.
• Message editor—You want to be able to bring up a past e-mail,
edit it and re-send to a group.
• Previews—You want to be able to preview your message before
you send it to make sure the formatting is correct, the personalization
is working and that the message looks great before you
send it.
• Spam checker—The spam checker is a valuable tool to ensure
your message has the best chance of being received and not being
rejected as spam. You want to be able to run your message
through the spam checker to see how you score before you send
any message. Today if you score 5.0 or higher in the spam checker
you will want to edit your message to reduce your score before
you send.
• Multi-threaded sending—This feature is important for large lists.
It divides a list and sends multiple messages at one time through
different streams.
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• Filtering—This feature allows you to send specific messages to
parts of your list. You could send a message only to those individuals
in a specific state by filtering on the name of the state.
You could send a message only to those interested in golf if you
have that information in a field in your database.
• Scheduling—This allows you to pre-arrange to send your e-mail
at a specific future time and date. Great if you want to set up all
of your “Tips of the Week” in advance or if you are going to be
traveling when you want you newsletter to be sent out.
• Autoresponders—Some mail list software applications have
autoresponders built in. See Chapter 11 for details on their uses.
• Web site integration—You want your mail list software to work
with your Web site so when someone subscribes from your site
their contact information is automatically included in your mail
list software. If someone wants to unsubscribe or change their
contact information they can take care of it through your site or
through the e-mails they have received from you. This really
cuts down on the administration you have to deal with.
• Reporting and tracking—Some mail list software provides reports
on messages sent (audience selected, date sent, clicks, total
sent, number of bounces), subscriber activity (subscribes,
unsubscribes, e-mails opened), link tracking, and bounce activity
(number of undeliverables, hard bounces, soft bounces).
Outsourcing Your Mail List
A third option is to outsource your mail list management to a third
party. There are companies that specialize in this service with great depth
of experience. One such company that we have had the pleasure to
work with is Inbox360.com (http://www.inbox360.com).
When you outsource this activity, of course you have a monthly
service fee. The software is run from the outsource company’s server or
their ISP’s server.
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Virtually all of the mail list service providers have the latest software,
allowing you to personalize your messages, segment your lists,
and get great tracking reports. Generally, administrative issues like adding
the “Subscribes,” deleting “Unsubscribes,” and managing the
undeliverables are handled by the outsource company.
On the down side, you might lose some control—over content, over
your customer, and over timing of your message release. It is imperative
to have a clearly laid-out contract with the outsource company, addressing:
• Ownership of e-mail addresses
• Use of e-mail addresses
• Timing of correspondence
• Final approval of content
• Responsibility and timelines for replies to subscribers.
It is important that you retain ownership of all e-mail addresses and
that the contract clearly states that all subscribers’ names and e-mail
addresses are the property of your company. Also include in the contract
that you are provided the current list in digital format every month.
This way, if you decide to change service providers, your list goes with
you. It takes a lot of effort to build your list, and it is a very valuable
asset. Make sure you protect it.
Make sure that your contract clearly states that your e-mail addresses
are not to be used by anyone else or provided to anyone else for
any purpose whatsoever. People on your list have given you their e-mail
addresses in confidence. They trust that you will not abuse the relationship.
Make sure it is in your power to live up to that expectation.
Make sure that you have final control over the timing of your communication.
It is important that your messages be delivered when you
want them delivered. Timing is everything. We discuss timing later in
this chapter.
Make sure that your contract has a clause that permits you to approve
the final content going out to your list. You want to see and approve everything.
You want to make sure the formatting is the way you want it; you
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want to be sure the personalization is working as it should; and you want
to make sure there is no problem with graphics or word wrap.
You want to have a clear understanding with the outsource company
regarding replies from messages going out to your list. Often the
“From” field, although it looks like it is coming from you, is actually an
address that resides with the outsource company. Discuss and agree on
what happens when a recipient replies to your communication. Where
does it go? When does it go? To receive a batch of replies three weeks
after your communication went out is not acceptable.
There are certain benefits to outsourcing this activity to a third party
that specializes in mail list marketing. This is their core responsibility.
Often the outsource company has been involved in many campaigns—
gaining expertise in what works and what doesn’t. Often they can help
you tweak your content or format to help achieve your objectives. Also,
outsourcing this activity to a competent third party frees up your time
and allows you to focus on other priorities.
Building Your Database or Mail List
Once you are committed to private mail list marketing, you want to
focus on building your database of e-mail addresses. The more people
you can reach in your target market with your message, the better.
There are many ways to grow your list:
• Import from your existing database. You probably already have
a customer or prospective customer list that you can import into
your mail list. You should send a one-time message asking them
if they’d like to be on your list or join your e-club. The best way
to handle this is with an opt-out message. Tell them what they’ll
be receiving and how often, and stress the benefits. Tell them
that if they’d like to receive it they don’t have to do anything—
they’re already included. Provide instructions for them to
unsubscribe if for some reason they don’t want to be included.
• Use permission marketing techniques to ask if site visitors would
like to be included in your list to receive your newsletter, your
e-specials, your coupons, or anything else you want to use to
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entice them to join your list. See Chapter 5 for more information
on permission marketing.
• Collect names and e-mail addresses at your point of contact—
registration desk at a hotel, checkout counter in a retail environment,
member renewal or registration forms for membership
associations or organizations. Ask permission to add them to
your e-club—remember to “sell the sizzle.”
• Have employee contests and reward the employee who collects
the most sign-ups for your e-club.
• Have posters in your bricks-and-mortar location promoting your
e-club and letting people know how to join. Think about providing
an incentive: Join our e-club and get a 10 percent off
coupon for your next purchase or a free gift.
• Promote your e-club in all your direct mail pieces and ads.
• Use direct e-mail rental lists to ask for sign-ups.
• Use brokers to run campaigns on complementary sites to get
targeted sign-ups.
• Promote your e-club in your signature file.
• Encourage viral marketing via existing list members: “Send a copy
to a friend” works for a number of repeat-traffic generators such as
coupons, newsletters, e-specials, contest information, special offers,
and promotions. Make sure that every viral marketing communication
includes sign-up information so recipients can add their
names and e-mail addresses to your list as well: “If you’ve received
a copy of this newsletter… or coupon… or e-special from a friend
and would like to be included in our list to receive your own in the
future, Click here.” The link should take them to a sign-up page on
your Web site or open a new message in their e-mail program with
“Subscribe” in the subject line and details of what exactly they
would like to subscribe to in the body of the e-mail message.