Everyone starts out small. And when you only have 10 or ... you might think that spending money on a ... system would be a waste of money. You're ... right! That is, if you're
Everyone starts out small. And when you only have 10 or 50
subscribers you might think that spending money on a
management system would be a waste of money. You're
absolutely right! That is, if you're not accepting any more
subscribers...
I know that some people start out by getting people to
subscribe by sending an email to them. When they receive an
email requesting a subscription the list-owner saves that
email to its own folder in his/her inbox and adds the new
subscriber's name and email address to his/her list.
When it comes time to send out an issue of the
newsletter/ezine, the list-owner sends a copy to everyone
on the list by simply adding each subscriber to the list of
addresses in the "To:" field. Others have progressed one
step further and actually take the time to send the message
to each subscriber separately.
At least that's one step in the right direction... You MUST
send each email to your subscribers as a solo-mailing. If
you simply add a large amount of addresses to the "To:"
field in your email program, then the email each subscriber
receives will contain the email address of everyone on your
list. That's a disaster! And there's also the fact that
people hate mass mailings. An email like that would not be
perceived as a personal letter at all.
Personalization is the key! You must make every subscriber
feel like the letters they receive from you are to them,
personally. You should include the name of your subscribers
in the subject line (greatly increases the chance of your
subscribers actually opening your email), and if you can,
include it in the message itself as well. Or even better,
include some other personalized information about your
subscriber.
Now, it IS possible to do email marketing correctly by
doing it the manual way, like I've described here. There is
one major problem though... Take a moment to think about
how much time it would take you to paste your text into a
new message, personalize the subject line and the message
itself, send it to that one subscriber and then repeat the
same process for each subscriber you wish to send the
letter to.
It would probably take as much as 15-20 minutes to send
your latest issue to 100 subscribers. That's not counting
the time it would take for you to manually make absolutely
certain you've removed all the people from your list who
have requested it, and the time it would take to manually
add any new subscribers to your list.
So you could actually send your newsletter/ezine to
1000-2000 subscribers in one day, if you worked hard. But
you wouldn't have time to answer any email you get from
your subscribers. And more importantly, you wouldn't have
much time to work on getting more subscribers! Not to
mention the fact that all that manual work is extremely
boring and you probably wouldn't be able to keep at it for
very long.
Having 1000 subscribers should be your first short-term
goal. That's right - Short term! Do you think you'd be able
to achieve this working like a maniac on all the tedious
tasks involved with managing a newsletter/ezine? If you do
then you need to go back to the top of this article and
read it again. If you still think the manual way is THE
way, then I have failed miserably and you need to contact
me so that I can explain it to you properly. Really.
A good management system automates things like adding
subscribers to your opt-in list, removing subscribers who
have requested it, personalizing every message sent to your
subscribers, sending each message as a solo-email to each
subscriber, keeping statistics that will allow you to track
your success, sending email to your entire list or just a
small ultra-highly targeted portion of your list at any
time in the relatively near future and so on.
In other words, a good management system will save you A
LOT of time, which again means that you can spend your
time getting more subscribers. Even though you start small,
you don't want to stay small, do you?
So if you want to build a LARGE list of opt-in subscribers,
then you need to get organized and start using a good
management system right from the start. Your list is your
own personal gold mine, and you should treat it as such.
Don't risk making a mess of your gold mine by not being
organized right from the start.
I wish you the best of luck in your list-building
adventure. Go for it! Have a great day...
-Joachim
