Years ago, before my children had their own email addresses one of them signed up to receive a newsletter from one of their favourite bands using our family email address.
I’ve never been able to unsubscribe from this list. I’ve requested that they remove my email address but the emails keep on coming. This is so annoying. I’ve flagged the message so now they land in my spam folder.
Are you spamming people with your emails?
Don’t send bulk emails to your entire contacts list. It isn’t enough to include a line “If you would like stop receiving emails, respond with “remove” as the subject and I will promptly do so“. People don’t want to have to approach you and tell you they aren’t interested in what you’re sending them.
The professional and acceptable way is to use a newsletter service.
I recommend MailChimp an email list management and newsletter service that allows your website visitors to subscribe/unsubscribe from your mailing list themselves. This is the professional way to build a proper mailing list.
I’ve used other paid email services such as Constant Contact, Vertical Response and AWeber. But what I love about MailChimp is that it doesn’t cost a thing! If you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers, you can send up to 12,000 emails per month absolutely free.
Some cool stuff you can do with MailChimp…
- Embed a signup form on your website
- Segment the list to send mailings to subsections of your list
- Email your blog posts to subscribers using your RSS feed
- Keep your list safely in the cloud. If your computer crashes you won’t lose your list. You can also download the list as an excel spreadsheet to store it on your computer if you wish.
- Make your emails look great with available templates
- Track how well your campaigns are doing
There’s more but isn’t this enough to convince you?!
There’s no time like the present! Sign up for MailChimp and start the New Year with an organized mailing list.
Thanks Ruth. Taking the Mail Chimp plunge!