Email list hosting service & mailing list manager

How to Build an Email List

Posted on Oct 23, 2023

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In the digital age, email remains a powerful tool for businesses to communicate with their audience and drive engagement. Building an email list is a crucial step in leveraging this tool, enabling your business to reach its target audience directly, foster strong customer relationships, and boost overall marketing effectiveness.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll show you how to build an email list, discuss the pros and cons of an email list, explore various methods to grow your email list, and delve into the potential of email distribution list services.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a clear roadmap for building an effective email list for your business. Let’s dive in!

What is an email list?

An email list, at its core, is a powerful marketing tool. It consists of a curated collection of email addresses that a business amasses over time from visitors to its website, typically those who express a vested interest in the products or services offered.

By voluntarily providing their email addresses, these individuals show they are open to further engagement and potentially more willing to convert into customers. These email lists are not simply static databases but dynamic channels of direct communication with your audience.

They provide opportunities for personalized marketing, allowing businesses to send tailored promotions, newsletters, and updates, keeping subscribers informed and engaged.

The potential reach of email is enormous, evidenced by its extensive global usage. According to a report by Statista, as of 2023, over 4.3 billion people worldwide use email. This figure is expected to ascend to approximately 4.5 billion by 2025. These staggering numbers underscore the tremendous opportunity for businesses to tap into a vast and ever-growing pool of potential customers simply by building an effective email list.

It’s essential to recognize that building an email list is not just about amassing a large number of email addresses. It’s about establishing a network of interested and engaged individuals who have willingly given you permission to enter their inboxes. They’ve expressed a desire to hear from you and learn more about your business.

So, building an email list is not just a crucial marketing strategy but also a cornerstone of customer engagement and retention, reinforcing the vital role it plays in the overall success of your business.

How Can a Mailing List Support Your Business?

Building an effective email list can do more than just connect your business with potential and existing customers; it can serve as a vital instrument in enhancing your overall business performance.

Let’s delve deeper into understanding the unique advantages of a well-curated mailing list for your business.

Direct Communication with Potential and Existing Customers: One of the most prominent benefits of having an email list is communicating directly with your audience. Unlike social media platforms, where algorithms dictate the reach of your posts, emails land directly in your audience’s inbox. This eliminates middlemen and ensures your messages are delivered right to the doorstep of your prospects and customers.

Highly Personalized Marketing Campaigns: A business email list empowers you to create hyper-personalized campaigns. You can segment your list based on demographics, purchasing behavior, or engagement levels and then tailor your content to meet the unique needs of each segment. This level of personalization can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns, leading to increased conversions.

Low-cost, High-ROI Marketing Strategy: Email marketing is incredibly cost-effective compared to traditional marketing methods. There are no printing costs, no postage fees, and no advertising charges. Yet, it yields impressive returns. According to Campaign Monitor, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $44. This high ROI makes it an indispensable strategy for businesses, especially small ones with limited marketing budgets.

Facilitates Customer Retention and Loyalty: Your email list can be a valuable tool for nurturing customer relationships. Regular and meaningful communication helps keep your brand top of mind, fosters trust, and builds customer loyalty. You can use your email list to increase customer retention by providing exclusive discounts, offering valuable content, and asking for feedback.

Builds Brand Awareness and Increases Online Visibility: Every email you send exposes recipients to your brand, reinforcing your identity, values, and offerings. This constant exposure helps build brand awareness and trust. It can make your subscribers more likely to turn to your business when they need your products or services. Moreover, by encouraging subscribers to share your content on social media, you can significantly increase your online visibility and reach an even larger audience.

In essence, a robust mailing list is not just a strategy for your business but a multidimensional asset that can support your business in myriad ways, driving growth and success.

Pros and Cons of a Mailing List

Pros Cons
Direct reach to your target audience Risk of emails landing in spam
Cost-effective marketing strategy High traffic might incur increased costs
Fosters strong customer relationships Inconsistency might lead to unsubscribes
Potential to create a launch team

Pros explained

Reach Your Target Audience Easily: Building an email list lets you send promotions, updates, newsletters, and more directly to interested customers. This increases the likelihood of conversion and boosts customer engagement.

Easy Marketing Strategy: The ease of creating and sending emails, as compared to traditional marketing techniques, makes it a straightforward and cost-effective marketing tool.

A Good Way to Communicate with Your Subscribers: Regular email communication enables you to foster a close relationship with your subscribers, encouraging brand loyalty.

Create a Launch Team: A mailing list allows you to create a launch team – customers who get early access to your new products and promote them on social media platforms.

Cons explained

Your Emails Might End Up in Spam Inboxes: If your emails are flagged as spam, your messages won’t reach your subscribers.

High Costs: As your mailing list grows, you may need to upgrade to a more expensive email list service provider plan to manage high traffic.

Inconsistency in Emailing: Sending too many or too few emails can lead to subscriber attrition. Thus, it’s crucial to maintain a balanced emailing schedule.

How to Easily Create a Mailing List for Your Business?

Building an email list for your business is a necessity in today’s digitally-driven business landscape. The process can be surprisingly simple and can be accomplished through the following steps:

1. Add an Opt-in Pop-up Form on Your Website:

An opt-in form is your first point of contact with potential subscribers. These forms can take several shapes, but a pop-up form that appears while a visitor is browsing your website is often the most effective. It’s crucial to make this form appealing and easy to fill out.

Use captivating images, enticing headlines, and a simple form that requires minimal information (typically just a name and email address). The goal here is to catch the visitor’s interest and make the subscription process as seamless as possible.

2. Have a Strong Call to Action (CTA):

A compelling CTA can significantly increase your email sign-ups. It should clearly communicate what the potential subscriber stands to gain by joining your email list. For example, a CTA such as "Sign up for exclusive discounts and insider news!" highlights the benefits and makes the offer more appealing.

Always remember your CTA should motivate the visitor to act immediately.

3. Utilize Social Media Platforms:

With billions of active users, social media platforms offer an untapped pool of potential subscribers for your email list. You can include a sign-up button on your social media profiles or run dedicated campaigns to encourage followers to subscribe to your mailing list.

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram even allow you to run lead-generation ads specifically designed to collect email addresses.

4. Create Landing Pages:

Landing pages are dedicated pages on your website that provide detailed information about a specific product, service, or offer. They’re designed to guide visitors towards a single action - in this case, subscribing to your email list.

You can rapidly increase your email subscriptions by addressing your visitors’ pain points and offering a solution (access to quality content, exclusive offers, etc.) in exchange for their email.

5. Incentivize Sign-ups:

Everyone loves a freebie! Offering an incentive to new subscribers can significantly boost sign-ups for your business email list. This could be anything from an exclusive discount, a free e-book, a webinar, or a cheat sheet.

The key is to ensure that what you’re offering provides real value to your audience and is relevant to your brand and offerings.

By following these steps, you can quickly and effectively build an email list for your business, providing a solid foundation for your email marketing efforts.

Build your email list with Simplelists

Email lists are invaluable assets for businesses of all sizes. Building an email list allows you to directly reach your audience, foster strong relationships, promote new products, and more. Despite some challenges, like potential high costs and the risk of spam, the benefits of creating an email list far outweigh the cons.

If you haven’t started building an email list for your business yet, now is the time to start. Try Simplelists for free today, and let us help you start building your business email list today. Your business will thank you!

Get your FREE 1-month trial

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Why Use an Email Discussion List?

Posted on Sep 15, 2023

A man viewing emails on a laptop

Email marketing is nothing new. It has been around since the widespread adoption of digital communications. That’s almost three decades, give or take a few years. Yet even today, in 2023 leveraging a strong discussion list as part of your email marketing is still one of the most effective ways for businesses to reach and influence new and existing audiences.

Members who sign-up will reap the benefits of being engaged with and participating in a broad community, having a voice to share ideas and reach and influence subscribers in a way that resonates with them.

And that’s just the start.

What is an email discussion list?

An email discussion list is cultivated from a group of people with similar interests who wish to hear about and share conversations. It could be a newsletter, information about a product or service, events happening in your local area, and more.

A company email list is merely a collection of email addresses gathered from people of all walks of life, each of which has signed up to receive emails from you, usually through an online opt-in form. There’s no collaboration or discussion.

Email discussion lists often have moderators or editors review all incoming messages and decide which can be sent to subscribers and which can’t. They also tend to have guidelines, for instance, asking everyone in the group to be respectful of others and only post relevant content. Permission to share content has to be granted and clear email list management, including organization lists stipulations are followed.

The whole process is operated through an automated server which receives the email of one recipient before forwarding it on to subscribers. As subscribers respond, a conversation unfolds. And there you have it, an email discussion.

Common uses for a discussion list

As you’ve probably guessed, discussion lists are great for email marketing, for a few different reasons. From personal targeting by segmenting your audience into specific lists and sales and lead generation to generating and nurturing new and existing leads to engaging existing customers to make them feel valued and running an email campaign in tandem with special offers or trends, discussion lists will get the right people engaged - at the right time.

Just have a look below at all the ways you can use a discussion list to engage and start conversations with prospects and customers.

Products and promotions

Using a mailing list to get the word out about any products and promotions is a fine idea. But who’s to say that a standard mailing list has the right contacts? A discussion list, especially one that has been segmented, has a much better chance of reaching customers more likely to put their hands in their pockets.

Discussion lists are much more effective to inform prospects and customers of any upcoming products and promotions. Information and ideas can be easily shared between every member of the list with ease. Educating a broad range of members about a new product or service is also simple and easy, with discussions inevitably following.

Company news and updates

If you want to share company news and updates with people who’ll want to hear about it, a discussion list can be ideal. Sending newsletters with company news, such as an announcement of a lucrative partnership, or even informing readers of a new member of the leadership team, can be easily achieved.

You can also take the opportunity to inform or affirm your mission and values to your subscribers or get the word out about an upcoming contest or giveaway.

Collaborate with departments

Another vital use of the humble discussion email list is collaboration with other departments. Although it’s not the operational aim, sometimes - in large businesses, especially - interdepartmental communication can be a bit lacking. It’s almost to be expected in a company with 500, 1000, and 25,000 employees globally.

A great way to collaborate with other departments is through a hub with a central flow of information - like discussion lists. Here you can share best practices and insights, highlight a project or initiative you’re working on, and more.

Upcoming meetings and events

Want to make sure that everyone’s up to speed and engaged with company happenings? You can use a discussion list. Highlight a company event or conference, promote events or social media campaigns, and even deliver meeting minutes. It couldn’t be easier.

Open forums

The last common use for discussion lists is that they promote an open forum where colleagues can share their opinions on any new products and services and subscribers can share ideas, opinions, and experiences. This alone can help you to make better decisions in the future.

Benefits of using an email discussion list

Choose Simplelists to build your discussion list and you’ll find that it is not only a great way to collaborate and communicate with teams, small and large, local and wide, but there are several other key benefits that you can’t afford to miss. These are:

Collaboration and communication

Simplelists make it easy for remote teams to connect with colleagues easily and share ideas and information. This enhanced communication improves workflows, customer service, and brand reputation, ultimately leading to better client retention.

Increased engagement and participation

When you choose to leverage Simplelists’ discussion lists, you’ll see an increase in community engagement and participation by giving members access to a resource that’s easy to use, accessible, and engaging.

Build a strong community

With Simplelists, it’s straightforward and easy to build a strong community. Administrator or owner values can be embodied by all members, creating an interesting and engaging place for discourse. Trust can be boosted and relationships strengthened.

Targeted communication

Use Simplelists and you’ll be able to segment and distribute your discussion list so that it reaches those members who it’ll interest the most. Segment your campaigns by behavior or audience, focusing on the correct messaging and you’ll stand a good chance of maximizing influence.

Cost-effective

Reach a broad audience for a low cost. Optimize your ROI and track and measure performance. Use data to evaluate campaign success and make improvements in the future.

How to Create an Email Discussion List

Simplelists makes it easy to create email discussion lists. You don’t need to integrate any complicated email list software or undertake training, it’s easy!

Simply send an email to your list address and we’ll automatically forward it directly to the group. You can add people directly to your mailing list or they can sign-up online. Transfer from another list without member confirmation. Simplelists even provide a full hosting service and management, so you don’t need to worry about the technical details.

Our email management service has been designed to promote simplicity and ease of use. Creating email management groups and discussion lists has never been easier.

The first thing users need to do is to sign-up and choose the plan best suited to their needs. Once you’ve set up an account, you can begin creating discussion lists.

Creating an email discussion group

Creating an email discussion list is easy. Go to the “manage lists” menu, click the “Add” button, then select the discussion list.

Screenshot of creating a discussion list

Managing email list subscriptions

Once the list is created, Simplelists allows users to add members by either uploading a CSV file or adding them individually.

Screenshot of adding a contact

Posting messages and replies

To send an email to their list, members simply write an email and send it to the email address that has been specifically created for that list. Simplelists will then send it to all members of that list. All replies will be sent to that same list-specific email address.

Setting up email list rules and guidelines

List owners are able to set posting restrictions, including what members can and cannot view, and assign administrators and moderators to ensure that guidelines are followed.

Screenshot of changing list settings

What can an Email Discussion List Platform Like Simplelists Do for Your Business?

Features and Benefits of Simplelists

Below are a handful of the key features and benefits of Simplelists’ email list software.

  • Easy set-up - you don’t need to be a tech wizard or someone with years of experience building business email lists, anyone can start using Simplelists product range today.
  • Import contacts easily - add subscribers from CSV files, previous lists or manually with ease.
  • Website integration - it’s quick and easy to integrate the sign-up form with your existing website. Learn more at our blog about adding a subscription form to your website.
  • Auto bounce handling - manage spam reporting settings. Find out more by reading our blog about spam folders.
  • Set permissions - restrict posting to specific members only. Enable an approval process for each message. Learn more on our blog about posting restrictions.
  • Make it personal - subscribers can choose how to interact with the list by opting for plain text or HTML emails. Get a daily digest summary or individual posts. The choice is yours.

For a little more in-depth information, take a look at this short 3 minute video.

Overview of pricing plans

Below is an overview of our pricing plans, comparing the cost of the “single email discussion list” and “multiple email discussion lists.”

Pay as You Go price plan

The Pay As You Go price plan means you just pay for the data that you use. The more list members you have, the larger your list emails, and the more recipients all increase the data that’s used. There is a maximum data purchase requirement.

The Unlimited price plan

The Unlimited price plan means you just pay for the total number of unique members in your account. The number and size of emails (and the number of lists for a Multiple List account) are all unlimited.

Get started with your discussion list today

As you can see, the benefits of using Simplelists to optimize a discussion list are clear. From enhanced collaboration and communication, not only internally but with your customers to build a strong community of like-minded people all of which share valuable, insightful, and targeted information, and reaching and influencing a broad audience for a relatively affordable cost, an email discussion list can really help your business to prosper.

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How To Manage an Electronic Mailing List

Posted on Mar 11, 2023

Laptop displaying an Electronic Mailing List

Email is one of the most important communication tools for many organizations.

Even in the era of social media and instant messaging, email remains one of the most effective methods of communicating with large audiences.

A 2020 survey by Statista found that there was a return of £35.41 for every £1.00 spent on email marketing.

But these kinds of results don’t happen by accident.

A well-managed mailing list is essential as the foundation of an effective email marketing campaign.

In this article, we’ll discuss email list management best practices for building, segmenting, and personalising your electronic mailing list as well as strategies for keeping it clean and up to date.

What is an electronic mailing list and how does it work?

Young business man thinking what is an electronic mailing list

An electronic mailing list is a collection of email addresses from people that have opted-in and agreed to receive emails from your organization. A healthy email list is important if you want to see success from your email marketing activities.

In the early days of email marketing, it was typical for all the recipients of an electronic mailing list to receive the same message from a business.

But with modern email management solutions, it’s best practice to segment your mailing list using criteria like demographics, location and buying behaviour.

Working with email management solutions that support segmentation enables you to deliver more relevant emails to the recipients on your mailing list and improve the performance of your email marketing.

How to build an email list

PC monitor showing methods to build your electronic mailing list

Building an email list may feel like a daunting task to some people.

Generating thousands of subscribers is very rarely something that happens overnight. Patience and hard work are key.

We’ve put together a few methods that can help you build your electronic mailing list.

Newsletter sign-up on your website

Make it easy for people that are visiting your website and enjoying your content to sign up to your list.

Have a clear, attention-grabbing call to action that prompts people to sign up. Don’t hide your email list sign-up form at the bottom of your footer!

One email list management best practice is to include the use of modals or slide-in banners on your website that clearly state the benefits of becoming part of your email list, to help prompt engaged site users to sign up.

Social media promotions

Your social media channels can also help you build your email list.

Some channels like LinkedIn and Facebook give you the ability to run ‘lead generation’ ads. With a lead gen ad, a recipient will typically sign up for your email list in exchange for a valuable piece of content you’ve provided.

The success of Lead Gen ads really depends on the value of the content you provide as your ‘lead magnet’, but it can be an effective way to build up email subscribers.

Organic social media can also help you build your list. You might consider running a promotion that encourages your followers to sign up for your newsletter to receive an exclusive discount.

In-person events

If you ever exhibit at trade shows, exhibitions or conferences, make sure to collect email addresses from the people who visit your stand.

To keep data secure, it’s often email list management best practice to use an electronic device like a tablet to collect email addresses in person.

Email list management best practices

Once the number of contacts in your list starts building, there are certain best practices to follow to ensure you get the best out of your email marketing efforts and adhere to all relevant legislation.

Make sure you meet all legal requirements

The most important step in email list management is to make sure you comply with all local legislation.

In the UK, this means making sure you adhere to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive.

One of the important things to remember is that you should only process the data for customers that have directly opted into your email list, or that meet another legal basis for processing data under the GDPR.

You should also make it easy for any subscribers to opt out of your email list at any time.

Design an onboarding strategy

When subscribers first join your mailing list, your ‘welcome series’ of emails can really help set the tone for their experience with your organization.

The first email should ideally welcome them to your list and set their expectations for what they are likely to receive from you in the future.

You might use the next two emails to help illustrate your brand story, what makes you unique and the value you offer to customers. You might also introduce your email preference centre at this point, to allow customers to let you know the types of emails they are interested in receiving.

You can then tailor future emails based on the subscribers’ preferences.

Prioritise quality over quantity

Making sure you manage expectations properly and only send emails that are relevant to subscribers is the key to building long-lasting relationships with the people on your email list.

Sending a high volume of emails to an audience that is uninterested and disengaged is likely to lead to high spam reports and high unsubscribes. These are both things that can impact your email deliverability.

Sending emails that are highly relevant to each recipient is the secret to developing a healthy email list. You can achieve this through personalization and segmentation in your mailing list manager.

Personalise your emails and campaigns

By including personalized details such as the recipient’s name, or the products they have recently shown an interest in, you can build a more personal connection with the people on your email list.

Personalisation can also improve the performance of your emails.

A study by Campaign Monitor found that people were 26% more likely to open emails with personalized subject lines. So personalization within your email list manager is important.

Segment your email list

Segmentation is one of the most important things you can do to optimise the performance of your emails and maintain a healthy email list.

By tailoring your emails to your subscribers’ details and preferences, you can deliver more targeted content that really resonates with them. This will increase the relevancy and lead to more opens, clicks and conversions, as well as reduce spam complaints.

Common segmentation methods for email list management best practices include:

  • Demographics (age, gender)
  • Location
  • Purchase behaviour
  • Interests
  • Stage in the customer lifecycle

Make it easy to unsubscribe

Including an easy, simple way to unsubscribe from your emails is necessary if you’re going to comply with current legislation.

Including an easy unsubscribe has the additional benefit of reducing the number of spam complaints which can have a positive impact on your overall deliverability.

Deal with inactive subscribers

Your sender reputation matters in email marketing.

If you continue to send emails to inactive subscribers on your email list, you are artificially reducing your own open rate.

If a subscriber is inactive for a period of time consider sending them a re-engagement email to try and encourage them to start interacting with your email again. This might include a personalized message such as “We miss you!...” with an incentive like an offer or promotion to get them opening and clicking through.

If the recipient doesn’t engage with this approach, you might consider moving them to an ‘inactive’ segment or removing them from your list completely.

Let users manage their preferences

Preference management is another email list management best practice that allows your subscribers to have control over the frequency and types of emails they receive.

Your subscribers should ideally be prompted to update their preferences in your email preference centre during their onboarding stage and reminded at regular intervals.

By understanding how often recipients want to be contacted and the type of email they would like to receive, you can improve your relevancy and overall email performance.

Track your results

You should keep an eye on important metrics like bounces and undeliverable messages, and take steps to remove these records from your database.

Tracking your email marketing results is also important for understanding what works and what doesn’t.

You should also ensure that any links in your emails have the correct tracking parameters for your chosen analytics platform. This can help you measure things like dwell time and the conversions that come from each of your emails

Some mailing list management platforms can also help you understand metrics such as open rates, click-through rates and the performance of different elements of your emails which can help you optimise even further and make data-driven decisions to improve your email campaigns.

What about using email list software?

Paper cut-out screen showing benefits of a mailing list manager

Choosing the right email list software is important for helping you to effectively manage your email subscriber list.

It’s important to choose a mailing list manager that can help support you with subscriber forms, segmentation, and the analysis of important deliverability data.

At Simplelists, we pride ourselves on making email list management easy.

We’ve got everything you need to set up, build, and manage an effective electronic mailing list. And it’s simple for anyone to get started.

Curious to find out more?
Sign up for our one-month free trial.

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Add a subscribe form to your website

Posted on Oct 22, 2017

Having a form on your website that allows people to sign up to an email list is a great way to grow your email list and increase the potential for your messages to be shared beyond your list members. In this short post, we explain what a subscribe form is, how it can work for growing your list, and how to use Simplelists to create a form for your site.

Add a subscribe form to your website

What is a subscribe form?

A subscribe form (sign-up form, email opt-in form) is an embedded/hosted web form that you can put on your website, blog or social media pages so that people can enter their details into the form to sign up to your list/email group. Normally, the form is very straightforward and only has a few fields to get the information needed. Name and email address are most important.

Importantly, this is a way to collect email addresses with permission. The person completing the form is actively agreeing that you can send him or her emails sent to your list. This is good news in terms of abiding by rules related to spam, as well as hopefully resulting in more visits to your website and/or participation in group discussions via clicks from your emails.

Creating a form using Simplelists

First, you need to copy the code from Simplelists. Sign into Simplelists and navigate to 'general settings’ and then the 'subscriptions’ tab. Scroll down to 'web subscriptions’, select the code and copy it. Next, you need to paste the code into your website. Open your website editor and paste the code where you want to the form to appear. This should be somewhere between the <body> and </body> tags. In this short video, you can see the code pasted into a div created for this purpose.

Styling your form

Finally, you can style your form by using CSS to change how your form looks. This means that you can make it match perfectly with the design of your website. You can also edit the HTML to adjust your form. For example, you could add a title above the form or remove some of the form options, to simplify it. You might like to remove the daily digest summary option, the unsubscribe option and/or the notes box. If you remove these three lines of code, you would be left with a form that allows users to leave just their name and email address.

It is a good idea to put your form in a visible place on your site where you receive the most visitors. Examples include: the top side bar of your website/blog, the top navigation bar, the footer, on your 'About’ page, etc.

That’s all there is to adding a subscribe form to your website - simple.

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