Email is a crucial tool for businesses and organizations and remains a cornerstone for communication.
Offering speed and cost-effectiveness, plus the flexibility of tone, it can reduce miscommunications, opening avenues for both personal and collective exchanges and even branding opportunities.
These advantages can be amplified when utilized in a group email or email marketing campaign, but success in this arena begins with a quality custom mailing list—a collection of email addresses from individuals keen on receiving updates from your group.
A targeted mailing list can take one of three forms:
- One-Way Announcement (Broadcast) – This is for distributing a piece of information to many people without the option of replying or initiating a group discussion.
- Two-Way Discussion – Here, your organization and mailing list members can send messages that reach other members.
- Moderated Two-Way Discussion – This is like a two-way discussion, with a moderator reviewing all member-generated messages before sending them to other subscribers.
Simplelists offers an elegant solution for crafting a custom mailing list. Let’s delve into the steps to achieve this:
Make it easy for people to subscribe
Firstly, it’s essential to have an easy-to-use subscription form for building a custom mailing list.
Start by positioning it strategically, like at the top of your main web page or the bottom of a blog post. This ensures that visitors easily find it. Use minimal text. Emphasize the benefit of signing up.
You can also request a first name to personalize your messages. Consider including a sign-up invitation in a social media post or guest blog.
Simplelists simplifies the email sign-up process and ensures a smooth experience for potential subscribers by allowing you to integrate a subscription form into your website easily. Using our email list builder, all you have to do is:
- Log in to Simplelists and navigate to “general settings”, then the “subscriptions” tab.
- Copy the code under “web subscriptions”.
- Paste. In your website editor, paste the code where you want the form to appear. This should be between the <body> and </body> tags.
Import your contacts quickly and efficiently
During email list building, Simplelists offers various ways to upload your contacts.
Smaller businesses can upload contacts one by one or paste them in bulk. For businesses with longer lists, Simplelists enables them to import multiple contacts at once using spreadsheets conveniently. To do this:
- Open a spreadsheet and create three columns (first name, last name, and email address).
- Remove any headers and titles from the spreadsheet (this may require deleting a row).
- Add the names and email addresses (feel free to add notes in another column and leave some cells blank if the name is missing).
- Open the “Save As” dialogue box and save the spreadsheet as a .csv file (click “Yes” or “OK” if asked for confirmation and remember the saved file’s location).
- Log into Simplelists and select the “List members” page (Single List accounts) or “All contacts” page (Multiple List accounts).
- Click on the “Add” button and then select “Upload file”.
- Search for your spreadsheet and select it, then click “Next”.
- You’ll be taken to the “Select fields” screen, where you select the correct field name for each column of the file (First name, Last name, Email address, etc.) and click “Next”.
- Select or leave out any suggested “Upload options” based on your preferences, then click “Finish”.
- A status page will show as the members are uploaded.
- Visit the “List members” or “All contacts” page again and check for your newly added members.
Connect with popular CRMs and databases
Businesses familiar with Zapier can benefit from Simplelists’ ability to automatically fetch data and sync contact information from popular CRMs or databases.
This feature saves time, and you can contact us for further details on how to build an email list efficiently.
Embrace the power of email personalization
Personalized email marketing can significantly increase engagement and conversion rates. It’s all about tailoring an email marketing message to a specific individual or customer segment within your audience.
Besides segmenting lists based on criteria like location, email marketing personalization can be guided by relevant content, such as messages and pages a member recently interacted with.
It can also be encapsulated in a recommendation strategy guided by information like purchase history. Email personalization offers a low-cost way to provide massive value to customers by making each individual feel like you’re speaking particularly to them and catering to their specific needs.
One simple way to personalize emails is by adding the recipient’s name to the message. To do this in Simplelists:
- Go to a list’s settings and then the “Email modification” tab.
- Scroll down to the “Merge tags” section and check the box to insert merge tags into email content.
- In the text box below that, regarding a member’s name being blank, provide your preferred default name. If the member’s name isn’t available, this will be displayed. It can be something like “Customer” or “Member”.
- Insert $TO_FIRSTNAME in the exact place you want the first name to appear in your message to your list. You can also use other available merge tags.
Email segmentation is also critical for better results in targeted mailing list marketing.
Fortunately, Simplelists allows users to create unlimited, custom mailing lists, ensuring email campaign flexibility, granularity, and precision.
Ensure regulatory compliance with unsubscribe features
Providing an easy unsubscribe option is crucial to complying with regulations like GDPR. With double opt-in, you remain compliant while reducing bounces and spam complaints, improving engagement rates, lowering costs, and enhancing analysis and reporting.
Simplelists offers this feature and integrates with other business systems via Zapier to ensure that emails are unsubscribed across the business. Applying such techniques helps you learn how to grow your email list with minimal risk.
Ready to send your first email with Simplelists?
Once you’ve built your custom mailing list on Simplelists, you can send your first email!
Simplelists also supports HTML emails, enabling you to use images, layouts, and stylization for a more captivating look. Moreover, businesses can easily set up emails from their domain using email list providers like Simplelists.
Book a free one-month trial to discover how Simplelists can help you realize a more effective and versatile custom mailing list.