Email marketing is a good way to stay connected with your customers. Through emails, your customers can stay updated about new products, discounts, and deals that you’re doing with your services. But, mailing all the customers one by one takes too much of your time. That is why you should use a mailing list. 

During the past few years, there has been significant growth in the use of social media as a marketing tool. However, 60% of businesses still believe that email marketing is very much effective. 

It doesn’t matter if your business has just started out or you’ve been in the game for some time now. If you want to market your business and see effective growth in it, an email list will provide you with that. And it’s not just your products, you can also tell people about your story and your impact through emails. When you make a list of all the customers and mail them together, you’ll see that everyone gets their timely updates and no one is kept out of the loop. 

Throughout this article, we have mentioned some useful mailing list strategies that you can use to promote your business and tell your story. 

What is a Mailing List? 

A mailing list is a list of contact information and addresses of the people who receive similar types of content or products. An email list consists of the names of people, their contact information, and their email address. 

Businesses use email lists to send similar updates to their list of customers. Through these emails, the customers can check out the new content that has been posted by the business owner on their social media or website. They can also participate in contests and polls. 

Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool that business owners have been using for a long time. The lists may be different for customers depending on the type of their membership. All premium members receive the same type of mails and the non-premium members receive the same emails. 

All email lists are not the same, mentioned below are a few types of email lists. 

• Newsletters: A newsletter lets the buyers know more about you and your company. These are not always related to a product. They tell people about the inspiration behind that product. 

• Announcements: These lists are very common and almost all businesses use them. People make announcements about coupons, upgraded services, membership renewals, and seasonal discounts through announcement lists. 

• Discussions: These are the lists that allow your buyers to communicate with each other. The discussion can be on any topic that may or may not be similar to the range of services you have. For instance, if you sell stationery, then you can make a discussion list asking people their opinion on eco-friendly or handmade notebooks. 

How to Create a Mailing List? 

A mailing list is a list of email addresses. These email addresses are of your customers and even potential future customers. There are many ways to stay connected with your audience members. 

Mailing lists are one of those ways. These lists allow people to know about the latest changes and updates that happen with your brand and services. 

Here’s how you can make email lists. 

• Have an email service provider: Gmail is a great emailing tool. But Gmail lacks many features that other email marketing software have. You need to choose marketing tools that provide you with many services such as, making email templates, designing landing pages, and adding sign-up and pop-up forms. 

• Use email marketing tools: You can use free plans or buy pro plans of tools like SendinBlue, Moosend, Drip, Sender, or Mailer Lite. Most of these email marketing tools allow you to send 10,000 emails in a month. As a small business that sounds less, but as your business will grow, you’ll send emails near this number only. Plus, there’s no need to even buy the pro plans because tools like Mailchimp allow you to send 10,000 mails as a part of their free plan. 

• Build landing pages: Landing pages shouldn’t be ignored by you. Many marketing tools have features that make captivating landing pages for you. These pages will ensure that more people are subscribing to your brand. Moreover, your conversion rates will also improve with a good landing page. 

• Make it easy for subscribers: Allow your subscribers to manage their details and preferences. This way they’ll get the specific updates that they really need. This isn’t only limited to subscribing. You should also make it easier for people to unsubscribe. Because inactive users are bad for your website analytics. 

5 Killer Strategies to Build a Mailing List 

If you do not use the email list strategies, then you can say goodbye to many of your customers. The main subject of your mails shouldn’t be always selling and making profits. These types of emails can easily annoy them. Therefore, you should think more clearly and use strategies that’ll naturally increase the engagement your customers have with your brand. 

Here’s how you can make a good mailing list. 

• Have sign-up forms on your website: Many websites you visit have their email sign-up form embedded on the main home page. You should have a similar sign-up form on your website page. It’s easy and doesn’t ask users many questions. 

• Use personalized CTAs: When you use personalized CTAs, people pay more attention to them. Using the same yes and no strategy doesn’t interest people anymore. They don’t have to be clichéd, they just have to be simple, like “Here’s how you can use GoPro like a pro”. 

• Use humour in CTAs: Be a little more creative, a normal CTA sometimes sounds sales-y or robotic. Adding humour to your CTA tells the customers that there’s an actual human on the other side of the screen. 

• Have a timed pop-up survey: Don’t you feel irritated when you see a pop-up just as soon as you open a website. Most of your customers feel the same. So, you should have a timed pop-up on your website. This way, people will go through the content of your website and when they’d feel like subscribing, they’ll see a pop-up on the screen. 

• Use referrals: Your subscribers can bring in more subscribers to you. Through referral programs, both your subscribers and their friends (and maybe your potential subscribers) can earn rewards.  

Top 8 Mailing List Services 

Here are a few mailing list services. 

• Mailchimp: Mailchimp is used by many small businesses and bloggers. It has email marketing and eCommerce tools. The free plan of Mailchimp allows you to send at least 10,000 emails a month. It also provides tools that can be connected with Instagram and Facebook ads. 

• Mailer Lite: It is a free email marketing tool. The tools also include pop-up surveys that help the owners in knowing what the users what and what should be changed. Using the free account, you can send up to 1,000 emails. 

• Sender: Sender is a mailing list service that allows users to send 15,000 emails per month. Using Sender, you can add videos to your emails, which can get converted into animated GIFs. 

• MailsenPai: It is favoured by many digital marketers, bloggers, and business people. Through it, you can send bulk emails and stay connected with your consumers on a personal level. 

• SendinBlue: SendinBlue is an email marketing tool that has a free plan and SMS text message sending system. Under the Lite plan of SendinBlue, users can send up to 10,000 emails per month. The free plan allows you to send only 300 emails per day. 

• ConvertKit: This email marketing platform is used by professional bloggers. It has email sign-up forms that come with autoresponders. ConvertKit’s pro plan has a newsletter referral system and subscriber scoring system. 

• Constant Contact: This tool is growing in popularity. Constant Contact allows you to easily manage your lists and contacts. It also has tools to make email templates and calendars. 

• Moosend: Moosend is a viable option for small businesses. The free plan of Moosend allows users to send 1,000 emails. Its pro plan includes team management, landing page builder, and transactional emails for eCommerce websites.  

The Pros and Cons of Mailing Lists 

Email marketing is a fast and cost-effective way to reach your audience. You can make your existing customers happy and have more customers through email sign-ups. But, emails come with some downsides too. Unwanted and unnecessary emails can irritate people, and these people stop receiving services from you. 

These are the advantages of a mailing list.

• Economical: With emails, there’s no extra fee that you’ve to pay. Unlike advertisements and paid social media ads, emails don’t require you to pay a hefty sum to promote your business. 

• Scalable and measurable: Email lists reach many people. It all depends upon how many people have signed up with you. You can calculate the metrics with software tools available online. 

• Needs permission: Customers choose to get emails from you. You can’t send them emails without them having signed up for your services. Only those who have subscribed to you can get emails from you. 

• Saves time: You don’t have to sit there for hours to send emails to people. With a single click, you can send emails to thousands of people. 

These are the disadvantages of a mailing list. 

• Spams: Spams are probably the biggest disadvantage of email lists. If the emails aren’t sent to the targeted people. People will get irritated by your emails and they may even report your business for sending unnecessary emails. 

• Undelivered emails: Sometimes email software programs filter out email addresses. Certain addresses that appear suspicious to these softwares get removed by them and therefore your mails are left undelivered. 

• Bad for metrics: Many subscribers stop engaging with you after a few emails. They still get emails from you, but their unresponsiveness disrupts the metrics of your webpage. 

• Sacrificing quality: Mailing 10,000 emails a month is great. But you can’t be sure about the quality of these emails. 

In Conclusion

Writing emails takes a lot of time. Then sending those emails to hundreds and thousands of people is another heavy task. It doesn’t really have to be, though. All you’ve to do is make a mailing list. Mailing lists are a list of email addresses of people who receive the same email from you about your business. The email can be an announcement about a contest, or it can be a newsletter. 

Once you’ve selected all the email addresses of your customers, you can create an email list. There are a few steps that you’ve to follow through. Make sure that you’ve signed up with an email marketing tool. Use that tool and all its features to make the emails attractive and sensible. Who uses bland email templates nowadays? Most importantly, make it easier for your subscribers to sign up. 

A mailing list has its pros and cons. However, if you’ve paid attention to everything, you can certainly minimize the cons and profit through the pros.