Why All The Fuss About A Good Management System?

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