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