This step is crucial. In fact, it’s so important that it only comes second in importance to Step #1.
You have to have the right technology workhorse to ensure your mailing list business is a success.
You have to understand that you cannot do e-mail marketing manually. It’s physically impossible. Even if you have a list of only 500 people, sending e-mail updates to those people one by one is going to drive you nuts.
You have to sign up to the right e-mail marketing platform that would automate all mail delivery. You might think that this is a pretty simple process. It isn’t. It’s very hard to manually keep tract of people signing up and unsubscribing to your list.
You may be able to get away with it if you only have a handful of members, but once your mailing list starts to grow, it can easily get out of hand.
Pay attention to key common features of e-mail marketing platforms:
Automated Autoresponder Sequence
Regardless of the platform you go with, they must have a way of enabling you to schedule e-mails to send to each and every one of your list members on a scheduled basis.
For example, if somebody joined your list on Monday, they get the e-mail update for Day 1. On Tuesday, they get the e-mail update for Day 2. When another person signs up for your mailing list on Friday, they get Day 1’s update and so on and so forth.
In other words, your mailing list platform must be automated and powerful enough to market to all your list members on an individually scheduled basis. This is crucial if you want to use your autoresponder e-mail sequence to turn your list members into buyers.
Powerful Universal Update Features
Sometimes, you need to send an update to all your mailing list. For example, if you’re holding a sale or you have some important news to share, you need to be able to reach everybody at one time. Your mailing list platform must be able to deliver your e-mail to its recipients. Otherwise, it’s failed at its job.
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Unfortunately, not all e-mail marketing platforms do a good job in delivering your e-mail.
Four powerful players stand out: AWeber, GetResponse, MailChimp and Constant Contact stand out amongst the rest. These services have a solid-gold reputation for getting past spam filters.
They are so trusted by mail services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail that their e-mails usually get through.
Deliverability is crucial. Regardless of whether you are sending autoresponder text or you’re sending a late-breaking update.
Insist on E-Mail Templates
Sometimes you just don’t have the time to compose e-mails. To make things easier on yourself, you probably would want to use a template. This is an e-mail that’s been formatted a certain way.
There are e-mail systems that are purely template driven like AWeber. Others expect you to come up with your own e-mail design each and every time. Others tend to push you to using text-only e-mails.
Pay Attention to Squeeze Page or E-Mail Signup Page Builders
Let’s face it. Most list marketers are not very good at web design and coding pages. Unfortunately, if you want to come up with an online form, you have to know some basic web design and coding. Thankfully, some platforms have ready-made e-mail list signup templates. You can just make certain changes to graphics, color and font as well as the text of these pages.
GetResponse is far and away the best choice for ready-made e-mail signup forms or squeeze pages. It really all depends on your needs. If you are looking for something that looks very professional and is easy to use, GetResponse is probably a good choice. If you know your way around HTML, you probably would be better off with AWeber or MailChimp.
Consider Alternatives to E-Mail List Recruitment Page Designs
One alternative you can try for building your own squeeze pages is a service called LeadPages.
This online service enables you to use a two-step process to get people to sign up to your mailing list. This is a very powerful alternative to how e-mail lists are normally presented on a page.
Usually, people load a page, and they would see the e-mail form where they can enter their e-mail address and their name. They would then click a submit button, and they would get their freebie.
The problem with this one-step layout is that it doesn’t really qualify people based on how eager they are for whatever it is you are offering to give your page visitors in exchange for the e-mail address. Maybe they’re just curiosity seekers. Perhaps they just want the freebie. Most likely, they didn’t read the e-mail form correctly.
Whatever the case may be they enter their e-mail address, and you end up with a list squatter. This is a person who just stays on your list without reading your e-mails or, worse yet, buying anything.
LeadPages solves this problem by enabling you to use a two-step opt-in system. People have to click an ad link to end up at a page where they can actually enter their e-mail address.
By using this two-step process, only truly motivated or genuinely interested list members are attracted by your offer. Sure, this may result in a lower subscription, but you have more peace of mind as to the quality of list members you will attract.