An email mailing list service (also called an email autoresponder) is a service that creates mailing lists and sends out emails to those lists for you. The good ones (who work hard at making sure they don’t have any spammers using their service) guarantee that 98% or more of the emails they send actually arrive at the other end. Those are wicked impressive numbers, people! Sending out bulk emails (which may be totally legitimate and requested) without having them trapped as spam is getting harder and harder when more than 90% of email sent is spam: in January, the number was reported as 183 billion spam emails every day.
I went to write *boggle* because that really is a mind-boggling number, but I made a typo and wrote *biggle* instead. And then my inner thirteen-year-old snickered. Heh, biggle. Lots of Viagra ads. Hee.
Ahem, back on topic!
Step 1: The List
First step is setting up a mailing list of people you can email. Or more likely, more than one list. You can tag and segment your group and have users on multiple lists:
- The daily update group
- The newsletter group
- The “Bought stuff from me before” group
- The “Bought product X” group
- The “Expressed interest in buying a product” group
And you want to, because then you can send them stuff that’s most useful for them! If they’re on the “Bought X product” list you can send them product updates, talk about the new matching cushions (at a special discount for you!), or ask them how it’s going. I used an advanced discount list for Awesome Fear-Wrangling: they got to buy a few days before everyone else, with a special discount. (I made eight sales from that list in the first 12 hours and danced like it was New Years’ Eve.)
If you’ve already got a list of email addresses (for the love of God make sure they’re people who agreed to receive email from you because otherwise you will have problems later) you can import it as a CSV file, and you can add people manually too.
For the rest, you need a way to capture these new list peeps. Look in the sidebar at the top, and you can see our form to sign up for daily or weekly updates. If you fill in your details, then that adds you to my list to receive new posts daily (or weekly) automatically.
Except it doesn’t add you automatically, because the vast majority of reputable mail deliverers want you to use double opt-in. See, by filling in that form you’ve opted in once… but there’s nothing to prove that it’s you filling in the form and not your malicious younger brother. Or my rival, wanting to give me a chance to annoy the crap out of a lot of potential customers. (Everyone who talks about double opt-in mentions this rival idea. Sounds a bit Machiavellian to me, but what the heck. Maybe you have a nemesis.) So what you receive, instead of daily updates, is an email asking you if you really mean it. You know, “click on the link to confirm your subscription” blah blah. That’s double opt-in.
How to insert the signup form
There’s two ways to do it.
I’ll talk about specific providers in more depth later, but some (like MailChimp, which I’m using now) have simple plugins to make it easy to add a signup form in your WordPress sidebar. You install the plugin, fill in the settings from your MailChimp account, and it does the rest.
Otherwise, you can design a signup form on your providers’ website. At the end you’ll have a block of HTML code that you can use two ways:
- you can switch to HTML view when writing a page or post and insert it
- you can add a Text widget in the sidebar and paste the HTML code into that, instead
Let me know if that isn’t clear enough… my Awesome Chat peeps have let me know that they want more how-to stuff!
Hooray! You have a list. Next time, let’s start using it.
Do you use an autoresponder, and if so which one? Tell me in the comments!