Building a Mailing List

One of the most valuable assets to any company is their mailing list. Often a finely tuned collection of interested parties, this list is generally a giant collection lying around in a mailing application or perhaps even just as an Excel spreadsheet. When it comes time to send out a mass mailing, many companies will often pull this list up, feed it into whatever mass mailing application they have available, and send out the e-mails. While this may initially seem like a good way to handle these lists, they can often be significantly enhanced with just a couple of tips.

Firstly, remember that each e-mail address represents a different person. As such, it is important to not only collect the e-mail addresses themselves, but you should also collect various metadata elements as well. For example, you may wish to collect that john.doe@acme.com has a first name of John, a last name of Doe, and makes about $100,000 a year. This information will help you send a more appropriate message to him than you might send to jane.doe@competitor.com with an annual income of $20,000. The beauty of e-mail campaigns is that you can tailor them extensively.

Secondly, it is important to consider that a mailing list should always been pruned and kept up to date. Do *not* keep old addresses on this list as new people may take those over and then consider your company to be sending out spam. Make sure you include an unsubscribe feature to allow people to be taken off the list if need be and watch out for bounce backs. As mentioned previously, if you notice that an e-mail address is now dead, simply remove it from your list. Don’t keep it in the hopes that it will “come back”. 

By following these two very simple rules you can dramatically improve your mailing list effectiveness and get more people to come to your site and buy your products or partake in your services. Make sure that you customize your messages directly to the intended consumer and also make sure that you keep your list as clean as possible. You don’t want to waste bandwidth and time sending to a bunch of defunct e-mail addresses.