Create An Email List

PUBLISHED: AUGUST 10, 2014 – ARTICLE: HOW TO CREATE AN EMAIL LIST

One of the best things you can do to increase sales for your small business is create an email list of your current customers. When you create an email list you are making a collection of names and email addresses of clients that frequently use your business services or purchase your business products. Once you have an this list you can use it to send out news, announcements, specials, coupons as well as other promotions to your customers. Because people on your list have already engaged your business, it's easy to get a positive response from your existing customers.

If you don't already have customers' contact info, you should start collecting it immediately. Here are a few simple ideas on how to create an email list: 1) Ask people are checking out to purchase an item from your business ask them to sign up to receive specials by giving you their name and e-mail address. 2) Have a small computer or tablet that people can use to enter themselves. 3) Have a promotional card that people can use to enter their contact information. 4) Have a container available that people can drop a business card into.

Offer A Special Discount Or Promotion

To incentivize people to join your website offer a special discount or promotion for joining the list. You could also do a monthly or weekly prize for people that sign up for the email list. This can be a discount or a give-away. For example, if you own a restaurant, you could give away a free lunch or dinner as a drawing that takes place for new email list members. Either way, give the customer something for their participation. Remember it is far easier to get more business from existing customers that have used you than it is to earn a brand new customer.

Once you create an email list, don't over use it. When your customers give you their email address, they are trusting you with an important connection to use to contact them. If you abuse this trust, you will end up with upset customers that will choose to not do any future business with you. With this in mind, it's important not to send too many emails within a short timeframe to your customers. It goes without saying that your customers also do not want you to give out their email addresses to other businesses. If you violate a customer's trust, your business will not be looked on favorably. Worse yet, you can hurt your own business by doing so.

Another thing to remember once you are ready to start contacting customers, the emails you send out must have high-quality content and be interesting to the customer that is receiving the email. We all get emails that are junk or spam. These usually come from companies that we have no past relationship with. When a company purchases an email and sends out unsolicited emails, they are spamming people with junk and they will most likely not receive a warm response from the people they are trying to solicit.

Again, it's very important to limit the amount of correspondence that your business sends out to customers. You want to send out enough emails that customers don't forget about you, but you definitely don't want to over send and end up with angry customers. Once a week is a good rule of thumb for most businesses. Don't email more than that.

What should you email? Try to put yourself in the customer's frame of mind. Ask yourself a few questions: Are they going to find this interesting? Is this something they will use and respond to? If your business is moving to a different location, that's worth an email. If you're adding a new product line, that might be worth an email. If you're going to offer 50% storewide this weekend, that's definitely worth an email blast out to your current customers.

After you create an email list you have a very useful tool for increasing your business. If used correctly, you will increase business while keeping your customer base engaged and informed.

Follow Our Step By Step Instructions On How To Create An Email List

There are third-party tools that people can pay for to send out emails to their email list. Mail Chimp and Constant Contact seem to currently be the most popular. The Easysite.com website building system actually has an email list along with email blast features built directly into their business website creator. This is a nice feature to have integrated into your business website. With Easysite, visitors to your site can simply sign-up using the "Follow This Site" feature or they can use the "Email Form" page to sign up to be on your website's email list.

Once they have signed up on your website that you created using Easysite, they have become part of your list of followers that can receive emails from your website. You can view your website's participants using your Site Admin > Users section. Here you can edit preference, manually add followers to the email list as well as delete followers.

When you use Easysite to manage your email list participants, you have the ability to automatically send out emails based upon updates to your business website. For example, you can use the calendar page to schedule reminders for certain special events or promotions right within the site. After you add a new department or new items to your website's ecommerce store, you can use the "Share" feature to send out an email to your customers regarding the new products. Most importantly, you can also use the built-in "Email Blast" page to send out customized emails to your website's email list participants.

The "Email Blast" page that is built into your business web site that you made with Easysite looks very much like a word processing program. This easy to use editor can be used to design a layout complete with text and pictures. This page also lets you select who you want to send the email to.

Under the "Send To" selector you can choose to send to only you. Use this option to test and send to yourself so you can view it and make sure that everything looks right before sending it out to everyone. Once the review checks out, you can select to send it to a predefined list of recipients or simply select to send it out to everyone. With your Easysite website, everyone includes all your website administrators, website members as well as website followers. The difference between your website members and followers is that members can actually log into your website, contribute items and view any pages that are set to members only access. Followers by distinction are only able to receive notifications from the website.

Another nice feature built into the Easysite website builder, is the ability for your participants to manage their own preferences. In this way you are able to let your followers choose the types of notifications that they want to receive. Followers can also choose no longer participate without having to contact you.

Email lists are used to group a set of members and followers.  For example, you might have customers that would like to receive weekly specials.  Another set of customers might want to know when special events are going to take place. 

To create a list, navigate to the "List" tab of the "Site Admin" page.  Select one of the ten lists available from the "Show" drop-down.  Use the "Name" entry to assign a name to the list.  Now select who's on the list using the checkbox listing of all your site members, followers and administrators.

Once you have a list, you can share website items, send out nofications and even create calendar events that will be sent to a particular list.

Watch this video to see how to create an email list: