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Getting Started With Your Own Opt-in List

Don't have your own opt-in list yet? Don't worry! Getting started is much easier than you might think, and once it's up and running the process of collecting opt-ins will be on autopilot for good!

First things first: You need to put a web form on your site to collect e-mail addresses from your visitors. (A web form simply provides a place for your visitors to enter their name, e-mail address, and any other information you want to ask them for.) This form contains a script that will automatically send you an e-mail every time someone opts in to your list, telling you their name, e-mail address, and any other information you asked them to provide.

Any HTML editing program, like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, will help you set this up easily, and if you're looking for a free resource that shows you how to do it, visit: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/fm.html. Of course, if you don't feel like doing it yourself, a web designer could take care of it for you in less than an hour.

It's up to you how you want to store, manage, and use this information. Many people simply store their opt-in lists in a spreadsheet or text file, but there are also some great programs available to help you manage this information more easily.

Once you've started collecting opt-ins, there are a few things you will need to know to effectively manage them... and guarantee the highest possible response from any mailout you send. I've boiled them down to four simple strategies that will have you managing your lists like a pro in no time!

List Management Tip #1: Subscribes And Unsubscribes

One of the most important things you can do to keep your profits maximized -- and your headaches minimized -- is to stay on top of your subscribe and unsubscribe requests. For those of you who don't have an automated system for managing subscriptions to your newsletters and promotional mailings, this is especially important.

Requests to unsubscribe from your list should always be taken seriously. If someone asks to be removed from your list, and you neglect to do so and continue to send them e-mail, you are spamming them, plain and simple. And nothing will get you in hot water faster than a few spam complaints. You'll find yourself wasting hours of your time explaining yourself to the "spam police," and your ISP might even terminate your account!

Of course, it's just as important to ensure that people who ask to be added to your list are subscribed right away, since you never know which one of those subscription requests is going to represent your best customer. If you aren't ensuring that your mailing is being delivered to each and every person who signed up, you're literally throwing money away!

If your subscribe and unsubscribe requests aren't handled automatically, you should take care of this right before you send out a mailing. This ensures that your list is as current as possible, and it also means that you don't have to deal with this chore every single day. Just make it a part of your routine before you press "Send" on any mailing.

List Management Tip #2: Cleaning Your List

Keeping your list clean means more than just removing unsubscribes. Cleaning your list means sifting through the messages that "bounce back" to you after a mailing, and deciding which ones should be removed from your list altogether, and which ones you might want to try mailing again.

"Bounced" messages, also referred to as "undeliverable" messages, are those messages that, for whatever reason, were not successfully received by the intended recipient. Before we go any further, you should know that there are two main categories that bounced messages can fall into:

• Fatal Bounces: These represent messages that can never be delivered. Fatal bounces are usually caused by the user typing in an incorrect e-mail address when opting in to your list, or the subscriber no longer using the e-mail address they originally opted-in with.
  
  
• Non-Fatal Bounces: These are messages that could not be delivered at the time the server tried to deliver them, but may be deliverable at some time in the future. These types of bounces are usually caused by the recipient's mailbox being full, or their mail server being too busy at the time your message was sent.

When going through your bounced messages, you'll want to separate them into these two categories. You'll have to go into each returned message and take a look at the reason why it bounced. These messages can be a little tough to decipher, but the two most common reasons for fatal errors are "Unknown User" and "Domain Not Found."

When you come across these error messages, the first thing you'll want to do is take a quick look at the e-mail address that the message was being sent to. You'll often find that people will type in an "n" instead of an "m" in the ".com" part of their e-mail address. You can easily correct this by changing the ".con" to ".com".

If there is no obvious problem with the subscriber's e-mail address, then this usually means that they entered it incorrectly when they opted-in to your list, or that it's no longer in use. Unfortunately, there's nothing that you can do about these fatal errors, except delete those subscribers from your list.

NOTE: Just in case you're thinking "Why go through the trouble of removing these addresses from my list if they can't be delivered anyway," think again! If you continue to send e-mail to an address that is invalid, you can get into real trouble. This is one of the methods used to identify spammers, and if you are reported as repeatedly sending messages to "dead" e-mail addresses, you can get into trouble with your ISP.

For non-fatal errors -- the most common are "Mailbox Is Full" or "Server Too Busy" -- you'll want to try mailing your promotion to these people again. I suggest waiting a couple of days and then trying to resend your message to all the addresses that returned non-fatal errors in your initial mailout. You'll be surprised by how many get delivered on the second try.

List Management Tip #3: Creating Exclude Lists

Are you subscribed to your competitors' mailing lists? You should be! A big part of keeping tabs on your competitors is monitoring what products or services they are actively promoting and how much they are selling them for.

If your competitors are smart, I can just about guarantee that they are subscribed to YOUR mailing list, too. So in order to stay one step ahead of your competitors, you might want to think about excluding them from certain mailouts. Let's suppose that you are planning a big promotion that is going to offer a product at a price 30% below what your competition is offering it for. Wouldn't you want to keep that information out of your competitors' hands as long as possible?

Just about the ONLY step you can take to stay ahead of your competition in this respect is to go through your opt-in list and exclude addresses that you KNOW belong to your competition. If your competitor runs a site called joes-widget-world.com, then you can be sure that the e-mail address susan@joes-widget-world.com belongs to someone who's keeping tabs on you.

Simply exclude that e-mail address from your promotion, and your competitors won't know what hit them... until well after you've dominated the market!

List Management Tip #4: Storing And Managing Subscriber Data

As your list grows, it will become more and more important to ensure that you are storing your subscriber data in a format that is convenient and easy to work with. The biggest problem that people run into when they start trying to manage and optimize their opt-in lists is that they quickly find themselves with dozens of small lists instead of one big one.

List "A" might contain people who have purchased your product in the past 3 months, List "D" might contain subscribers who have downloaded your free eBook but have never bought your product, List "W" might contain people who have bought five or more of your products, and so on.

While this means that you are able to easily target different segments of your customer and subscriber base, it also means that you could spend hours and hours preparing your various lists for each promotion you send. Those of you who are doing this already know how frustrating and time-consuming these kinds of tasks can be. And once you have your lists ready, importing them into whatever e-mail application you're using can be even more maddening!

Luckily, there are some pretty powerful products out there designed to help e-mail marketers develop, manage, and segment their lists easily, from one user-friendly interface. The right software can save you literally hundreds of hours of frustration. Keep your eyes open, because we're going to be talking about some of these products in future issues.

Final Thoughts:

I don't know about you, but what I like best about having an effective list-management system in place is that I no longer have to worry about my lists. Once you get your lists under control, you'll be amazed at how much extra time you'll suddenly have on your hands. And if you're like me, you'll want to spend it working on other, more profitable aspects of your business.

In our next newsletter, we'll be talking about creating an effective e-mail promotion. This involves a lot more than just writing killer copy, though -- using the right technology can help you put together an e-mail promotion that will dramatically boost your bottom line. Using advanced targeting and personalization strategies, I think you'll be surprised at how easy it is to send out e-mails that will have people buying like crazy!

So please watch for our next issue, where I'll reveal some highly advanced techniques that we've been using to generate very impressive results from our own e-mail promotions. You won't want to miss it!