How to Create a Mailing List

[Ned Storm]

I have done this in many ways before such as with AWebber, Manually and even using my own PHP code.

What bugs me is that we normally have to pay monthly fees to get a decent level of service for the opt-in, auto-responder and deliverability.

It's all very well when Marketers tell us that the money is in the list and that it is so easy to recoup the cost of your subscription that it is a no-brainer simply to pay up $20+ every month.

But, I am sure that most webmasters are not going to want to spend more money on an email service just to keep in contact with their subscribers than they may pay for hosting.

But I do think that it is important to have a robust opt-in mechanism and avoid sending email from your domain name so that no one person can shut down your website for a trivial reason like forgetting that they opted in to receive your emails.

I am convinced that GMAIL is the way forward for us people that don't want to waste our money on fees that are higher than our hosting per site.

GMAIL uses a voting system for spam, so unlike a web host that may pull the plug on your website and demand an explanation the minute somebody accuses you of sending some spam. It is a community voting system that determines if your emails go to the Inbox or are sent to the Spam folder.

The only challenge that I see is the Opt-in process. In the standard systems they have to use a Double-Opt in system which is where the subscriber fills in their email in a form and it sends a message to that email box asking them to confirm that they wish to subscribe. So, they do it twice.

This is required since anybody or even a robot can fill in a form and submit it.

But with the GMAIL approach, we can ask our potential subscriber to send us an email request to join our list. This is powerful since we never sent them any email, they are the person that emails us first! And, this will be registered by GMAIL so when we reply, our email will go straight to their Inbox.

So the challenge is how to make it easy for the subscriber to Opt-in.

I did an experiment. I set up a new GMAIL account and sent a blank email with the word "Subscribe" to this address and it got received without a hitch. Further more, I set up a vacation auto-responder to immediately reply to incoming emails. This was received within seconds of me sending the email.

The vacation autoresponder needs to take care of welcoming new subscribers and those people unsubscribing and will respond to any other email you receive. So it is a bit clunky but still very useful.

Before sending email to your list, you will have to manually check for unsubscribe requests, so you delete them from your contact list before sending any more broadcast emails.

The actual sending of broadcast emails is a topic I hope to cover later, I do have a good 3rd-party solution for this and also I am thinking to code my own tool for this purpose too. So more on this later.

Here is the text of the Vacation Autoresponder message:

Quote:Hi

If you are newly subscribing, welcome to the community!

I hope to provide a subscriber bonus download, so a download link will
be sent to You once I have this in place.

If you are unsubscribing, sorry to see You go. And I will not send You
any more emails.


--

- Andy

http://siteA
http://siteB

You subscribed to the WNA mailing list at one of the
above sites. To unsubscribe, please reply with that word in the title.

Of course I need to clean up this format a bit, but you get the idea!

The part below the double-dash is the email signature that I set up which is added to every email that I send. So I need to remove the dash before my name.

Your thoughts ...

Anyone providing a useful contribution to this discussion can have a free copy of my email scheduling software when I produce it. Also you wil get the PDF guide to the whole technique once I perfected it.