Got a forum or site that requires registration for free or fee-based membership?
Recommend That You Do This Email List Building Strategy Immediately:
Use your registration page to interface with your email list server to automate and make it easy for your members to join your mailing list while they subscribe to your forums!
This will require your membership registration form to integrate with your email list server and it *IS* possible.
In addition, you should also automate the ability for your member to be able to update their email address or change which list, frequency and format (HTML, or TEXT ONLY if you offer the choice) via their Membership profile.
How to implement?
If you outsource your email newsletter hosting and management to a 3rd party provider, then call them up and tell them what you want to do and ask them how your forum registration page or your membership registration page can integrate into their email list subscription software.
If you own your email newsletter management & delivery software, then either your in-house network admin or programmer can make this work or you can outsource the labor to a qualified contractor via Rentacorder or sites like it. This is the kind of job that should be able to be done in about 1-7 hours of labor at the most and once its setup?you can forget about it.
The one question that you'll have to answer once you go through this process:
Should you confirm or double opt-in your members in addition to the confirmation that I assume your registration process already has built into itself?
The answer: If you don't have a confirmation process as part of your forum/membership registration form, then it would be absolutely be a situation where you would WANT to have your email list server sends out a confirmation request email to verify the subscription request.
If you already do have a confirmation component to your forums or membership registration sign up process, then turn off confirmation from your email list server (to avoid duplicate confirmations being sent out to the end user) and be CERTAIN to send separate or at least one welcome email to your new members to acknowledge and confirm that they have been subscribed to the specific ?lists they signed up for. Got it?
Bottom line:
If you run a membership site or forums, give your new members the ability to subscribe to one or more of your email newsletters or alert lists as part of the registration process and allow them to manage their email list subscriptions with you via their member profile. The one-time setup costs are nominal compared to all of the new email list members you'll attract with this simple list building strategy.
To Do List Management
So far you have been following my advice and mailing to the same list more than once. At some point you find lists that will produce returns continually, but you notice that you are receiving more returns than when you started mailing to those lists.
You may see things like "Undeliverable as Addressed" or "Forwarding Order Expired." Every time you mail to an address and that prospect has moved or cannot be found for any reason, you have just paid for the postage with no possibility of getting a response.
Obviously it is a pretty big waste of money to continue to mail to this address, but what do you do about it? You could simply go into the list of names that you have purchased and delete the returns. No more bad addresses, no more wasted postage, right? That is one option but there is a better way to handle the situation.
The US Postal Service has an NCOA (National Change of Address) System that a limited number of companies are licensed to access. These companies are able to take the list that you have purchased, or compiled yourself, and check it against the USPS system. You will receive a report that will let you know if anyone on your list has moved, gone out of business, or even if the zip code that contact was in was changed by the Post Office itself. Along with the report you will receive a new copy of your list that has been cleaned and updated.
The cost for having your list checked is very economical (about $5.00 per thousand records) and will allow you to keep getting your message out to as many people in your list as possible.
At times you can see up to a 10% undeliverable rate, and it can even be higher on older lists that you have been using for a while. Average is more like 5% undeliverable so let's take a look at the numbers at that rate.
If you mail 10,000 and get 5% back for bad addresses: 10,000 x .05 = 500 pieces.
You will have paid postage on 500 pieces that did not reach their destination.
So if you mail to your list again without cleaning it you have just wasted: 500 x $0.23 = $115.00.
If you were to NCOA that list at a rate of $5.00 per thousand you would have spent: 10 x $5.00 = $50.00.
So you have three choices when faced with a list that needs cleaning:
1. Spend hours deleting every return that you receive from your list.
2. Waste $115.00 or more in postage every time you mail to that list.
or
3. Have the list checked by an NCOA service and get back in touch with customers that may have moved, for around one tenth the cost.
The NCOA service is the easiest and most effective way to keep your postage costs down.
Both Bittukansal & Joy H. Gendusa are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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