Building & Managing Your Email Subscriber List with Constant Contact
Most Internet Marketers out there will tell you that building a list of subscriber emails is your greatest online asset. I have personally used Constant Contact, a low-cost user-friendly email management system.
“More than 300,000 small businesses and organizations use Constant Contact’s tools to build strong relationships with their customers.”
Generally you would have a sign up form on your website or blog that would allow a visitor to sign up for your list in exchange for a free report, series of video training, eNewsletter, etc. I’m sure you’ve seen offers out there.
For this type of setup, I suggest using an online program called Constant Contact.
Scenario:
Someone fills out your online website subscriber form. The user will then go to a confirmation page to confirm they want to be on your list. Meanwhile, you get an email notification that this person has signed up for your list. Once they confirm, a welcome email will automatically be sent from Constant Contact, and land in their Inbox.
Additional Uses for Constant Contact:
- Outside of building your list securely, you have the added feature of being able to send text emails (like this one) or HTML emails to your list(s). HTML emails are when you get the pretty pictures and colors in an email.
- You can add, schedule and manage a series of emails, better known as autoresponders
- When you send an email to a list, you click one button and send to that list (versus sending individual emails).
- Create multiple lists of subscribers to organize your contacts and send targeted campaigns to each.
- Advanced email and link tracking system to monitor activity on emails sent to your lists.
- Free coaching and support from the Constant Contact team to maximize results
- Everything is automated - the welcome emails are customized and you don’t have to send anything out. The user is sent the email once they sign up.
A free (an painful) alternative to Constant Contact:
You can always add a form to your website to sign up for your list. When a visitor submits their email address into the form, you get an email with the form contents (name, email, etc.).
If you have desire to build a list of email addresses manually (without an automated system like constant contact), you could copy each email address, from each individual email you get, and paste it into an Excel sheet (or other spreadsheet). You’d probably want one excel sheet for each form or list to keep the leads straight (and not mix sources). Then, if you ever want to email your list (let’s say to notify them that a new blog post has been listed), you would have to manually enter each email address into an email (from gmail let’s say) and send the notification out. Some email accounts will limit the number of email addresses you can send to at once…which could cause further delay. It just adds more work. But an option.
Let’s assume you want to build a list of subscribers and build a following, but don’t have the time or patience to do it all manually. Constant Contact an inexpensive and easy alternative! For up to 500 email addresses, this system is only $15/month. If you send just one email promoting an affiliate product, you’ll make that back and then some as long as only 1 person buys. A nice thing to, is Constant Contact is currently offering a free 60-day trial.
There is some set-up involved when you open an account. The Constant Contact team has a pretty solid training center for you to learn it all and implement yourself. But, if you don’t have the time, we can help!
There are really two ways for us to set up your account. There’s a very bare-bones basic track, and a full customization track.
1) Full Customization: For this option, I go in and grab the code to connect your forms to your database within Constant Contact, set up your individual lists, customize your settings, customize a text template for your email broadcasts, customize a color html template that will look like a mirror of your site (basically, we can take the header, or parts of the site to make this email template really shine and convert), set up a welcome email for you which will include a free report attached (if that is your hook), customize the visitor’s verification page, etc. And, you have full training included by me – where we go in and I teach you how to use the whole system. This setup and training takes us up to about 6 hours. We usually charge new clients $995 for this Constant Contact package – but for my blog readers, we will drop the price down to $450.
2) Bare bones basic: For this option, I go in, grab the code to connect your forms to your database within Constant Contact and that’s it. No email templates designed, no training (but CC has a good training video section – it would just take time to learn it – it’s not that bad though), you would set up your welcome email and client lists. This option is $50 because you would be doing most of the work.
Are you ready to get started with Constant Contact?
Click Here to Sign Up for Your Free Trial Today!
Have any questions? Contact me or fill out a comment below.
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[...] that can do everything you want, like Constant Contact. You can read an earlier post titled, “Building & Managing Your Email Subscriber List with Constant Contact” which outlines the benefits, features, pricing and [...]