A Quick Guide To Marketing With Mailing Lists

As you may or may not know, email marketing is becoming the weapon of choice for many of today's marketers. Not only is it very effective at marketing to targeted customers, it's also very affordable and can largely be put on autopilot.

Building a targeted mailing list will provide you with an asset you can use for the rest of business days. Not everyone knows how to market to their mailing list however, so I thought I'd show you.

Before we start looking at marketing, you need to know how to collect subscribers. The single best way to do this is by offering people a free gift in exchange for them signing up. Make sure this free gift is something related to your product / service, and is in your industry. That way if they sign up they are already showing they have an interest in your area of expertise.

Now you've got people subscribed to your mailing list, the next stage is to start communication with them. While you could email them as and when you have the time, there's a better way to do it. Write about 20 non time sensitive emails, and put them into an autoresponder (You should have an autoresponder included in your email marketing program). Set them to send out one message a week. Now anyone that signs up to your mailing list will get a message from you every week for five months. You may want to add more emails as you go along, say writing two new emails every week. This means that your subscribers will have new emails for as long as they stay subscribed.

You need to make sure these emails are informative and interesting, although you can always add the odd promotion in there too. This will build up your relationship with customers on auto pilot and allow you time to do other things.

You can also email people directly with any breaking news or time sensitive information. Showing subscribers that you have the latest news will mean they're more likely to stay subscribed to you (People like staying up to date). Don't over do it with the regular emails though, send too many and people will get annoyed by you. You are already sending them the one autoresponder email a week, one more breaking news email a week should be more then enough to keep the customer interested. This does vary depending on what you're emailing them about however, in some markets it may be standard to update people on a daily bases (E.G For the stock market). On the other hand, some markets may require you to update once a month or less.

That's pretty much the basics of effective email marketing. If you want to find out more about marketing with mailing lists, check out Ultimate Mailing Lists, a website detailing everything email marketing. Alternatively you can see what you need to look for in mailing list companies.