Top 10 Dos and Don’ts for your Email List:
- Don’t send your newsletters out through regular email such as gmail, yahoo or hotmail. If you are sending your e-newsletter out through your regular email, you are spamming people. Your newsletters must give people to opt out. It’s just good practice.
- Do get a professional email address: Don’t use the “from email” as your gmail, yahoo or hotmail. Get your email from your web domain: [email protected].
- Don’t add people you meet casually or from networking groups to your email list. Meeting someone at a networking group and automatically adding them to your newsletter list is LAME and so annoying. If you ask people if they want to be added to your email list and they say YES then you can. Otherwise, respect the relationship. When you meet people at a networking group, send them an email thanking them for their time and invite them to join your list then include the link where people can go to opt in.
- Do go for quality people not just quantity – you can have a 6-figure business with a list of less than 1,000 people.
- Don’t take it personally when people opt out. If they opt out then they just did you a favor and you now have a more focused list who wants to read your message.
- Do be consistent: A good open rate (according to stats out there) is 20% for service-based industry. So you can see that if you are ONLY sending a monthly newsletter then some people forget about you because they may not read your email. Send a newsletter at least twice a month if not weekly.
- Don’t focus on only one medium. Video is HUGE and not everyone loves watching videos. If you have a video in your newsletter AND you give a text version of it, it gives people the option of scanning your info. Also, since so many people read email on their smart phones, some people can’t watch your video on their phone so if your message is ONLY in your video then you have excluded some of your audience.
- Do use a professional email manager such as Infusionsoft, Aweber or Mad Mimi. There are a ton of them, these are my favorite. (Talk with a VA and have them set this up for you, it’s worth it!)
- Don’t promote a bunch of stuff at once. If you are promoting your own products and services and you are an affiliate of someone else and you are promoting them, then space things out appropriately.
- Do give great information in your newsletters. Give value.
