It’s quite likely that you collect your clients’, prospective clients’, or other interested people’s email addresses.  If you don’t, then you should seriously consider doing so. It’s easy to put a form on your website and ask people to sign up to your email mailing list – and then you can contact them when you have new products or other news to communicate to them.

This is a really good idea because it is highly likely that once people navigate away from your site, the chances are that they’ll forget all about you, and you’ve lost that once-only chance to turn them into a client.

I don’t know if this is true, or how statistics like this can be worked out, but it’s said that on average it takes six contacts between you and your prospective clients before they will actually buy something from you. (Did I get that right? Is it six?)

In any case, it makes sense to maintain some kind of rapport with people who are interested in your product, or whatever it is that you are offering.

There are two easy ways of managing an email list.

1. Handling your prospects’ emails manually

The most basic way is simply to handle the list manually.  Ask people to contact you if they want to join your email list, and then manually add their email address to a list of addresses that you keep in a plain text file on your computer.  You should separate the email addresses with a comma, like this:

email@emailaddress.com,joe@joebloggs.com,info@website.com

and so on.

When you send an email, simply copy and paste the list of email addresses into the bcc field of the email, and send the email to yourself.  You should take care to paste the list of addresses into the bcc field, rather than the cc field – you don’t want everyone to see the list of addresses.  It breaches the trust your prospects have placed in you, because you are supposed to keep the email addresses confidential.

People are sometimes wary of giving you their email address, so in order to reassure them, by your sign-up request or form you should write something like: “We won’t share your email address with any other party”. You must stand by your promise.

Similarly, you need to add a “how to unsubscribe” sentence at the bottom of your email.  You need to say something like “You are receiving this email because you signed up to receive email updates at http://www.yourwebsite.com.  Should you no longer wish to receive updates from us, please reply to this email with “unsubscribe” in the subject line.”  And you need to make sure you honour any unsubscribe requests you receive.

You can’t simply add people’s email addresses to your list.  You have to make absolutely sure you have their permission before you do so, otherwise you could be accused of spamming, which could be serious.

You may find that your server doesn’t let you send out emails to large lists of addresses.  In this case, you simply break up the list into smaller sections and send out two, three, or four emails.  However, if your list gets so long that it becomes unwieldy, it may be time to use a third party email list manager.

2.  Using a third party email list manager (an email marketing service)

There are several services that can handle your email list for you.  The advantages are multiple.  It is much less work for you, as the system automatically handles signup and unsubscribe requests.  You can also use a much more secure “double opt-in” system which means the person signing up needs to click a link in an email (also sent automatically) before they are signed up to your email list.  This makes double sure the person wants to be signed up to the list.

Another benefit is that you can set the signup form to ask for the person’s name (and any other details) which means you can send emails which say “Dear Joe” – much more personal and effective!  Also, you can ask the system to collect other information that may be useful to you, such as how they heard about you, where they live, what in particular they are interested in, etc. etc. – though you don’t want to ask so much information from them that it puts them off signing up.

Other benefits of third party email list managers are that you may be able to set an autoresponder sequence (a series of emails sent automatically to people who sign up), use highly professional-looking email templates, synchronise your mailings with Facebook and Twitter, turn your blog posts into email newsletters, track click-throughs within emails, and run online surveys.

Pricing and the features offered vary – have a look around and see which system best fits your needs.  Many offer free signup for a limited time which means you can log in and play around with the system before committing yourself.

Some highly-regarded third party email list managers are:

iContact
Vertical Response
Constant Contact
AWeber
Benchmark
GetResponse
JangoMail
Pinpointe