How to Choose Mailing List Management Software

By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
April 12th, 2000

The problem with most Internet marketing articles is that they tend to concentrate on ways of attracting visitors to your site using tactics such as search engine optimization, linking strategies, banner ads etc., but don’t show you how to convert these visitors in to customers.

Now the sales conversion process is a huge topic in itself, and in this article I intend to concentrate on one, albeit very important, factor: quite simply the more times a potential customer is exposed to your sales message, the more likely they are to make a purchase. Indeed, research shows that people may need to receive a sales message up to seven times before making a buying decision.

Sometimes visitors to your Web store will spend enough time in it to receive sufficient exposure and reach a purchasing decision. However, more often than not, they will not buy during their first visit and you therefore need some way of maintaining contact with them. And this is why one of the best pieces of Internet marketing advice that anyone can give you is to build your own email newsletter.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Publishing a newsletter can take a lot of time and effort, to prepare the content, to administer the ever-changing list of subscribers and to mail-out the finished newsletter. The time taken for these latter tasks – administering the mailing list and distributing the newsletter – is often overlooked, but can grow to be a significant portion of the total time needed to produce the newsletter. So clearly, any tool that can help ease these tasks is to be welcomed.

Until recently there were basically two ways of managing and distributing an email newsletter: you could either use an email client (such as Pegasus or Eudora) installed on your local PC or attempt to master some rather unfriendly online tools such as Majordomo.

Like many newsletter publishers operating on a limited budget, I started of using Pegasus which had the major advantages of being fairly easy to set up and, of course, being free! However, by the time I reached around 800 subscribers I found that I was spending around 2 hours per week managing the distribution list. Add to this my increasingly anxious ISP who feared that my regular bulk mailings were maybe spam, and it was clear that it was time to look for a better solution.

Fortunately, there is now a whole new breed of Web-based email list management tools available for example eGroups, Topica, Listbot, Sparklist and Oaknet. However, these new tools have vastly varying capabilities and pricing and the choice can be a difficult one. It is very important to choose correctly the most appropriate system for your needs, for although it is usually possible to transfer your mailing list from one service to another it can often be quite difficult and you may lose a significant number of subscribers in the process.

Here then, are some of the features you should look for together with an explanation of their importance:

Database import: allows you to import an existing list of subscribers, should you have one.
Database export: allows you to export your list of subscribers either for backup purposes or for use with another application.
Email and Web-based sign up and removal: enables you to include a subscribe/unsubscribe form on your Web site and a subscribe/unsubscribe email address within your newsletter.
Double opt-in: this feature sends an email to a person who has requested a subscription asking them to verify that they do indeed wish to sign up. This prevents people from signing up someone else for a subscription and reduces the chances of you being accused of spamming.
WYSIWYG display: enables you to see exactly how your newsletter will look before mailing it out.
Text and HTML options: allows you to send both text and HTML versions of a newsletter.
Size limitations: some systems, particularly the free ones, limit either the size of newsletter you can send out or the number of messages you can send out each month.
Personalization: this feature enables you to personalize each newsletter, for example with the addition of the subscriber’s name.
Address modification: some systems make it very difficult to change a reader’s email address, often requiring you to completely delete a subscriber’s details and then re-add them using the new address.
Include subscription address in body of email: even though most of these systems have automated remove features, they usually require the subscriber to know what email address they subscribed under.
Automatic removal of bouncing addresses: email messages can fail to be delivered (i.e. they “bounce”) for many reasons, for example because the subscriber has changed their email address and not updated their subscription.
Online archive: automatically adds newsletters into a publicly accessible online archive.
Verifiable number of subscribers: advertisers are more likely to place ads in your newsletter if they have a means of independently verifying the number of subscribers it has.
Collection of demographic data: during the newsletter sign up process subscribers are asked a number of questions about themselves. The collated data is useful both to the newsletter owner and potential advertisers.
Welcome and goodbye messages: allows you to specify messages that are automatically sent when people subscribe or unsubscribe from your newsletter.

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