Your list is important. Use it
It’s a lot of work to build a strong mailing list of fans or followers who give you permission to send them news about your business. Your list can become your most effective tool to meet your fans where they are and build your credibility. You have a group of people who have gone out of their way to personally give you permission to email them about your brand. This list is your target market, your loyal fans, and no less – your brand evangelists. You can count on them to tweet, facebook, or blog about your brand within their own network. Your mailing list is a vital tool.
It’s true, you can lose it if you don’t use it wisely
I am working with a well established and highly credible band right now who just lost their entire mailing list. Thousands upon thousands of fans who can no longer receive the updates they individually asked for over the past 15 years. It was devastating. What went wrong? They didn’t use the list for a couple months – the next time they went to send an update to their fan-base, only 300 emails went through.
Why?
Mailing lists are “permission based” by federal law. Every time you send an update to your fans, whatever email client you use will file all who clicked, read, forwarded, blocked, opted out, reported as spam, or just passed over your email. This tracks each individual address’ permission granted to you to send them updates. By filtering out all who opt out or report you as spam, you can keep your updates to those who give you permission. Large lists have various checkpoints to clear before hitting the inboxes of your fans. These checkpoints review your list to be sure it is not spam – meaning you have the permission you need to send your update.
Here is what you may not know…
These checkpoints also check the last time you sent a blast to this specific list. If it has been too long, the checkpoint will consider your permission lost on all accounts – your list will be no good. You can kick and scream on the phone with anyone you like – I have – it doesn’t work. If and email client sends out an blast that is potentially considered spam, according to federal law they can be blacklisted and you both can get in big trouble. No one will risk it for you.
A loophole if you lose permission
After being told five times by everyone I talked to that the list was dead and gone – that we had to start over, here is what I did: Exported the old list from our email client (Constant Contact) and ran it through a mail merge in Microsoft Office. I had the frontman write personal letter to the fans apologizing for not keeping in touch, and he would love to continue to be connected to everyone. He briefly explained that we were switching email clients and if they would like to continue their involvement in the bands community they would need to re-sign up at the new mailing list (hyperlinked to the sign up form). Then I set up a dummy email account and let my computer send one email at a time to each fan on the old list requesting them to join the new list. Voila – permission.
This will not guarantee your entire list back to you, you may only get a small percentage of those fans back.
Use your mailing list, and use it wisely, or you will lose it.
