What Is Email Marketing and Does Your Business Need a Mailing List?

There are many different marketing strategies that a small business can employ online: blogging, social media, and ads are just a few examples. But one of the most powerful (and often overlooked) marketing strategies is email marketing, which involves using email outreach to share your business offerings with existing and prospective customers.

You may have received some coupons from your favorite pizza joint. They got your address the last time you ordered pizza for delivery. They want to keep you as a customer, so now they’re using the valuable information they’ve obtained — your address — to make sure you don’t forget about them.

Email technology caused mailing lists to explode. Gone were the high costs of paper, printing, envelopes, and stamps. No more licking, sticking, and shipping. Now we compose a message and shoot it out to every email address on our list, and then we sit back and wait for customers to show up.

Email marketing offers several advantages over snail-mail marketing and other marketing efforts: first and foremost, it costs a lot less to send out emails than traditional mail. Emails can be tracked, so you can see who read the message, who clicked on it, and how many recipients took action in response to your email. It also offers an opt-in feature, which allows potential customers to sign up or sign off from receiving your messages, resulting in a pool of willing recipients who want to receive your marketing messages.

What is a Mailing List?

Mailing lists were around long before email and the internet. Businesses have been using snail mail to entice customers for decades. The concept is simple: collect people’s addresses and then mail them promotions and special offers.

A mailing list is a list of physical mailing addresses or email addresses, and in some cases, both. The only thing you need for your mailing list is the address itself. If you want to send messages to a physical address, you can send it to “Resident.” And an email doesn’t require a name, just an address.

However, the more information you collect about the folks on your mailing list, the better. For example, if you collect first names, you can send emails that say, “Hi Joe!” This makes the message more personal, and recipients are more likely to open and read it.

Although mailing lists are still used to send marketing materials via snail mail (as your daily mail intake probably confirms), email has become the dominant form of mailing-list marketing, so that’s what we’ll focus on.

What About Spam?

Spam could be considered a type of email marketing, but spam is unsolicited and therefore unwanted. It’s often used to garner illicit or nefarious business transactions ranging from ad clicks to hacking (malware) endeavors.

We’ve all opened our email only to find it bombarded with spam — garbage emails that we don’t want or need. Email marketing is different from spam, primarily because it’s based on ethical marketing and business practices.

There are also nefarious practices in list-building, such as scraping the web to collect random email addresses, a practice that is most commonly used by spammers and unethical practitioners. Ethical list-building only uses willing participants.

How Does It Work?

It’s quite simple: you gather a bunch of email addresses, and then you send messages to the people on your list. The messages vary. Some businesses send monthly newsletters. Others send weekly coupons. What you send and how often you reach out to your mailing list will depend on the marketing strategy you’ve developed for your business.

There are a few common methods for gathering addresses for a mailing list: obtain an existing list (usually by purchasing it), invite people to sign up, or collect contact information from customers when they inquire or make a purchase.

Purchasing email lists will get results, otherwise people would have stopped buying and selling mailing lists a long time ago. We’ve all got junk mail filters and spam folders filled with garbage that’s broadcasting to thousands — maybe millions — of email addresses. This is a spammy practice, and these spammers are surely wasting resources sending messages to people who are not a match to their business offerings, and as we know, the best marketing campaigns target prospective customers, people who are likely to be interested in whatever your business provides.

However, when you invite people to sign up for your mailing list or collect contact information from willing customers, the list you end up with is full of people who have chosen to receive your messages. This is usually done with a sign-up form on your website. Some mailing lists promise a regular newsletter or blog updates; others only notify subscribers when there’s a big announcement, launch, or special offer. A good way to entice folks to sign up is by offering them something, like a freebie (also called a lead magnet). Authors often use this tactic, offering new subscribers a free short story.

Although it’s possible to manually manage a mailing list, doing so would be pretty cumbersome. There are several excellent service providers that make managing mailing lists a breeze, and they usually offer the service for free for a limited time or up to a certain number of subscribers. If you decide to use a provider, either get advice from an email-marketing consultant or do your research — all mailing-list providers are not equal, and moving from one provider to another can be tedious and time-consuming. It’s better to try to make the right selection from the beginning, even if it costs a little more.

Email Marketing: The Process

Here are the basic steps involved in email marketing:

1. Choose a provider. If you’re starting super small, you might be able to manage your list on your own. But most service providers will let you start out on a free plan. As you increase your number of subscribers or use more advanced features, you’ll start to incur charges.
2. Build a list of recipients. This can be done by offering an opt-in form on your website; many websites use a pop-up to encourage visitors to sign up. In some cases, you might use a shared or purchased list. You can also add subscribers to your list when you collect their email addresses during a purchase or some other action. The goal is to collect addresses of people who are a match to your business — people who want to receive updates, notifications, and special offers from you. You can offer goodies to potential subscribers to entice them: some examples include a free e-book or a discount code. Your list should always allow users to unsubscribe.
3. Develop a campaign. The email marketing campaign should be carefully designed, customized to both the target audience and your business offerings. It might be as simple as sending a weekly discount code to subscribers, or it could be a complex series of emails that walk recipients through various steps. Make sure you’ve set a clear and achievable goal, which usually culminates with some kind of purchase.
4. Run the campaign. Perhaps the first year, you send quarterly newsletters that are designed to boost your credibility and make subscribers feel connected to your business and its offerings. In the second year, you can include semi-annual discounts. Eventually, you can send announcements about new and existing products. Keep your products and services in front of your customers and offer occasional specials to make it worth their while.
5. Develop your lists. Over time, you might want to break your list into segments. If you run a bookstore, you might have a segment for sci-fans and another for romance readers. Look for new ways to grow your lists.
6. Expand and fine-tune your campaigns: Continue to tweak your campaigns so your content doesn’t grow stale.

Does My Business Need a Mailing List?

A lot of website owners aren’t comfortable with the idea of a mailing list because they don’t want to spam people, especially their own customers. But if your subscribers have opted in to receive emails from you, then it’s not spam.

Mailing lists offer unique benefits and opportunities, but the most important benefit of a mailing list is the built-in cost savings. When you build a list of customers who have chosen to receive messages from you because they are already interested in what you’re offering, you have created a direct path for marketing to people who are matches to your business offerings. And while there is a cost associated with managing a mailing list, it’s nothing compared to what you might spend on a regular advertising campaign.

Put simply, mailing lists allow you to reach your target customers efficiently and affordably. Does every business need a mailing list? Of course not. Plenty of businesses get by without one. But for the vast majority of small businesses, a mailing list just makes good sense.

Why Is It So Effective?

Email marketing is effective, because when it’s done right, you’re reaching out to people who’ve told you they’re interested in your offerings. That’s why it’s a great way to build customer loyalty. You won’t need to rely as much on other costly marketing efforts like sales and advertising. Email marketing puts your customers a click away.

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