Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’ve got to say I’m living the high life and it continues today because we have a fascinating
topic.
We’re going to be talking about email but not our normal email client software.
Oh no, no, no.
We’re going to be talking about email management software for things like newsletters.
That’s coming up today on DottoTech.
Ask Dotto Tech is the show where you ask and I answer questions and the question you can
ask are anything technology-related and you ask them right here on the YouTube Channel.
Where we go and we find the question Pedro Albertos who says, “Howdy Steve, I’ve
got a question for you.
I need to start a mailing list and I’m not sure how to do it.
Is there an app or format in Google or Gmail to do it easily?”
Pedro, Gmail and Outlook, other email apps are not really designed for mail list management.
When you say mail list, I’m assuming that you want to maybe create a newsletter or do
some marketing or something that’s larger than interpersonal communications.
Our Gmail software, Outlook, Apple Mail, it’s all designed for personal communications.
Now to be fair, you can build lists but those lists typically are small and they contain
people who you are intimately in communication with, maybe a list of people who you share
driving to school or you share driving to hockey practice in the morning, in case you’ve
got four or five parents all on that list and what the list becomes is a convenient
way to communicate with all of them and kind of permission is implicit in that fact that
you know these people and you’re talking to them on a regular basis.
It’s great for community type stuff like that.
If you’re actually building a list that’s based on a broader interest or especially
if you’re building a mail list for business where you’re going to be producing a newsletter
or you’re going to be creating some sort of emails that grow your brand, introduce
you to customers and ultimately you might want to do some commerce out of, then your
personal email software is definitely not the place that you want to build that list.
There’s a class of software called email marketing software or autoresponder software
that’s designed for that and I’ve got three examples of that here on my computer.
You’ve got Constant Contact, which you see here.
I’ve got Aweber and I’ve got Mail Chimp.
These are all introductory level or entry level autoresponder or email marketing packages
that you can start out with and usually, you can start out with these packages for free
or for a very inexpensive monthly fee but they allow you to build your list properly
both safely and legally which are all issues.
Now what is special about this software compared to using Gmail?
Well, the first thing that all of the software has is it has the ability for you to have
people subscribe and unsubscribe from the list.
That is a hallmark for email marketing software.
First of all, legally you need to be able to give people the ability to unsubscribe
from your list if they are subscribed to and all of these software enables that.
The other thing that it enables them to do is to subscribe to your list, which allows
you to grow it and all of the tools include with their subscription capabilities the ability
fir for you to send out subscription links within your email or to embed them within
your website.
We’ve all done it.
We’ve gone to a website and there’s a question saying if you want more information
on this, if you want to download this free PDF, if you want to sign up for our newsletter,
enter your name and email address here.
Then one thing usually happens if you’re a good email marketer, as soon as somebody
has entered their information an email is immediately sent to their system verifying
that they are indeed the ones who applied in order to join that email list and opting
in and completing what we call the opt-in process.
It’s called double opt-in because the first thing they had to do is enter their name and
email address in the web form and then they had to reply in their email.
So we have now an audit trail of the person actually saying that they want to be on the
list and then confirming that they want to be on the list.
And that’s very important and very professional way to approach things.
All of these software does that.
Other things that email marketing software will do for you includes having email templates
and managing your lists and allowing you to segment a list into a variety of different
special interests and ultimately build funnels or email marketing sequences or communication
sequences where you might send somebody a series of emails introducing them to more
and more intimate details about a product or service that you may be selling.
Basically what email marketing software does is it allows you to engage in an email conversation
with your clients and give you the total control over that conversation.
And it ultimately can grow into full blown CRM or Customer relationship management software.
For example, I started out using a tool called Aweber which is this tool right here.
I outgrew Aweber over a period of years, over a couple of years, and have moved on into
a program called InfusionSoft where I now manage all of my business.
InfusionSoft allows me to do things like have shopping carts and far more tactical communications
with the people that I’m talking to, such as knowing exactly when they click on a link,
all sorts of things like that.
But you are asking about starting so rather than starting at the deep end of the pool
with InfusionSoft, let’s show you just a little bit of probably the one that I would
recommend more often than any of the others.
While Constant Contact is a terrific tool, very popular, it really holds your hand all
the way through things.
It’s got great customer support but I think it’s limiting as far as the growth cap that
it gives you.
Aweber is a little quirky.
I like Aweber a lot.
Technically, it’s very good but there are just some things about it that cause me to
go it’s not really my favorite app.
Mail Chimp, however, I do like a lot.
Not that it doesn’t have its warts but if I had to recommend to start with it would
probably Mail Chimp.
Now let’s just kind of log in now.
I don’t have a paid for account in Mail Chimp.
I’ve got a free account in Mail Chimp which allows you to just kind of start out and send
a few thousand emails I think it is per month for free.
But just take a look at the dashboard is what I wanted to look at.
When you start out, you can setup campaigns, lists, start building your audience, invite
your colleagues are all the kinds of the introductory things that they ask you to do.
So let me just talk to you a little but about what happens here so that you have a more
complete picture of what happens in the email software.
Campaigns are series of emails that we create within our email autoresponder that will allow
us to basically send a sequence of emails.
It can be one every day.
It can be every other day.
For example, anybody who signs up for my Evernote course, they get a series of email, ten or
actually eleven consecutive days they get an email.
If you take a look here, this is the actually sequence as it looks in InfusionSoft and each
of these little icons represents a new email going out on subsequent days.
And within InfusionSoft, I can actually see who is receiving those emails on what days
and where they are in that sequence.
That’s a campaign.
That can be used to promote a product or to deliver a product as is in the case of the
way I’m using it to deliver my course on Evernote.
So all of these packages allow you to create campaigns which are very powerful marketing
tools.
Lists are basically where you have people opt in, sign up for your newsletter, sign
up for your campaigns and we manage their names and email addresses on those lists.
We can have people on multiple lists.
They might be interested in two or three different products that we’re talking about and topics.
So you could say have a list of people that were interested in productivity tool, let’s
say it’s a productivity space and Evernote and other people that are interested in task
managers and then I would combine all of those lists for my weekly email.
That’s a typical way that email marketers would use the lists in order to reach their
community.
They can send to everybody if its general interest or they can segment it to vertical
interests by managing their lists properly.
Each of these packages handles this in a different way.
Some of them use tags for representing people on list.
Other ones have just full lists themselves that are demarked uniquely.
InfusionSoft, one of the things that I love about it is everybody is on a single list
and then we split them out through the tags that we apply which gives us tremendous flexibility
in how we manage people in InfusionSoft.
And then we talk about building our audience and building your audience—actually, I’ll
just jump in here—because building your audience means that you can create sign-up
forms and those sign-up forms can be forms that you email out to people or that you embed
on your website.
So if I just click here on the embedded forms, what will happen is it will actually start
to create a form that looks like this preview that we see here and this is what the code
looks like that we actually plug in to our WordPress website, which will then create
this form on our website.
If you go to my website right now, there will be a pop-up invite for you to join one of
my mail list that will happen a few seconds after you visit the site.
In other places on my site, there will be actual physical forms embedded right into
the pages.
All of these serve to capture people who might be interested in the sorts of communication,
the sort of stuff that I create.
So the content I create allows them to sign up for the appropriate list, tells me and
identifies to me that they are interested in those things and then allows me to email
to them as we go along.
And when they get bored or when they get too busy or if they decide that they don’t like
my content, at the bottom of every single email is an unsubscribe button.
All they have to do is click on that and then my email software is notified this person
no longer wants to receive these communications from me and they are removed from the list.
It’s a very nice, simple and elegant tool that you can make incredibly complicated procedures
with and then you can really make quite sophisticated as far as how you market it.
One of the other things that each of these tools will have is the ability for you to
create email templates.
Now personally, I don’t use any of the templates.
I like a very clean email format and when I send my emails I don’t like a lot of fanciness
but you can create really fancy looking newsletters with each of them and they enable the creation.
They actually just give you ideas of what you should be putting into your newsletter.
If you’re say a realtor, it’s tremendous for you to be able to see the templates that
they have that are designed for promoting real estate.
They even show you where the pictures go and how big the pictures should be, what sort
of pictures you should have, where the description goes and allows you to kind of work within
their format to make your content look that much more professional.
But Pedro, the bottom line is if you’re thinking about getting into the world of email
marketing or sending out newsletters, one of these tools is the place that you want
to start.
I recommend probably starting with Mail Chimp.
Sign up for the free account.
Take their training and their tutorials and go slowly through the process of learning
and understanding what an email autoresponder or email marketing tool will do for you.
As an online marketer, somebody who makes their living from the internet, this is the
most important tool that I use on a daily basis because this is the one that puts me
in contact with my community directly.
It allows me to talk to them and ultimately to ask them if they want to purchase something
downstream and that’s really where business happens.
I hope you found this video today to be useful.
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That’s it for today.
Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!