Membership Sites and Email Lists We recommend MailChimp


Most membership sites have access to their members via email and should have at least two separate email lists,  one  for premium subscribers and one for general marketing for those that want to stay in contact with you. This second list should be used on a regular basis, at least once a month, with an update on your product and some other useful information that compels the recipient to open your email. Your premium members should not be included on this second list as you might offer specials  that could cause pricing issues with your current, or even worse, recently joined members.

Your membership list needs to be constantly updated with adds and drops from your premium membership service. As members add, they should be dropped from the free and added to the premium list. As members drop, they need to be removed from the premium list and added to the free list. Managing these lists by hand can become overwhelming very quickly.  We use our S2-membership plugin to handle this back-office record keeping. A free MailChimp account  is available to everyone. This is one of the best free internet offers out there and  Mailchimp promises this list to be free forever:  http://mailchimp.com

This free service currently allows you to have up to 2,000 email addresses between all your lists and you can send out up to 12,000 emails per month. Once you exceed these numbers, you must become a premium member to continue to use the MailChimp service.

There is a learning curve involved in getting the service set up and seeing how best to fit it into your workflow but once this process is complete it becomes  just another tool.  If you are on a PC and using our recommended tag team tools of Windows Live Writer and Snagit, the good news is that MailChimp supports an XML-RPC (ie LiveWriter) interface, allowing you to compose your emails in LiveWriter, upload them to MailChimp, and select the mailing list you want to send them out to.

There are several other reasons to use Email services such as MailChimp, one of the more important being making sure you are in compliance with CAN-SPAM standards. These standards ensure that users on the mailing list have “opted” into the the list and can easily opt out of the list via a link in the email.  This compliance is recognized by many email services such as GMail and helps to insure that your valuable work does not end up in the spam bucket.  It also gives control to your email receipients where it belongs.

Using an email service also provides you with the ability to easily conduct analysis of your emails. Mailchimp can give you open rates, click rates, and even track emails that are being forwarded and passed around which can be something you encourage or discourage. In our opinion, the benefits of setting up and using a mail service such as MailChimp in your workflow is well worth the extra effort it initially takes.

Don’t want to do this all by yourself?  We don’t blame you.  Our experts can have you up and running in about 2 hours.  We will save you a couple of days of work using our shortcuts and scripts insuring you are setup correctly for just $100/USD

[add_to_cart item=”S2/MailChimp” quantity=”user:1″ ]

 

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Need help setting up your membership site and getting going with MailChimp or another email service?  Give us a call or send us a note and we can put together an affordable plan for you.

build@FortunesRocks.me
617-391-7990


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