Making a mailing list, checking it twice…

After writing about the form elements a couple of weeks ago, a few people at the office suggested that I write about the mailing list elements as well. If you have a domain with email service, creating a mailing list is an excellent and easy way to keep your visitors informed about your business, club or group, and is a good tool to get them more involved as well.

Mailing List Overview

It’s easy to set up a mailing list for your website. In fact, you can set up as many mailing lists as you like. Basically, a mailing list is a collection of names which you can use to send information to multiple recipients at the same time.

I like to think about using mailing lists in two different ways: external and internal. As an example, let’s use a site that my friend uses to manage their Japanese drum group, San Francisco Taiko Dojo http://www.sftaiko.com/contact_booking.html.

First, the more traditional, external way to use a mailing list is as a consolidation of your customers or people who might be interested in your business. In my example, we’ve created a mailing list for people who are interested in finding out about upcoming performances or concerts that San Francisco Taiko might be doing.

Another way to use a mailing list is as an internal tool. If you have several people in your organization who might be responsible for the same job (e.g. answering general questions about your business or responding to sales inquiries), you might want to set up a mailing list that includes that group of people (e.g. sales@yourbusiness.com or info@yourbusiness.com) That way, if a customer sends an email to that address it will automatically go to everyone on the mailing list, and anyone would be able to answer it.

Setting Up Your Mailing List

Before you add any mailing list elements to your website, you’ll need to set up your mailing list. Note that you MUST have a domain in order to set up a mailing list!

1. Login to your account at www.homestead.com.
2. Click the domains & email link in the left-hand menu.
3. Click the email services link. If you have multiple domains, you may be prompted to choose the appropriate domain name. The Email Manager page will appear.
4. Click the Create Mailing List button.
5. Select an email address for your mailing list. This will be the address you use to send messages to your mailing list.
6. Enter email addresses for anyone you want to receive messages you send to your mailing list. Separate the addresses with a comma, or by pressing Enter or Return on your keyboard.
7. Click the Save button to save your mailing list.

Once your mailing list is saved, you can send mail to your mailing list at any time by simply entering the mailing list address (the one you created in step # 5) into your email program.

The Mailing List Elements

Now you’re ready to use the Mailing List elements that are in SiteBuilder!

There are three elements for you to choose from:

• Join the mailing list – this element lets users automatically submit their email address to the mailing list of your choice.

• Remove me from the mailing list – this element gives your visitors the ability to opt out of your mailing list by simply entering their email address. Keep your visitors happy by allowing them to choose the amount of e-mail they receive.

• Mail the mailing list – use this element in conjunction with the Join the Mailing List element. That way, visitors who are interested can join and then email something to your website’s mailing list quickly and easily. Note that you may NOT want to let people email something to your mailing list so easily! This is the kind of element that might be better for a club or organization that has a password-protected page.

As with all elements, there are a bunch of things that you can customize on them including font, color, image used and custom messages. Just check out the Properties Editor to see what you can change:

Note that you can also use text links to let people email your mailing list. Just highlight the text that you want to use as your link and use the “Email Address” option.

Hopefully you’ve found this post useful, and you can now unleash the power of Mailing Lists on your site!

Oh, one final word of caution – there’s a limit of 1500 characters for each mailing list. This roughly translates to a limit of 60 to 80 email addresses.

If you hit this limit, here’s a little trick that I use which I like to call “embedding mailing lists”. When I get near the limit I create a new mailing list that I name something like “MailingList2” or “MailingList3” (depending on how many mailing lists I have), that will hold any new addresses I want to add.

Then I just add that new mailing list to the original one, so that whenever I address something to the original mailing list it will include everyone on the new mailing list too!

It sounds kind of crazy, but it works!