Throwback Thursday – Email Mailing Lists!
For this Throwback Thursday post we wanted to focus on the importance of email mailing lists and how they can be a benefit to your business. Email mailing lists, much like traditional mailing lists, are a way of using emails to distribute specific information to many Internet users and have become increasingly valuable over the past couple of years.
Email mailing lists are a great way of getting the message out there if you have an opt-in subscribers list for email notifications. Equally setting up multiple email mailing lists can help you implement your email marketing effectively by targeting specific groups with specific information. Therefore, if you were displaying a targeted advert, for example “Valentine’s Day Offers”, you may want to offer a different discount to your existing customers compared with your visitors.
There are many email service options out there; mailchimp, constant contact or madmimi being just a few you should research. Equally, the “Ask for Email” feature allows you to prompt visitors for their email addresses when they visit a collection. You can then use the addresses to notify visitors of image updates, special offers, or to give them a last chance to view before archiving their collection. This feature is especially useful if you publicise the collection before all the images are ready to be uploaded.
Each collection can have one of these values:
Do not ask for or require visitor email
Ask for visitor email, if collection is empty.
Ask for visitor email all the time.
Require an email; ask Opt-In or Opt-Out. This approach is a bit different than the voluntary ask-for-email form. Here a visitor is required to enter an email address before accessing the collection. At the same time, the visitor chooses between “you may contact me” (Opt-In) and “do not contact me” (Opt-Out).
Require an email; do not ask for Opt-In. The approach is the same as above, but the visitor enters only his email address – he does not choose between Opt-In and Opt-Out. This is the most popular choice.
Require and email (must be listed). Similar to the above approach, a visitor is required to enter an email address prior to accessing the collection. In addition, the email address entered must have already been added to the collection email list by you (acting as a sort of guest list).
Now, for the forms which ask for a voluntary email address, it is assumed that the visitor is granting you permission to contact them with relevant news and updates. By adding an email address this way you have permission to email. On the other hand, for the form which requires an email there are a few issues to consider. Visitors will expect to be told why they must give an email address and what it will be used for.
There are various laws and rules-of-etiquette concerning collecting email addresses and getting permission before sending marketing emails. To help you comply with them, we can present two radio buttons when prompting for the required email address. One radio button is for the visitor to allow emails from you while the other is requesting that they are not contacted. Whichever is chosen has no effect on whether the visitor can access the collection. It is up to you, the photographer, to respect the visitor’s wishes.
For the form which requires an email, the logic requiring opt-in is different. Because you, the photographer, already have the email addresses on file the visitor is not providing you with new personally identifying information, and so we do not need to ask permission to contact. As such, no radio buttons are displayed in this case and the email addresses are stored in the list.
For more information about email mailing lists:
1. Log in to your account on theimagefile.
2. Go to “Help and Support”.
3. Type in “ask for email feature”.
[question]Do you have any other recommendations for getting the message out there?[/question]
