Managing Your Mailing List
Congratulations! You're the owner of a new mailing list. Whether you use it to help promote your latest blog post, announce new products, or just keep in touch with old friends and family, it's important to have some basic steps in place for managing and growing your mailing list. In this post we'll teach you how to create a compelling email sign up form, set up good unsubscribe options, and establish a good hosting service for your list so that you can avoid common pitfalls like spamming your happy customers.
We'll be using MailChimp as an example, which is one of the most popular email service providers on the web. There are many ways to manage your mailing list, and you should feel free to research other options. This post will show one way to proceed with your list, but feel free to tweak our steps if you'd like to find something better suited for your needs.
Once you've got your list set up with a good email service provider, it's important that you don't forget about it! So let's start building our email sign up form right now!
First things first, we need a mailing list sign up form for our general purpose blog that we'll start using immediately. Here's an example of the kind of form we'll be building:
This email sign up form gives you a way to visit your blog, leave a message, and subscribe to your newsletter. If you'd like to make any adjustments to the text, such as adding or removing fields, making changes on a page-by-page basis, or adjusting the font size and color, feel free to do so. Just remember that in order for this email sign up form to work properly, you must create it in HTML format.
Here's how you can set up your HTML email sign up form using MailChimp. To get started with MailChimp click here and follow their quick sign up instructions .
After logging in to your MailChimp account, go to " Lists " and then click " Create a List ". In the pop-up window that appears you can enter a title, email address that you'll use to access your list, and language. Once you've filled out this information scroll down until you see the box for entering your HTML form!
Click on the " Build Forms Now! " box and then write the code for your email sign up form. You should have something like this:
<form action="https://lists.yourwebsite.com/webform/mailchimp/" method="post">
<div class="row">
<div class="d-flex justify-content-center">
<p>Subscribe to the mailing list below and you'll get access to <strong>free updates</strong> about <a href="https://www.yourwebsite.com/blog/" target="_blank">all things blogging</a>.</p>
<div class="form-group">
<label for="email">Email:</label>
<input type="text" name="email" id="email" value="" size="30"/>
</div> <input type="hidden" name="hint" value="" /> <input type="submit" value="/subscribe/" /> </div> </div> </form>
In the <form> , put your code that looks like this below: The first thing we need to do is include our MailChimp form link and HTML in an external CSS file. To do this, we'll use a simple HTML template. Create a new empty HTML file and save it to your site. This must be an external CSS file; you will not be able to edit the CSS inside of your template.
Open your HTML template and add this code: Save this new template as a .html file in your root directory. You can name it anything that you like, but I recommend using something like "list_form" so that you remember which form is yours when you need to edit the form later on. Add the following lines of code: Your MailChimp form link should now look like this:
<form action="https://lists.yourwebsite.com/webform/mailchimp/" method="post">
<!-- the form code goes here! --><input type="submit" value="/subscribe/" /> </form> In your MailChimp form's HTML template, add this code:
<div class="d-flex justify-content-center"> <p>Subscribe to the mailing list below and you'll get access to <strong>free updates</strong> about <a href="https://www.yourwebsite.com/blog/" target="_blank">all things blogging</a>.
Conclusion
Congratulations! You're the owner of a new mailing list. Whether you use it to help promote your latest blog post, announce new products, or just keep in touch with old friends and family, it's important to have some basic steps in place for managing and growing your mailing list. In this post we'll teach you how to create a compelling email sign up form, set up good unsubscribe options, and establish a good hosting service for your list so that you can avoid common pitfalls like spamming your happy customers.