E-mail subscription? Mailing list?

December 28, 2006

Continuing with the topic of subscriptions, I’ve prepared yet another small article for all of you. This time I’m gonna be addressing the issue of mistaking an e-mail subscription for an e-mail mailing list. This isn’t just a beginners’ issue - many webmasters that have insanely popular websites still can’t separate which is which.

You may be thinking: so what? Who cares if the name isn’t right? As long as it works, there’s no reason to trouble yourself. And that’s very close to the truth - still, it’s not the complete truth. The two types have their differences, and some people won’t subscribe just because the name confuses them - for example, mailing list is oftenly associated with spam. This is going to be the topic of this article - the main differences between e-mail subscriptions and mailing lists.

E-mail subscriptions

An e-mail subscription is basically just a way to receive news from a website, similar to RSS feeds. I too have a service like that runing (top right corner). It’s usually used as an alternative to a feed agregator. People are usually less alarmed about these, but in case they’re new to the internet, they’re still afraid to type in their e-mail. This is where you try to make them believe you hate spam as much as they do, but that’s a different story.

Mailing lists

Now this is something completely different. True, these can be used to announce important news too, but it’s not the meaning of their existance. By subscribing to a mailing list, a person agrees to receive e-mails from you. That means practically everything - news, promotions, special offers - you name it. And due to the fact that there are no strict definitions of what is supposed to be sent, mailing lists can be used as an aditional source of income - lots of webmasters are ready to open their wallets wide for targeted advertisment, sent to your subscribers.

The two types of subscription that I just mentioned are completely different, and should not be used as if they were the same things. Don’t forget though, that in order to get a subscriber you have to offer something for him in return. If the case is an e-mail subsription, the reader gets your news delivered directly to him. But a mailing list is a whole different case. The most common tactic (and it seems to be the most effective too) is offering a gift for signing up for a mailing list, and then ocasionaly sending some new freebies to keep your subscribers hooked. It is important to remember to keep the ratio of advertisments/junk and news/freebies/etc… at about 1:1 - unless you have truly great freebies, you risk loosing subscribers if you serve too much junk to them.

Good luck!

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