Do you have a website for your candle business? Maybe you don’t have a website yet, but you have a Facebook page, or you sell your candles on Etsy, or maybe you only do offline sales.
You NEED to Have an Email List!
An email list is so important to building your business and building relationships with your customers. If you have people voluntarily signing up for updates and specials and promotions, you have a gold mine! Besides the fact that if your website goes down you still have your mailing list and you can communicate with your customers, letting them know what’s going on so they aren’t in the dark.
Your email list is so important and you really NEED to start one as soon as possible if you don’t have one going already.
When I was selling candles, I didn’t have a way for site visitors to sign up to a mailing list. Ooooh how I wish I did! When I started this site, I didn’t start my mailing list right away until I read about starting a list from a blogger that I follow (SmartPassiveIncome.com). He showed me the importance of having a way for people to sign up on your website. I had thought about it before, but I just never implemented it. Well, I started my list in March 2013 (just last year) and I now have a list of nearly 1000 subscribers! These are people that voluntarily want to hear about what I have to offer.
Now, I don’t normally “sell” to my list, but I did send a couple emails out recently with my book launch and guess what? I sold quite a few books and most of my buyers were from my mailing list! With a website where you are selling your candles, like many of you probably have or intend to have, your customers will be signing up with the expectation of receiving sales type emails, and as long as you aren’t bombarding them, you should get a very good response to your newsletters, specials, etc….
How Do You Start an Email List?
So, this part is pretty simple. You just need to sign up with someplace like Mailchimp (that’s who I use) which is free until you hit 2000 subscribers. And then there’s Aweber (affiliate link) which is highly recommended by many, but they do not have a free version. I am probably going to switch to Aweber soon and try them out because I have heard so many great things about them.
As far as I’ve seen, those are probably the top email marking sites. I really like the free version of Mailchimp although they definitely have some useful tools in the paid version that I would like to try out. I think Aweber may be more flexible in creating custom sign up forms though. I’ll do a review when I try them out.
So after you sign up, you’ll just follow their instructions to put a form on your website. You can see my newsletter sign up form over on the top right side of this page. That area works really well for me, as well as including a form at the bottom of my posts and even sometimes in the middle of content like on my home page and about page.
I will talk more in detail about the placement and style of your email list sign up form in another post, but this should get you on your way. I’ll also talk about how to include a mailing list sign up form on your Facebook page in another post as well.
So get that form up on your site if you don’t have one or make a way to collect your customers email addresses offline if you don’t have a website, or better yet, do both!
I hope you found this helpful and feel free to post a comment below if you have any questions or thoughts.
Leave a Reply