And when you teach online, regardless of which platform you host your courses on, you will want to do your own marketing. And a mailing list is the easiest way to do that.
When I created my first online course, I had a mailing list for the people who had purchased my first e-book. I used this mailing list to send a discount to the course and over the course of a month had 120 people taking my course.
I have used a whole bunch of mailing list software.
I've settled on mailchimp. I'll explain why.
- Free if your list never grows beyond 2000 people
- Easy to maintain multiple lists
- Easy to embed subscription forms
- More reasons to come...
I started with mailchimp, manually uploading my sales list for the e-book to build the list. Easy with the csv importing. (I now copy and paste into the import box online from a spreadsheet).
It looked like I was going to exceed the 2000 people on the list, just from e-book sales, so I started to look for alternatives.
This was a mistake. I recommend you let your list grow. Even if your list expands beyond 2000 people on mailchimp, you can still keep growing the list for free. You just can't send any emails to the list unless you purchase some credits or a monthly plan.
I tried a few of the php mailing solutions but they all felt very Web 1.0 compared to the ease of use of mailchimp. Not just for me, but for subscribers. Unsubscribing with many free solutions I tried involved sending 'unsubscribe' emails. This was fine back in the early 90's but isn't really very good for today's users.
I tried some desktop tools. These were easy to use, but again the unsubscribe was harder than it needed to be and I had to jump through hoops to create the subscribe forms.
I've probably lost about 5 - 10 days, investigating mail solutions, trying them out, writing custom code to handle subscribe events and unsubscribe etc. In retrospect, I would rather have that time back, and have spent the money I could have made over those days, on a payment plan for mailchimp.
But, mailchimp still looks expensive to me for a monthly plan. I do not send out a lot of mailings, so paying for a monthly plan of unlimited emails doesn't work for me.
But mailchimp do a PAYG plan, where you purchase credits. This is how I plan to use it. I will either, set a budget for each advertising campaign and buy the necessary credits. Or buy a lump sum of credits and use them over time - probably the latter.
You see at the moment, I'm building my lists. I haven't sent many mailings. I don't have any credit in the system. But I have created sign up forms on many of my prominent blogs. To build up a base of emails that I can use later.
I did a quick comparison of the different email sites. Campaign Monitor also looked quite good. As it has a PAYG plan as well.
MadMimi looked like the cheapest for a pay monthly. But I ruled out pay monthly.
If you send out a lot of mails per month, then a pay monthly plan will make a lot of difference to you. And presumably you will get the money back on sales, so you can offset it. I don't work that way yet so PAYG works well for me and with mailchimp I could pick a PAYG plan which would work out at 0.5 cents per email, pay on a campaign basis.
If my mailing plans change and I get a lot of subscribers and start sending out a log of emails then I can move to a pay monthly plan. But if you are uncertain about your use case, then mailchimp allows you to build up lists and gather subscribers without having to commit to a pay monthly plan.
