Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: Building your email list
Lecture: Choosing a mailing list provider
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0:02
There are a number of companies out there that will basically be the backend for your mailing list.
0:09
But the first thing I want to say is: Don't build this yourself, it's easy to think "well, I know how to send email out of Python
0:17
or out of my web app or somehow, I could setup my own server and I can do this", it's not going to turn out as well as you think,
0:25
there is way more going on in these email systems than you think. So first of all, setting up just a valid email server with the right MX records,
0:34
making sure it doesn't get onto a spam list, blacklist, and it just starts not showing up, these are all really hard,
0:42
I've had friends who setup email servers and their mail just go straight to my Gmail spam, because there is something wrong with their email setup,
0:50
it's just not trusted, right, so that is not super easy, the spam rules and laws around the world are complex
0:57
and you'd rather have somebody help you with that, right, like for example there is the US CAN-SPAM Act,
1:03
there is a lot of rules around that, but that's just United States, there is many countries right, maybe they have their own spam rules,
1:10
there's subscribe and more importantly unsubscribe, when people become uninterested, functionality you have to implement this,
1:19
segmentation and by segmentation I mean breaking your users into various stages,
1:23
you'll hear people talk about acquisition funnels and customer funnels, right,
1:28
people who are new users versus people maybe have signed up to your newsletter
1:33
but they haven't actually bought anything, people who are paying customers, people who are repeat customers, you can use these mail systems
1:39
to categorize your contacts, your email list into these different groups so if you want to have a special followup just for second-time buyers,
1:47
you could do that easily with what I am going to show you, you would have to build that yourself.
1:52
Reporting, analytics, like who has opened the emails? Were they delivered?
1:57
Did they bounce? There is just tons of that so you don't want to get involved in this, A/B testing, trying slight variations over time on your emails
2:06
to see what works better and improving over time, getting help so if you are going to hire somebody to come work with you,
2:12
right, find the consultant or something to help you work with your marketing angle. If you say "oh and I have this totally custom thing I built",
2:19
and they are kind of like: "What? I don't know if that is a good idea", if you say "hey I use MailChimp" or "I use GetResponse" or something like that,
2:25
like OK, great, I know how it works, I can work with that. There is a lot of automation and workflow as you'll see, we'll talk a bit about that.
2:34
But, you can do things like well, 30 minutes after a purchase, send this email,
2:38
and then if they click this button, then send them this email two days later,
2:43
if you want to setup that kind of automation or workflow you have to build that,
2:46
there is just lots and lots of reasons you don't want to build this yourself. So what we want to do is look at a couple of options we have
2:52
for getting the software as a service type thing to plug into our app as an API. So we are going to be using MailChimp,
3:02
I've been using MailChimp for a long time, it's a solid, good, well known, well understood platform.
3:09
They have a nice free tier as you'll see, right here it says sign up for free and it's pretty generous, so we'll be doing that in a little bit.
3:17
So as we go through this course, this section we're definitely going to be working
3:20
with MailChimp, I want to show you some other options because MailChimp is fine but you can pick whatever you want.
3:27
Another option that looks really good to me is customer.io so this is similar to MailChimp but it has a lot more tracking and automation
3:35
and kind of those rules that I talked about, right, if they click this button then do this thing in two hours and so on. So customer.io is pretty cool.
3:44
GetResponse is another one that works really good for email marketing, webinars, landing pages, this is a little bit more than just pure email,
3:52
so it's kind of a bigger platform but you know, marketing is its whole own thing and if you want to get into this, this is also a good choice.
4:02
I've also heard really good things about drip.co which is from Leadpages and Leadpages is a place where you can create landing pages
4:08
like that one I showed you in a previous video, actually, or more importantly, create a whole bunch of different landing pages
4:15
you can run ads and drive people to do these various pages and do the A/B testing and so on, so this is a very powerful visual email automation system,
4:23
to go behind those types of things, and I've heard this is really good as well. But, like I said, we are using MailChimp
4:30
because that is what I am using and it works really well.