Words of Wisdom: Get Insights from LISTSERV List Owners

By Susan Brown Faghani
Manager, Marketing and Sales Communication, L-Soft

Did you know that there are more than 57,000 public LISTSERV lists and hundreds of thousands of private ones? Powering education, government, business and non-profits; unifying professions; helping people overcome health, parenting and other challenges; and simply enabling lively conversation and humor on favorite topics – email groups do this and much more because of the dedicated people behind them.

Here's a sampling of email success tips from some of the people who manage mailing lists with excellent results and subscriber experiences:

Start with Purpose

"Ensure that you know what type of list you need and how you plan to manage senders and recipients."

Michael Hensley
Chief Information Officer
NeighborImpact

Consider Pitfalls

"Be sure to think about privacy and the potential for misuse of your list in your plans. Spam filtering can cause many lists to be filtered into Junk email folders. Be sure that you include information about how to 'whitelist' email list senders."

Michael Hensley
Chief Information Officer
NeighborImpact

Build a Great Reputation with Reliability and Relevance

"The key is word-of-mouth, or 'street cred': Nothing can drive your membership base better than being known as 'the place' to do X or talk about Y. Anyone can place an ad about a list and generate a brief spike in members. But to get the quality membership that would support a stable list base, you have to be a reliable site with timely conversation."

Mike Varney
List Owner
RESADM-L

Keep Subscribers' Needs Front and Center

"Make it relevant, make it timely and make it appealing to the membership. Do these things on a regular basis and membership will grow on its own. At some point subscribership will slow. And that's okay as long as it continues to meet the needs of the community."

John H. Taylor
Founder
FundSvcs

Manage Actively

"List management is just that – active management. You cannot just start a list and let it run itself. Monitoring error messages, inactivating accounts when the individual sets up a vacation message that runs amok, sending messages to posters when content is not entirely appropriate, advising subscribers when changes or outages (when changing hosts) might occur are all key."

John H. Taylor
Founder
FundSvcs

Set and Reinforce List Expectations

"Adherence to our netiquette rules is key. I cannot emphasize more the importance of establishing list protocol, and publishing it at least twice a year."

John H. Taylor
Founder
FundSvcs

Set Supportive Tone

"Our list is like a family. We share the joys of new puppies, the loss of dear old companions, and everything in between. And while we may occasionally squabble within our 'pack', the Belgian community is amazingly helpful and supportive in times of trouble."

Libbye Miller
List Owner
BELG-L

Be There for Subscribers

"We include instructions for contacting a list admin on the bottom banner of each BELG-L post. One of the list admins walks the subscriber through the solution to their issue."

Libbye Miller
List Owner
BELG-L

Share Your Email Tips

Feel free to share your email list tips, insights or experiences with us. Simply email us at editor@lsoft.com or message us on social media.

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