Got a forum or site that requires registration for free or fee-based membership?

Recommend That You Do This Email List Building Strategy Immediately:

Use your registration page to interface with your email list server to automate and make it easy for your members to join your mailing list while they subscribe to your forums!

This will require your membership registration form to integrate with your email list server and it *IS* possible.

In addition, you should also automate the ability for your member to be able to update their email address or change which list, frequency and format (HTML, or TEXT ONLY if you offer the choice) via their Membership profile.

How to implement?

If you outsource your email newsletter hosting and management to a 3rd party provider, then call them up and tell them what you want to do and ask them how your forum registration page or your membership registration page can integrate into their email list subscription software.

If you own your email newsletter management & delivery software, then either your in-house network admin or programmer can make this work or you can outsource the labor to a qualified contractor via Rentacorder or sites like it. This is the kind of job that should be able to be done in about 1-7 hours of labor at the most and once its setup?you can forget about it.

The one question that you'll have to answer once you go through this process:

Should you confirm or double opt-in your members in addition to the confirmation that I assume your registration process already has built into itself?

The answer: If you don't have a confirmation process as part of your forum/membership registration form, then it would be absolutely be a situation where you would WANT to have your email list server sends out a confirmation request email to verify the subscription request.

If you already do have a confirmation component to your forums or membership registration sign up process, then turn off confirmation from your email list server (to avoid duplicate confirmations being sent out to the end user) and be CERTAIN to send separate or at least one welcome email to your new members to acknowledge and confirm that they have been subscribed to the specific ?lists they signed up for. Got it?

Bottom line:

If you run a membership site or forums, give your new members the ability to subscribe to one or more of your email newsletters or alert lists as part of the registration process and allow them to manage their email list subscriptions with you via their member profile. The one-time setup costs are nominal compared to all of the new email list members you'll attract with this simple list building strategy.