Before you launch your first issue, however, take a few minutes to pay attention to your list.  After all, you’ve been working hard at coming up with a great newsletter for them.  And if you need more motivation to start managing your subscribers early on in the game, here are two more reasons: 
  
Reason One:  Subscriber management is one of the keys to getting your newsletter noticed and read.

Reason Two:  You won’t believe how easy it is within the eNews Builder system.  Here are five tips to get you started...

Start by clicking on the word “Subscribers” from your Main Menu and you’ll find the Subscriber Overview page.  The tools on this page let you import any pertinent data you have on your subscribers, sort the subscribers into different lists, create profiles for subscribers, and manage your “bounces.”  Begin by naming your subscriber lists – this will come in handy not only now, but when you go back next issue to reuse the names.  Click on one of the lists on the right hand side of the page and type in an appropriate name for the list.  If you’ve decided to segment your lists geographically, you might name each list after a region.  Or perhaps you’ve decided on grouping people a few different ways within a category – not to worry, when you click on the “+” sign to the left of each list, you’ll be able to create a “sub-list” for each category.  Note:  if you are using our “Advanced List Management” feature when a subscriber opts out, the lists you are using will be shown in a pop-up window to your subscriber, so name your lists in a way that will be understandable (and not offensive) to your readers.
If you have more data for each subscriber than just their email address, you can import all or part of the file rather than simply copying the email addresses.  Any additional information in these files, such as the subscribers’ names, job titles, and other personal information, will play an important role when you want to personalize and customize your newsletter for each person.  Also, this information will be the key to segmenting your lists.
You’ll find that a number of the “fields” have already been named for you – these are your existing column headings from programs like Microsoft Excel. You’ll find that fields such as names, addresses, and company information have already been created for you in the eNews Builder system and will match up automatically with the column headings from your file. You also can create up to ten additionalcustom fields to mirror your pre-existing list by going to the “Subscribers” drop-down menu at the very top of the page.  Here, you can select “Change Custom Field Names” and type in your own names for these fields.
 Instead of loading all of your lists separately, you can use the “Search and Manage” function to break your master list into any number of different categories.  This feature will allow you to filter out virtually any segment of your subscriber list, such as geographic location.  Then, you can not only move and copy them to the appropriate list, but you can also delete them, change fields, and perform many other custom functions.  You can even save the searches you run here, for use later either in running the searches again, or for cross-referencing them with reports.
Lastly, once you’ve sent your first issue out, you’ll be able to manage the emails that have bounced.  When you click on the “Bounce Manager,” try selecting each of the different types of bounces (like “bad email address” or “mailbox full”) and there you’ll find a list of each email address that was returned.  You can then choose to download them, try them again, or simply clear them all out at once to clean up your database.

The biggest reason to take advantage of all of eNews Builder’s subscriber management features is this: It’s easy to become a pro at it in just minutes.  Then, once you’ve taken these steps, you’ll find yourself way ahead of the game when it comes to getting people the right content.  All in all, good subscriber management is one of the quickest and most effective steps toward creating a newsletter that will perfectly suit your readers! 

Depending on your account level, some features discussed in this article may not be available to you, please contact our sales department to inquire how to add features to your account.