Your email lists are some of the most important components of not only your marketing tools, but your entire voice-over business in general.

If you're just starting out or are new to business tools/services and email lists, you might think all you have to do is create a spreadsheet of people's names and email addresses and you're good to go.

While this is certainly better than not storing and tracking this info at all, it still leaves a lot to be desired and can be holding you back from more efficiently and effectively managing your clients and prospects/leads.

Let's take a look at some more intricate ways to deal with email lists in our VO business.

The first and most obvious thing to consider when creating our email lists, is what information to actually put in them.

Let's start with the obvious. Names and Email Addresses.

Email Addresses are pretty self explanatory, so let's talk a little bit about Names.

It's a good idea to store names in two separate fields, one for first name and one for last name. This way, when you are sending out emails, you can use "Merge Tags" to address your audience by name. Merge tags are what allow you to customize emails for each recipient.

For example, you can send the same email to 100 people, but everyone will see their own name, such as "Hey Bill!, Hey Mary!, Hey Steve!, etc…

If you store names in two separate fields, you can then selectively use first and last names in your emails. If you were to store a full name in a single field, when you addressed people by name using a merge tag, everyone would see their full name which comes across as pretty robotic and inauthentic (ex: "Hey John Smith!")

Another consideration is to store Company Names. This could be helpful because it again allows you to customize your emails with company names using Merge Tags. These could be used in both the content of your email, as well as the subject line.

For example, an email with the subject "Hey Ted, any upcoming Voice-Over needs at ABC Studios?" is much more enticing than "Hey, any upcoming Voice-Over needs?"

Think about any additional information you would like to have available to customize your emails, and store that info in your lists.

Note: don't go overboard with this, because your email lists are not your CRM database, which is where you should be storing more detailed info about each client and prospect.

Now let's talk about how to organize our lists within our email campaign service.

One way is to simply create multiple different lists for organization groups that make sense.

The most obvious way to do this, and one that I would recommend, is to create separate lists for:

You will likely want to speak to these separate groups in different ways.

Clients already know you and are familiar with who you are, what you do, and the quality of your work. But your prospects and leads might not be, so the language you use to address them and the content you want to share with them will likely be different. Having them on separate lists makes it easy for you to do this.

Another consideration is the frequency with which you contact the different groups.

For instance, if I want to touch base with clients more often throughout the year than with prospects, I can do so with separate lists. But if they are all grouped together, it becomes much harder to do so.

Another great organizational element that many mailing list services offer is use of Tags or Segments.

The terminology used may vary a bit from service to service.

Basically, these allow you to take an overall list you've created, and further subdivide it into useful groups.

For instance, one potential application of this for voice-over would be to divide your lists into types of companies or the type of work they do.

Here's how that would work:

You can further subdivide your client list into categories, such as Video Production Companies, Animation Studios, Ad Agencies, E-Learning Producers, etc. This allows you to target your messaging more specifically and address these groups differently with your emails.

For example, if you've recently created an eLearning demo, it makes sense to tell clients and leads who do that kind of work, rather than blasting it to everyone.

To sum up, creating a mailing list is an essential part of a successful VO business, and having one, in whatever form, is better than having none at all.

But to get the most out of this essential tool, it is best to:

All of these organizational elements will help you send out better, more targeted, and more relevant emails. And this will also help minimize unsubscribes, and maximize the results you get from your email marketing efforts.

So start creating and organizing those lists!

PS: If you'd like a handy visual guide of Mailing List Organization, click the button below to download the free resource package.