Email List trouble - How exactly to make use of my list?

I wouldn't advise to go for free autoresponder - you'll lose time (therefore money). Go for Aweber or GetResponse - most of professional internet marketers are using one or another

8000 is a lot of subscribers... I suspect if this number just crept up on you that a lot of them aren't real and perhaps spam robots who registered on your forum, but if even 500 of these are real people it is worth investing in some mailing software, even just to try it out and see how responsive they are to a couple of free gifts / offers - you just need one sale to pay the cost of the autoresponder - free ones aren't worth bothering with - especially at this level.

I recommend you listen to this Podcast I have in my blog to learn how to communicate to your customers via email effectively. Here's Troy McDonald from ListCrew.com:

Podcast: Troy McDonald's Listcrew : Internet Business Podcasts | Internet Business Profit Resources | Weekly Business Expert Podcasts

Enjoy!

What you may want to consider is a service that will let you import all of these contacts. Aweber is a great service for building your list, but they won't simply let you upload your list of nearly 10,000 subscribers. You'll have to do it in smaller batches of 2000 and they will have to optin to your list again.

Yeah, I agree that free autoresponders are waste. While aweber and getresponse are quite popular, other autoresponders like emailaces and icontact are also good

I would also recommend these other posts from Tyrone Shum. All great reads indeed!

Why Your Internet Business Needs An Email List? : Internet Business Podcasts | Internet Business Profit Resources | Weekly Business Expert Podcasts

Building Your List Of Customers : Internet Business Podcasts | Internet Business Profit Resources | Weekly Business Expert Podcasts

Good luck!

I wouldnt advise using a free autoresponder but if you really want to test it out, you can try sendfree.com

Hi,

You may have a problem if you import these contacts into an email service and start mailing them.

First, just because they joined your forum does not mean they have opted in to receive email from you so you will be basically spamming them. If anyone complains and it goes to court you would need to prove when and where the person gave you permission to send them an email.

Going to court is the extreme end but you could also find your IP gets blocked, you can get your hosting shut down and if the domain name is with the host it could even get confiscated. Remember hosts are paranoid about spammers because once their IPs get blocked then all their shared hosting users get blocked too.

Secondly if you do add them all to an online based email company like Aweber or Mailchimp and send out a mailing, you will likely get a very high amount of un-subscribes and bounces all at once.

The company you use will likely take this as a sign that you somehow harvested the email addresses and will probably ban you, or again, ask you to prove where people gave you permission to email them.

My best advice would be to go through your forum and clean out any dodgy looking emails and ensure you have software installed that stops spambots from joining.

Then you can use the admins built in "send message to users" function of the forum software. You could also email everyone through the site with any offer you have and ask them to sign up to a proper website page with an opt-in form. Give them some free offer or something to encourage them to sign up.

Cheers

Max