Digital Vegetarian

Well if you are looking to increase your returning traffic and have a way to provide your readers on your mailing list (or if you NEED a mailing list - which you do if you don’t have one!) then here is the FREE solution.

Finally.

I’ve been waiting for a free mailing list application to come along that is compatible with blogging as well as your standard e-mail marketing initiatives. Introducing ZOOKODA from Izea Inc.

To do this right, I figured the best thing was to go through the process of signing up and explain some of the things I went through during this process.

For Example, the registration process is simple and straightforward - this screenshot shows what you are required to fill out during the initial registration.

After registering, you have the option to do what I’ve found to be the most annoying part of e-mail lists, which is figuring out the best way to have people subscribe to your mailing list. What’s nice about Zookoda’s interface is how easily the help areas are available and very informative about what you may need assistance with.

The really important thing to note here is that everything is stored on Zookoda’s servers, so you don’t have to worry about administration at all or possible downtime. At the same time if you decide that you don’t like the service provided by Zookoda, you can simply export your partial or entire lists for use on another system of your choice.

So to create a NEW mailing list it is very simple. Thank you Zookoda!

Here are the instructions they provide:

Creating a new mailing list

1. Click on Mailing Lists
2. Click New Mailing List.
3. Enter the mailing list name and description.
4. Click the Submit button. This will create a new mailing list with one field. The EMAIL ADDRESS field is a mandatory field that must be present in all lists.

The steps are nicely laid out on the page in order of what you need to do, depending on your business strategy, the next steps are to create the subscription forms, then create an actual email to send out to users.

Create a new email - This is what you will see:

Its great that you have the option to use feeds directly into the mailing list. This is one of the benefits of using ‘blog-related mailing list software’. For example, for the field above named “Feed Source” I simply put in http://www.digitalvegetarian.com/feed which is the main RSS feed for my blog.

From an SEO perspective, it is even better to have RSS feeds from your categories as your content grows. This means you could have targeted mailing lists for your categories and users can decide to only recieve updates for the categories they are interested in.

THEMES for your email.

This is probably the coolest part of this blog post.

They have a page (as shown below) where you decide which mailing list theme you want to use for your list.

After you choose from 4 pages of possible themes, you can preview first to see if you like the look:

HMMM so that looks great, but it may not be the most effective ‘look’ for dig-veg readers.

I tried another and this seemed a better fit:

Okay, great so that was really easy.

I simply did all of this while writing this post and I’m excited to use this for my other websites (such as GuitarTechnician.com)

So, the next step is to customize the email with the simple list of all the posts that will be involved. You can edit with simple checkboxes whatever posts you don’t want included in the digest.

If needed the options here are available to change feeds, edit the template, or re-order the posts any way you like or if there is something that you feel should go earlier in the post (some people only read the first part of an email).

Then click ‘Preview’. and you’ll see the message as it is intended.

Now I personally don’t believe anything until I see it work with my own eyes. So I decided to test sending this out to myself at several different domain email addresses (hotmail, yahoo, guitartechnician.com and wpromote.com).

After you get used to the interface you will find that there are areas where you can add or remove recipients to the mailing list. Everything is straightforward, just make sure you actually ‘name’ your mailing list, which I did not do initially and had to do before I could test anything.

This is what I saw before I sent my test messages out:

I also decided, what the hell and tried out creating the form…

If you wish you can edit the email message that will be sent out (I wish Facebook applications let you do that! no they only send out something you can look at but not change - stupid Facebook).

Okay, so now I want to send this out to my test accounts. I go to BROADCAST and I see a warning that reads

“Your Sender Details have not been approved and therefore broadcast permission has not been granted. To assist with spam protection, our support team needs to authenticate your Sender Details before you can schedule a broadcast.”

As seen here…

So the last step before you can broadcast out emails is to get verified.

HOW IT WORKS: this was a little confusing but I really like their interface. What happens is you ‘Create a new email’ which simply gets saved in their database in your account. Initially I wasn’t sure where exactly that went, however now I know that it is available in the ‘email’ dropdown field of the ‘New Broadcast’ page.

Here you choose the Email to send, and the Mailing list to send it to. ****AWESOME**** why?

What this means is that you can send the same messages to different lists very easily, or make minor adjustments as needed. Once you are Verified, you will see that the ‘Sender’ field is available with your name in it. - Just click on Account to see if you are ‘Zookoda Verified’ - as you can see here I wasn’t yet.

You can also send out ‘recurring’ emails if desired. Just remember that too much email will cause folks to quit your mailing list fast, at the same time we all need to be reminded sometimes!

Best of luck with Zookoda, I know I’ll be using this a lot now with my new sites and on this one too!

Aaron - Digital Vegetarian