Grow a Mailing List From Your Actor Website
Your actor website can now feed signups directly into Mailchimp or Constant Contact. Connect the account, choose the list, and anybody who signs up on your site is added to it.
Why a mailing list, when you have social accounts
Because you own it. Every follower you have on a platform is rented, and the terms change without warning: reach gets throttled, an algorithm changes, an account gets suspended by an automated system with no appeal. A list of email addresses you exported last month is still a list of email addresses next year.
For an actor the practical use is narrow and real. A show opens. A film is released. You are teaching something. Those are the three emails, and the people who asked to receive them are the people who will actually turn up.
What connecting does
- Signups on your site go straight into the chosen list, tagged with where they came from.
- Existing subscribers are not duplicated.
- Unsubscribes handled on the platform stay unsubscribed. We never re-add anybody.
- If the connection fails, signups are held here and synced when it recovers rather than being lost.
If you do not want a third party at all
You do not need one. Signups can simply be collected on your site and exported, which is covered in newsletter signups on your website. That is enough for a list of a few hundred people and it involves no accounts and no monthly fee.
Connect a platform when you actually want to send something designed, or when your list is large enough that sending from your own address would look like spam to the receiving servers. That threshold is somewhere around two or three hundred.
Consent, briefly, because it matters
Only add people who asked. Not your contacts. Not the cast list from a production. Not people who emailed you once. Beyond the legal position, which is real in most territories, the practical effect of adding people who did not ask is that they mark it as spam and your future emails stop arriving for everybody.
What to send
Not often, and not much. Three or four emails a year, each with an actual reason. A newsletter with nothing in it trains people to ignore the next one, which is the one about your opening night.
Related: building your email list and marketing yourself online.
Create your free actor website and add a signup form.
