What are Mailing Lists
A mailing list is a collection of contact details specifically used for contacting individuals or organisations. The contacts can be collated in many ways:
Through requesting details of individuals so they can be updated of products and/or services. By purchasing contact details of individuals who have opt-ed in to be contacted by organisations who may have something of interest to offer From the public domain, many details are available in the public domain for example the yellow pages website.
Large mailing lists are generally stored on a list server which automatically manages its subscribers, when people request to be removed the list server automatically processes the request.
Smaller mailing lists can be stored within a database or a simple spreadsheet, and removal requests have to be manually managed.
Effective mailing lists should be segmented and contacts should only be contacted about information that they would find beneficial to receive. Many mailing lists are not managed in this way and are used to just blast out mailings to everyone contained within the list server.
