When a company decides to invest in creating a mailing list, it wants to offer customers an easy and direct way to receive news and valuable content.

The content you’ll find in a mailing list goes a little beyond the type of content that companies put out on their website and corporate blog.

If you stumbled upon this article as a business owner, know that your job is to invest in the development of information that brings value to your customers. By serving them with genuinely useful, insightful, and informative content, your efforts should positively impact their lives and greatly increase the likes, shares, and organic traffic to your site/blog.

However, if you wound up here as a reader, up until now most of this stuff probably doesn’t even make sense to you. You may be thinking:

“What does this have to do with me?”

“Why should I even join (or care about) a mailing list in the first place?”

For many reasons.

Here’s why we think you should (and shouldn’t) join one.

3 Reasons Why You Should Join a Mailing List

1.  You gain valuable information. In an attempt to gather more leads, many companies offer their readers a product or service of massive value, free of charge, in exchange for their email address.They give away things such as books, courses, videos, consultations, and even more. And, if it’s something that can make your life better, at no cost to you, why not subscribe?

2.  You’ll be the first to know about things. People that are in a company’s mailing list are the first to know about the launch of a new product or service. Many businesses release this type of information exclusively to their mailing list customers. Also, many companies send out special offers to their readers. So, you’ll get deals that others won’t even hear about.

3.  You can unsubscribe if you want to. Nothing is worse than being bombarded with information overload. Although some offers seem enticing, as soon as you sign up, many companies will send you spam and share your information with other people. If you know a company that is well known for providing valuable content, treating their customers with respect, and makes it easy to unsubscribe from their list in case you no longer wish to receive information from them, then you’ve found yourself a mailing list worth subscribing to.

3 Reasons Why You Should Not Join a Mailing List

1.  You just want a freebie. Sure, some offers are too good to pass up, but is that the only reason you’re joining a list in the first place? In this day and age, you can find freebies with a quick Google search. You don’t need to subscribe to a list to get that information. The worse thing you can do is sign up for something that you don’t want. Eventually, you’ll receive information about things you could care less about, and you will become annoyed with the company as a whole (even though you agreed to receive their mailing list.)

2.  It looks spammy.  If you are an active user on the internet, you can pretty much tell when something is real or not. If it looks funky, run. Many spammers and hackers set-up fake mailing lists in order to gather your personal information. The last thing you want is to have your private data in the wrong hands.

3.  You don’t like the company. Sounds obvious, but many people make this mistake. A lot of people will sign up for anything that has the word “free” in it. If you’re signing up for the mailing lists for the wrong reasons, don’t do it. Spare yourself the stress. The last thing you want is a company you dread trying to become your close friend on the internet.

Final Thoughts

In most cases, signing up for a mailing list is a great way to connect with a brand you like and obtain valuable information for free. We do, however, advise caution when subscribing. The internet is full of hoaxsters and people who try to steal your private information for selfish reasons. So, as long as you sign up for a mailing list from a reputable brand that you love and trust, you should be good to go!