Sending Mass E-Mail
If you’ve ever tried sending an e-mail to more than a handful of recipients at once, you know that it’s not necessarily the easiest thing to do.
As unsolicited e-mail (“spam”) escalates out of control, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are becoming more aggressive in their efforts to combat it. This can have a direct bearing on your ability to reach customers via e-mail.
If the ISP that provides your store’s access to the Internet is like many others, it may place restrictions on who, what, where, when and how you can send e-mail. These restrictions can include:
- You may not be able to send messages to more than 50 to 100 (or fewer) recipients at a time.
- If you place recipients’ addresses in the BCC: field of your message (as recommended earlier), you may be limited to 20 recipients — or less.
- Even though your store hosts its website with a company that provides your domain with its own mail server (any_address@yourdivestore.com), the ISP that actually connects you to the Internet may require that all outgoing e-mail be routed through its mail server — and, as such, be subject to its more restrictive policies.
All these factors may combine to make it difficult — if not impossible — for you to send e-mail to any more than a handful of customers at a time. So, what can you do?
- If you are a bit of a techno-geek (or have access to one), you can install a free Perl script such as Majordomo on your webserver. You can then upload your mailing list to the server, and any e-mail sent to the correct address will be automatically forwarded to everyone on the list. The catch? This process can be difficult and complicated.
- A more practical approach is to sign up with a permission-based e-mail marketing company (sometimes known generically as list servers). These companies specialize in helping small businesses like yours stay in touch with their customers via e-mail.
A list-serve company can make the process of sending e-mail to hundreds (or thousands) of customers surprisingly easy. Among the services it may offer:
- The ability to automate the process by which interested customers subscribe or unsubscribe themselves from your mailing list.
- Because you will most likely want to control the content of your mailing list through your store’s POS or database software, your list server may give you the option of simply uploading a complete list of subscribers each time you do a mailing.
- Your list server may automatically deal with bad addresses, bounced or blocked e-mail — and provide you with status reports on the effectiveness of each e-mail campaign, including the percentage of recipients who opened and read your e-mail, and which links they clicked on to proceed to your website.
- As mentioned earlier, your list server may provide design templates that make it easy to create visually stunning e-mail announcements — while at the same time providing “text only” equivalents to those who want or need them.
- Additional options may include the ability to offer moderated or unmoderated discussion lists to your customers. (Although caution is indicated here; you don’t want a disgruntled customer to use your own website as a tool against you.)
Reputable list-serve companies have aggressive anti-spam policies. They will only allow you to send e-mail to those individuals who have agreed to receive it — and you must make it possible for users to unsubscribe themselves from your list at any time.
Popular companies that offer this service include Bronto.com, JangoMail.com, Topica.com and ConstantContact.com. You can find more by doing a Google search for permission-based email marketing.
And the Winner is…
In researching this article, we were looking not only for a permission-based, e-mail marketing company (list server) we could recommend wholeheartedly to readers, we also needed one for ourselves.
Constant Contact was not only the best of the available choices, it stood head and shoulders above everyone else.
Among the many features Constant Contact offers:
- You can manage lists of any size.
- You can also subdivide list by interest areas.
- If you want, Constant Contact can manage subscriptions for you (sign-ups, changes, deletions), and/or you can do it yourself by importing data from your store’s database, spreadsheet or POS software.
- Constant Contact offers a variety of professional e-mail templates that look great in everything from Outlook Express to AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo and almost any other e-mail program — plus generates a “text only” equivalent for those who cannot receive formatted e-mail.
- Constant Contact can generate detailed reports telling you: who opened and read your e-mails; which links they clicked on; and, whether they forwarded your e-mail to friends.
- Despite its power and sophistication, Constant Contact is absurdly easy to use. Not only do the pages walk you step by step through everything you need to know, there are excellent tutorials that will give you a firm understanding of what you can do and how to accomplish it before you even start.
Best of all, despite its power, sophistication (and ease of use), Constant Contact is extremely affordable. Pricing is based on the size of your mailing list. For example, you can send unlimited mailings to a list of up to 2,500 customers for just $25/month.
Constant Contact has a “zero tolerance” policy toward spam. Follow their rules, and you can send your e-mail marketing campaigns with a clear conscience.
You can try Constant Contact at no charge for 60 days. And, if you don’t like it, you can always go back to sending out e-mails the hard way. We think, however, that you’ll find this simply too good a deal to pass up.
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