So here’s the situation: I’m putting together a mailing list of all the people who ever sent fanmail to me. They’ll have to opt in or they’ll never get another email, all the emails are crafted according to when they sent theirs, how many they sent, and so on and on and on. But here’s what I’ve decided: the only way to make this work is to ATTACH their original email(s) as a reply onto the one I send. Each person also needs to be addressed by name. I am convinced that this is the secret.
This means that I’m totally prepared to send out about 4,000 emails one… by one… by one… by one. If there’s no other way to do it the first time they are sent out, I’ll do that. Really not kidding, y’all. But… is there any way to automate this at all, or, failing that, to make it easier? Can a database at least be kept of people who’ve already been sent email so that there aren’t duplicates? (Again, totally prepared to do this by hand if necessary…) It’s better to do this right than to make it easy. However, it would be dumb to not at least find out if there IS an easier way. All advice appreciated!
If you try to send 4000 emails from your home account, you’ll likely get throttled by your ISP or your webmail service and have your email severely affected for at least a few days, if not weeks.
Can you be a bit clearer about your requirements? Did you separate the fanmail into groups according to those criteria, and did you have a distinct reply for each group? And is it absolutely necessary to attach their original email to your reply (this makes it a lot harder)?
There is bulk email software of various kinds that are designed for mailing lists, that send them out in manageable batches of ten a minute or whatever, to not choke your ISP bandwidth and avoid targeting you as a spammer. It’ll also have a wildcard system so you can fill in blanks with personalised names, much like a mail merge in MS Word.
I recommend you contact your ISP so they know you plan to do this, they may offer suggestions.
You need to publish everyone’s emails to the web. Make them PDFs and put them in a folder off the root of the site. They won’t be indexed by search engines because they won’t be linked from anywhere (although you need to double check that you do not have Directory Browsing set to “Yes” for the folder. “No” is the default but if you go to www.website.com/pdf/ and can see a list of files, it’s on). You’ll want to randomly name the PDF files so that the names aren’t guessable (for example don’t put up 12.pdf and 13.pdf, because Mr. #13 could easily guess the URL to #12).
Then in your mail program that you choose to use (Constant Contact, MailChimp, etc) put the URL for the contact’s PDF email in to one of the available contact fields (First Name, Last Name, Email, Extrafield, Otherfield…)
When you send the mass email you can insert the URL field just like any other field.
For example, your email might look like this:
Dear %%FirstName%%,
You wrote a fan letter to me once - thanks! I would like you to sign up for my mailing list. Just reply to this email to sign up.
Don't remember why you emailed me? Here's a copy of your email you sent:
%%PdfUrl%%
Hope to hear from you soon!
Anise
Yes! It’s an ongoing issue (can’t believe that it started last August…) And thanks for all your suggestions then. I did install Mailchimp and download all of the tutorials, although it seems like their official forums are just gone. The problem is that I realized that the original emails MUST be attached. Here’s more about why:
Here’s the reply I wrote last night; I realized this morning that it never actually got posted:
I have a different reply for each group, but I’m holding off on separating the people into groups until I’ve decided what to do. Mailchimp was one possibility I looked at, but I just don’t see (yet, anyway) how that would work with the emails needing to be attached. (Their discussion board has been down FOREVER, and I haven’t seen that exact question addressed anywhere.) But after a very great deal of time spent studying a lot of people’s attempts to promote their books and analyzing the psychology involved, I am 100% convinced that the original emails have to be attached.
I just don’t see where Mailchimp has those options, and it would be a lot easier to find out if their forums still existed.
There’s only one place where I’ve seen this discussed, and I’m afraid that I’ll have to join. Warrior Forums. Oo! Just saw ZipperJJ’s reply. I’ll have to try that too.
To me that is a bit dangerous because Google is remarkably adept at indexing anything that people view in their browser. In our web server logs I often see someone do a very specific query and then GoogleBot retrieves it a few seconds later. I think this is largely due to the Google Toolbar, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Google Chrome did it too.
Justin Bieber!! God forbid. Cathy Green of Food Lion? :dubious:
Anyway, I don’t think so… my brain seems to be completely gone these days, though, so it’s hard to say. I don’t know. If I have to do these ONE BY ONE and then put the opt-ins into a database (because then I’ll know that it’s worth it), I’m starting to think that it might not be the worst solution in the world. Is entering everyone’s info into a database first really easier, when I really don’t know how many people will have their info permanently kept for the mailing list?
(Does that sentence make sense? Very tired. Can’t tell.
(laughs)
(laughs and laughs and laughs and… well, you get the idea)
I do have my own domain, though. The main question is if there’s ANY way to attach the original emails to each person who sent them in the first place-- except for ZipperJJ’s idea. Which does sound like a great idea, but I guess that control z’s objection does need to be thought of.
All right then. Create a database for your site. In one field enter an ID, in another field enter a random password, and in another field enter the contents of the email in HTML format.
Create a page that shows the HTML email after you enter the right password into a password box. The password would key off the ID field and the ID field would be in the URL querystring.
Send out an email with a link to the email and the password.
What I’m trying to say is do not send 4000 email attachments.
Anise, your sample of what they said STILL didn’t get posted. Is it absolutely critical that their reply be included? It makes it a LOT easier and cheaper if not.
If it still absolutely has to include their reply, I was going to suggest Amazon SES as well.
In fact, do you have a budget for this? Consider hiring a cheap freelance programmer (like from elance or a local college) to write you a script that sends them out using Amazon SES.
It has to:
Analyze all your exported emails and sort them by sender.
Arrange them into groups by frequency and last-received-by dates.
Quote the latest reply AS PLAIN TEXT IN THE BODY OF THE EMAIL, NOT AS AN ATTACHMENT. This cannot be emphasized enough.
Send it to the original sender with the message body customized as per #2. Add it all to the Amazon SES queue and watch it all go out over a few hours/days.
STRONGLY recommend that you transition them to Mailchimp (or a similar service) with this campaign. Have the body of this email contain a subscription link to your Mailchimp list. From then on the subscribers can manage their own preferences and you don’t have to do this again.
This is not inconceivably difficult. In fact it should be pretty simple for somebody good with Perl or really any other internet-aware high-level language (most of them these days).
Anyway. Basically, what I said was that I’ve done a lot of research on what others have been doing to promote their books. Most of it sounds good but doesn’t work, sad to say (pestering everyone to death and beyond on social media being a good example.) But in this case, I really think that I have something priceless: all 4,000 of these people sent me fanmail, and that’s the only reason I have their addresses. They liked my work enough to spend time and energy writing to me about it, often several times. So they HAVE to have their original replies sent to them as a reminder.
So in summary, I like the idea of putting their attachments on my domain as pdf files, and I might even check out FreeGeek to see what it would cost to write something… but no matter what, I think that I have to set up Mailchimp first.
Thanks to all the wonderful people who made suggestions!
Terrible idea. “Random PDF attachment from this author I wrote a long time ago? What? Why couldn’t she just quote my reply if she wanted to say something?”
It’s going to look like spam/malware to many people.
Can you export your these emails into an mbox format? In what email program are you storing these? If you can get them into mbox format, it’s fairly easy to extract the email via a script and send them along.
It is terribly manual, but if you sent 100 a day for 40 days you’d be done, plus you would have time to learn along the way and more time to respond to the inevitable replies.
I have absolutely no problem with that at all. The emails are organized and the template responses are written. So that’s only an hour a day! With an hour and a half a day, it would be done in a month. I have to be honest; it looks like the best way for me. I’m SURE there are better ways, and someone who knows how to write code could come up with all of them, but that person is not I.
What you want is usually called an “email marketing service” for handling and organizing mass marketing emails. If you’re serious about keeping in touch with clients and building your business you need one of these programs. If this is just a one shot deal you might as well just mass mail a hundred a day directly out of GMail.
Most of the time people using these programs also use some kind of client database and contact (CRM) software like ACT or Salesforce etc. if they are communicating one on one with specific clients and selling clients products. If this is just a mass newsletter email and you are not interacting with specific clients you probably don’t need a client contact front end database.
A CRM lets you tailor emails to specific client groups and a host of other customization features.
I did install Mailchimp and download all of the tutorials, although it seems like their official forums are just gone. The problem is that I realized that the original emails MUST be attached. Here’s more about why:
I don’t know. If I have to do these ONE BY ONE and then put the opt-ins into a database (because then I’ll know that it’s worth it), I’m starting to think that it might not be the worst solution in the world. Is entering everyone’s info into a database first really easier, when I really don’t know how many people will have their info permanently kept for the mailing list?