IS there even a way to send 4,000 mass emails rather than one by one in this situation?

[control-z]

@GuanoLad

Be warned you’re going to get a lot of bounces. Many of the people will have changed their email/ISP/died/gone into the witness protection programme.

Yeah the classic rule of thumb for postal mailings is 10% bad addresses, for email it is 20% or more. People switch ISPs a lot.

[Anise]

@astro

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.

Here is a comparison of some top email and CRM programs
Email Marketing: iContact vs. MailChimp – First Look

Here’s another

iContact vs. Aweber vs. Mailchimp vs. Constant Contact – The Best Newsletter Service

CRM comparision
Act vs Salesforce

Sage ACT vs SUgar CRM

I watched the videos and read the articles. Yay! Thanks. I think I’m down to the last idea: to set up one of these services and THEN send each email one by one with an opt-in link that somehow automatically enters them into the system. THAT, there must be a way to do. Some of the emails are duplicates, so it can’t be 4,000 separate ones anyway. And it’s hard to explain, but I also want to re-connect with the fans who sent the email over a period of years by seeing everything that was originally sent. It will be a labor of love!

[Time_Stranger]

@Reply

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.

Yeah, I encourage you to think more about this. Adding their name - great! Including any kind of attachment, especially a letter they sent who knows how long ago - totally sketch. I would think it was spam and delete right away, and I bet most other people would too.

[Anise]

When all is said and done (and before that, actually) I agree. As far as I can see, nothing will work except including the original email as inline text in my email to them. I think that what I need to find out next is the point about their opt-in reply working as an automatic add to the database itself.
ETA: Oh, and it gets crazier. I’m thinking about including something related to what they said in their original email. (“I loved hearing about how much you liked Sex, Sex, and More Sex, As Well As Some Spam.” “Are you still writing about mutant squids who do kinky things in tapioca pudding?” That kind of thing.)

[Reply]

@Anise

When all is said and done (and before that, actually) I agree. As far as I can see, nothing will work except including the original email as inline text in my email to them. I think that what I need to find out next is the point about their opt-in reply working as an automatic add to the database itself.
ETA: Oh, and it gets crazier. I’m thinking about including something related to what they said in their original email. (“I loved hearing about how much you liked Sex, Sex, and More Sex, As Well As Some Spam.” “Are you still writing about mutant squids who do kinky things in tapioca pudding?” That kind of thing.)

Separate it.

Maybe 5% of those emails, you’d want to personally reply too. Put them in their own special group and craft individualized responses for them.

The rest, just bunch together into however many groups you need and send them group canned responses.

Seriously, hire a programmer to do the scripting for you. Unless your time is worth so little, why spend an hour a day for the next 40 days doing this? This is exactly the kind of thing that no human, even in a sweatshop, should have to do. It’s so mind-numbingly dull and pointless when a computer script can do it so much easier.

[tellyworth]

And if the programmer doesn’t try to talk you into simplifying what you’re trying to do, you’ve hired the wrong guy.

[Anise]

@Reply

Separate it.

Maybe 5% of those emails, you’d want to personally reply too. Put them in their own special group and craft individualized responses for them.

The rest, just bunch together into however many groups you need and send them group canned responses.

Seriously, hire a programmer to do the scripting for you. Unless your time is worth so little, why spend an hour a day for the next 40 days doing this? This is exactly the kind of thing that no human, even in a sweatshop, should have to do. It’s so mind-numbingly dull and pointless when a computer script can do it so much easier.

Because I’ve seen what other people are doing to promote their books. I’m going to be honest here… (ducks to avoid thrown items) Almost nothing works. This is that rare, rarer, rarest, virtually-nonexistent opportunity to do something unique, and something crucially different from torturing everyone you know on social media until they can’t stand hearing about the book anymore.

[Reply]

@Anise

Because I’ve seen what other people are doing to promote their books. I’m going to be honest here… (ducks to avoid thrown items) Almost nothing works. This is that rare, rarer, rarest, virtually-nonexistent opportunity to do something unique, and something crucially different from torturing everyone you know on social media until they can’t stand hearing about the book anymore.

I’m saying personalize it as much as you want, but unless you’re doing 4000 individual replies, you can still benefit (tremendously) from automation and scripting.

It’s easy for a computer program to look at each email, sort them, and then copy and paste their body text into the reply of an email, and send it through Amazon.

To do all that as a human would be veeeery tedious. Your time. Your call.

[Blakeyrat]

@Anise

(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.

I’m not sure what’s so funny about what I wrote.

With SES, it’ll take about a day and a half to set up your domain for sending. Your initial throttle rate will be 10,000 emails per 24 hours, which could handle your load in just a day or two. It’s dirt-cheap. The emails you sent can include whatever text you want, whatever attachments you want, whatever links you want-- SES just sends normal typical everyday email.

So the only part you’re missing is someone to write the scripting to make it happen.

[Orionizer]

I’m writing to a software company I’ve done business with for years to see if their product can support this. I’ll let you know once I receive a reply.

[Orionizer]

Damn Edit Window…

If you’re curious about the software I’m talking about, here’s a link…

[Orionizer]

Ok, got the reply and it sounds like it can’t do what you want. Here’s the reply I received:

I’m afraid, but I do not understand why you would like to attach the original opt-in mail to your mailing.

But you might use SmartSerialMail to import a list of recipients from MS Outlook or other sources.

SmartSerialMail stores all emails (also content and settings) in a own database. You might also perform a search in your recipient list for duplicate entries, as well as SmartSerialMail saves the information if a email in a list was already send out by a sending task.

For subscription and cancellation you might have a look at the tutorials:
http://www.jam-software.com/smartserialmail/online_manual/EN/tutorial_handling_bounces.html

http://www.jam-software.com/smartserialmail/online_manual/EN/tutorial_registration_in_newslettercontent.html

In case you own a website you might also have a look at the advanced tutorial, which describes the possibility to use a webserver to generate opt-in process:
http://www.jam-software.com/smartserialmail/online_manual/EN/optin_smartserialmail_optin_form.html

Best regards,

Marcel DÜtscher

[BigT]

@Blakeyrat

I’m not sure what’s so funny about what I wrote.

Seriously? You asked if she was able to do her own programming. She laughed because she is not only unable to do so, but also unlikely to be able to learn.

She does not seem to want to farm out this job to someone else when she should be able to do it herself. She likely does not think the return on investment will be nearly great enough to justify hiring someone else. It’s only useful to her if she can do it herself.

And, yes, honestly, most people’s time is not worth that much to them. It’s their work that’s worth money. And, while tedious, this is not terribly difficult to handle manually.

[Anise]

Yep. I know what I’m good at and what I’m not. I can’t learn everything, and I can’t do everything (at least until that Timeturner order comes through from Amazon… And above all, the time spent going back through all the fanmail I’ve received is time worth spending. That’s what I finally had to realize, which I doubt I could have done without all the input from this board. I will check out all the links soon! (scurries back to laptop. I have to get the finished version of this book in by Thursday for the critique group!!)

[ZipperJJ]

You know in the time you’ve spent trying to figure out how to do this, you could have manually responded to like 25% of your fanmail already, with a link to opt in. Heh.

I think that’s called “the programmer’s delimma” or something