I’m after some software to send out a mass email to customers who subscribe to a service I provide.
No need for repeat emails, no spam involved, they’re not subscribing to an email list.
I want to be able to feed a program a spreadsheet, have it remove certain email addresses, check for duplicates then send out a personalised email to each address on the list.
Most software I’m seeing is aimed at either regular mailing / discussion lists or spammers.
Has anyone had any experience with this kind of work or can suggest something for me?
As it’s going to be commercial use the cost is not that important.
Which services do you think are being marketed to spammers?
Constant Contact is the de-facto email marketing system for most organizations. I personally (and professionally) think MailChimp is pretty awesome.
While you can do this yourself using Office tools, you are going to get more reliable sending, a cleaner list and a tighter HTML newsletter if you use someone else’s service. You also will not be compromising your own IP address. If you have over 50 to send, don’t even think about doing it locally.
A conference I’m involved with uses Constant Contact. One really good thing about it is that you get back statistics on who opened your email, which is very valuable.
Just be sure to let people unsubscribe.
Shagnasty, I do indeed have Office available, but I’m looking at sending out about 500 emails per day, do you think office can handle that, along with the mail-merge elements I’m looking for and checking of the address list?
It’s important that each customer only sees their own details, not the name or address of anyone else receiving the email.
ZiperJJ, When I see software that claims to be able to send 300,000 emails in a day with a built in SMTP server, that seems a little spammer-ish.
I’m not sending out a news letter, it’s a one off email to welcome a customer and give them the terms and conditions of the service. No subscriptions involved and we’re not marketing anything really, the people getting the email have already signed up.
I’ll check out constant contact and mailchimp, see if they’re comfortable doing ‘one-off’ emails or if they’re centred around regular mailings.
500 e-mails a day should be well within MS Office capabilities. Setting up the e-mail merge is fairly easy. The main works comes from scrubbing the e-mail address list which would take a combination of Excel features. If you are good with automatically manipulating Excel spreadsheets already, it may be the easiest and cheapest way to do what you want.
Very true.
Sending locally via a product with its own SMTP server from your own IP is likely to get you bounced by a lot of servers. (the email won’t be delivered) Many server administrators subscribe to blacklists that block all dynamically assigned IP ranges from most providers (so a comcast cable modem won’t work, but if you lease a T1 it probably will).