Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Most email clients should allow you to essentially do the same as you would for a mail merge. Personalized emails are great and get higher responses, so it sounds like you're on the right track.

However, move away from the Outlook. I repeat....move away from the Outlook. Even if you have a small list, don't subject your reputation to the hazards of deploying through Outlook. Trust me on this.

-Josh the Email Marketing Guy
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You can mail merge from Outlook, but why bother?

The Web based solution will make it easy to handle your bounces and unsubscribes, and personalization is easy. Moreover, the personalization does not have to end with just a name. Any field in the database can be used.

The fact that you can actually track opens and clicks if you want to...that's just another bonus.

You can get a 500-message/month account at StreamSend (https://www.streamsend.com) for like $6/month.

I use massmailsoftware.com - great software, really works, not expensive. Plus if you subscribe at their blog https://www.massmailsoftware.com/blog/ you'll get free exclusives ebooks full of tactics and secrets every week! I run my own marketingb biz and use their services for a year - these books help me so much, really!

At the StreamSend Email Marketing service you can do mail merge with any field.

For example, if you had a first_name field or something like that it would be:

Dear {{{first_name}}} and the system would replace the first name value with whatever each member of the list had for that value.

I hate to disagree with Inbox_Interactive but this is a recent change: we have recently dropped our $5.95 plan. We were growing too fast with the smaller accounts and wanted to grow a bit slower with a bit larger accounts. The $5.95 account is now what we call our Hiatus account, where a customer who only does email marketing periodically can downgrade to in order to hold their account until they want to upgrade again to continue email marketing. For example, someone who did an quarterly newsletter would downgrade during the off months.

StreamSend used to be the obvious choice (because of the very low price) for someone with a list size of 100. At this point, we very well may not be the best deal at that level.

Kathy, I would suggest you do a Google search for "email marketing" and compare the features and prices of some services. Then maybe do a free trial of a small number and see which of them works best for you.

Here is a list of why to use a service (and most good email marketing services do these things. If not, look elsewhere):

1. Reporting - open rates, click throughs, bounces, and so on.

2. Unsubscribe link - people can easily get off your list if they want.

3. bounce handling - Hard bounces (email address does not exist any more) are automatically unsubscribed from your list. ISPs do not like you sending to bad email addresses repeatedly. Soft bounces are not instantly unsubscribed but, like hard bounces, you will see reports.

4. Delivery reports - how did things go with aol, yahoo, xyz corporation, and other places you send emails.

5. Feedback loops with ISPs - For example, if someone clicks on the spam button in aol or others it is reported back to the email marketing service and the user is automatically unsubscribed. Remember, not everyone who wants off your list will formally unsubscribe. Some people, hopefully very few, will simply complain to their ISP, which is as easy as clicking a button with many ISPs. They will be very mad if that did not get them off your list and the ISP will not appreciate you trying to send to someone who complained previously.

There are other reasons to go with a good service but these are probably the most important. Maybe some others could list a half dozen good services for you to look at. Otherwise, a Google search is probably your next step.

Thanks.

Neil

There are a bunch of online email markeitng services that make this easy. You can even merge in a lot more fields than just a name. Here is a blog article about Questions to Ask When Picking an Email Marketing Solution that you might find useful.

Constant Contact tends to be the best and most widely used solution for a very small list or business like yours seems to be.

I personally use a program called Savicom at my job and it pretty simple to personalize emails using their email addresses and their names or user names.