Sending Batch emails

mbarnes

Hi Lads,

Was just wondering what peoples opinions were on the best way of sending batch emails for marketing purposes.
I have built up a lit of clients that I like to email every so often, but it takes a while to email them all one at a time.
I currently use outlook 2003 as my email program.
Any advice on the above would be greatly appreciated.

wobbles-grogan

Could you not put all of their emails in the "To" box. It will then send the mail to all of the people in the box. Problem with that is that the recipients will also get the email address of all your other clients. Dont know of a way to turn that off, i presume there is a way.....

mbarnes

wobbles-grogan wrote: »

Could you not put all of their emails in the "To" box. It will then send the mail to all of the people in the box. Problem with that is that the recipients will also get the email address of all your other clients. Dont know of a way to turn that off, i presume there is a way.....

Bcc is that way mate.
If you pt the addresses in the Bcc field as opposed to the Cc field, it will not reveal the email addresses of the other recipients.
I was just looking for a more effiecient way of doing this, some kind of add on I could use. Or maybe even a technique in Outlook that I am not aware of.

Eoin

You want to make sure that your ISP / email hosting provider allows bulk emails to be sent. They don't want their mailserver to be flagged as a spamming service.

I would look at using an online email marketing service. It's not that expensive at all - some are free if you're not sending too many. Here's one you can look at:
http://www.mailchimp.com/

Placebo

whats the size of the mailing list.
You cant be using outlook for that, for VARIOUS reasons

you need to use something like
www.campaignmonitor.com
www.mailchimp.com

or
phplist

Shzm

+1 for mailchimp.

mbarnes

thanks for the replies lads, I'll take a look at the links

mbarnes

Also, the amount of emails would be maybe a couple of hundred recipients.

Inspector Gadget

Assuming your intended audience didn't opt in to this, might I suggest an opt-out mechanism of some kind? I know that if I get spam, um, I mean, "marketing" from some business unsolicited, that outfit would be quickly consigned to the "only if there's absolutely no better, equivalent or even slightly dearer" pigeon hole. An opt-out might soften my attitude a little bit. Also if it is an opt-in service, a written policy on the privacy of user data would be a good idea.

Gadget

Evil Phil

And make sure the opt-out works! It seems that a dublin based recruitment agency is using the opt-out to confirm email addresses and little more.

Inspector Gadget

Evil Phil wrote: »

And make sure the opt-out works! It seems that a dublin based recruitment agency is using the opt-out to confirm email addresses and little more.

Yep, that's true. May they burn in whatever infernal flames they believe in... maybe even those in the pits of heck

Placebo

Some companies are horrible for it
like hotels.com

i've opted out 3-4 times
jesus

mneylon

Outlook is NOT the solution

If you want to do it from your desktop then try GroupMail

Server-side you could try phpList

Or outsource it to MailChimp, CampaignMonitor or Newsletter.ie