Mass Emailing for Marketing Your Business

Mass-emailing campaigns are a legitimate way to market a product or a newsletter, but with the massive, chronic problem of spam, mass-mailings have gotten a bad name. These days, the way legitimate companies do mass-mailings is to send their message only to subscribers who have voluntarily signed up, or “opted in” for the service. To do this, marketers had to purchase expensive, complicated mass-mailing programs, and tie up their own computers to do the mailing. It was always a big hassle, and with programs like Outlook, all the subscribers get is a plain text message, which is not especially eye-grabbing.

Many people who attempt an email campaign try to use Outlook or Outlook Express to send out the message, by cc’ing everybody in his address book. In most cases the email hosting company will block the campaign because it has been identified as a mass-mailing, which these days has the reputation of being a BAD THING (because of spam), and mail-hosting companies don’t allow it. In addition to this, Outlook-type programs aren’t very good at mass-mailings, because they only offer rudimentary tools, and are extremely complex to use for this purpose.

As with so many things computer-related these days, the process has undergone a good deal of refinement, and products are getting not only better but also cheaper. Fortunately for companies wishing to send out product announcements or newsletters to their database of customers, the process of sending out a mass-mailing is now very simple to do, and also very cheap.

A friend of mine, who is always on the lookout for ways to market his company and send his customers offers and newsletters, turned my attention the other day to company called Vertical Response (http://www.verticalresponse.com/). This product is truly amazing; it makes the process of designing and sending mass-emails so easy and fast that anybody can do it. Once subscribed, the mailer uses a control panel in his web-browser that takes the user through the process of designing the message, importing the email addresses from the company database or address book, creating subscriber lists, and using templates of previous campaigns as the basis for the next one, eliminating most of the work of starting from scratch each time. All campaigns are saved and can be repeated at will, or slightly modified and sent to a different subscriber list. All the templates include an opt-out offer, which cannot be omitted, allowing the subscriber to unsubscribe at any time. The pre-designed templates are excellent; the finished results are HTML formatted, and include all the elements of a well-designed web-page, including graphic images, background designs, etc.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of Vertical Response’s product is the outstanding statistical reporting that it provides. Once a campaign has been sent out, the marketer can then see how successful his campaign has been by viewing a web-stats page that will provide accurate percentage information about how many mails are successfully sent, opened, unsubscribed or bounced. If the campaign contains links, the stats will report the percentage of click-throughs.

Companies like Vertical Response are extremely cautious that this system does not get abused by spammers, and therefore include a very legal disclaimer about the product being misused, so don’t try to use this as a spam weapon. The law will bite you if you do. Vertical Response has a “no tolerance spam policy”, and complies with the CAN-SPAM act.

However if you need to reach your customer base with a legitimate, important message on a regular basis, Vertical Response is the best thing going.