Sending email shipments to multiple contacts is no news to those who work in marketing, who often craft elaborate newsletters and campaigns and ship them off as mass email.
And even if you are not a marketer, you may need to inform or elicit response from contacts from time to time, be it people outside your organization or within.
- Maybe you are a CEO and want to inform the organization about your company's monthly performance.
- Perhaps you’re in sales and want to share a great new offer with your prospects.
- Or you are organizing an event and your next task is to invite people to join the event.
In all these situations it would have been useful to be able to send a nicely designed, personalized email message to a large number of contacts.
Now, people who don't have a mailing tool often try to use their basic email client, like Microsoft Outlook, to send their mass mailings – which is a bit of bad news.
Why sending bulk emails from your basic email client isn’t cool
If you have to send a mailing to a large number of contacts, you want the process to be fast and simple. You want to be able to create personalized and beautiful emails, and you don't want to be perceived as a spammer.
Basic e-mail clients are not designed for sending bulk emails. First of all, most of them have restrictions to how many recipients you can send a mailing to. They also have restrictions to how many emails you can send in one hour or day. For example, Microsoft Outlook limits the number of recipients to 300 per email. So, performing mass mailings might turn into a headache when you have to split your recipient list and send your mailing several times.
And even if you manage to send to 300 recipients at a time, it may not be a good idea to do so anyway. The reason is that you can actually hurt your organization’s ability to send email. All emails have to go through a a so called Internet Service Provider (ISP). One of the jobs for these servers is to mark senders they believe are sending spam, and give them lower sendout power. So the real migraine sets in when you get a message from an ISP that says you have sent too many emails to too many recipients, and you have to take several specific actions to get up and running again with sending normal email again. It can take up to 72 hours before anyone in your organization can send an email again.
Also, it’s hardly practical to send mass mailings with your basic email client. Talk about the distress when one email address is wrong and the email client won’t send because of it. You will have to manually find the one wrong address in your list of email addresses and correct it, which adds to the time waste.
In addition to spending a lot of time compiling the address list and overcoming the limitations of your email provider, you will hardly be able to make your messages look nice. It involves advanced and time consuming HTML writing to show your message the same way across all browsers and all email clients, and that’s the last thing you want.
And to top it off – a common mistake is to put all recipients in the "To" field. Suddenly all the recipients can see eachother's email addresses, which wasn't part of the deal when they signed up for the newsletter. A common way to solve this, is to put yourself in the "To" field, and everyone else on blind copy – which may seem impersonal and won't help your clients see you as a customer-centric company.
To sum it up, reaching a large number of customers with nice looking emails in a simple and easy manner requires special tools.
Luckily, you’ve got a new feature in SuperOffice, called Mailings.
Here's how to reach your customers fast and easily
With SuperOffice Mailings it is easy to send newsletters, invitations or other announcements to a large number of customers with personalized and well formatted messages. This feature allows you to use recipient lists directly from your database, save them for future mailings, or modify them with just a few clicks. No matter how large your address list is, you can send your bulk e-mails all at once. Moreover, you can create your messages using one of 16 design templates – or if you are up for it, create your own.
So, the next time you have to send a bulk of emails, learn how to create a mailing in SuperOffice here.
That’s it! Mass emailing made easy. Why not go and try it yourself today?
And by the way, if you work in marketing and need a more advanced mailing tool, we have a new solution for that – the new user plan SuperOffice Marketing. Go and have a look, and don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!
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