If you get these daily offer emails from On*One or similar you'll know what I'm trying to explain (I hope)
How using Microsoft Outlook can I set up something similar?
I want to set up and send out a weekly email to ALL of my customers using a base template. But most importantly I don't want them to see who else I've sent it too.
So please help how do I set this up?
Please keep it in simple steps. Ta
Set up a "distribution list" in outlook and add all your customer emails to it using your pre-exisiting email contacts. Then when you send an email you select the distribution list instead of the individual names.
Use the BCC (blind carbon copy) field, when creating the email, select the "To" option on the new email, and all you contacts & distribution lists will appear, at the bottom of that you will have the option of adding them to the "to", "CC" or Bcc".. use the BCC field.
The first question, of course, is 'do ALL your customers want your emails?' Sending unsolicited emails is a fast track to losing customers, and sending a large number of identical emails is likely to get you blacklisted by your ISP.
Assuming they've opted in, you can do what you want to do with the BCC: field in Outlook (you may have to enable this in View first).
For a large number of addresses this is going to get unwieldy fast. You're then looking at specific marketing / mailing list software rather than Outlook.
IIRC, you can only send 50 emails at a time with Outlook (unless it's my ISP)???
I use an excel spreadsheet of emails with data so they can be targeted.
Do a cut and paste of email addresses into the bcc row (click on To: to access that). Put main address as yourself. Not aware of any limit on outlook and sometimes send >400 at once.
Hth
"targeted"
*itches*
Bcc your customers first and ask if they want contacted. Those that do, add to a distribution list.
Keep the template simple and make sure any images used are stored online, that way the recipient will see them if they have images allowed.
Make sure any unsubscribes are actioned very quickly.
Get the customers to buy in to it so you don't turn them off.
Not quite an answer to your question, but have a look at MailChimp.
There are loads of similar companies but for the basics we find it works really well. The reports are good, updating lists is simple and it looks after the unsubcribes for you too.
We pay $14.99 a month for over 2,000 subscribers (I think), but you can try them for free and keep it free depending on the size of your distribution lists.
The reports tell you how many people open and read, and how lond people spend clicking through the content. After a few campaigns, it ranks your subscribers by how much they interact with the email so you can start to target different people in different ways.
Well worth the money, in our opinion...