E-Mail Marketing Programs

E-Mail Client Programs

The first type of e-mail program you need is a basic e-mail client. Don't settle for the built-in program included with your Web browser. One of the essentials is a system of filters that will sort e-mail by keywords for you as it comes into your site. You can send out multiple e-mail messages to individuals in your e-mail program's contact file by creating a "group" or pasting multiple addresses into the To: field, but that's the mark of an amateur, since every one of the recipients see the e-mail addresses of all the other recipients, which can be embarrassing, and subjects your contacts to spamming from others. When pasted into the Cc: field, it works the same. But when you paste the e-mail addresses into the Bcc: field (which stands for "blind carbon copy") no one sees the addresses of the other recipients. If you have a small list of contacts to e-mail to, this works okay. But in a moment we'll describe some better tools for bulk e-mail.

Here are some of the best programs available:

Eudora Pro

Eudora Pro (http://www.eudora.com/) is the father of excellent e-mail handling programs. Its use of filters and stationery allows you to send automated responses to e-mails containing keywords, such as those you set up with forms-to-email systems. For example, one option a customer might choose would include the keyword "birdbath" which would automatically trigger Eudora to send an e-mail response about your Electronic Birdbath product. Eudora's filters are very sturdy and reliable, but its contact information section is pretty crude, and difficult to set up in a database system that allows you to send personalized e-mail to contacts. I used it with success for several years, and switched to Outlook 98 in August 1998. Eudora Lite (freeware) includes much of the power, but lacks some of the features important to marketers.

Outlook 98 and 2000

Microsoft Outlook 98/2000 (http://www.microsoft.com/outlook/) is an excellent e-mail program. Its filters are not as sturdy and reliable as Eudora's, but the way it integrates e-mail with contact information, e-mail addresses, categorization, journals, calendaring, etc. make it ideal for people-intensive small businesses. One weakness of Outlook 98 is that not all fields of its contact information can be used in an e-mail merge operation. (I haven't checked to see if they've improved that in Outlook 2000). Don't confuse this with the dumbed down Outlook Express e-mail client that ships with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Pegasus Mail

Pegasus Mail (http://www.pegasus.usa.com/) by David Harris is a high quality, multi-featured freeware e-mail program praised by users. I haven't used it, but it comes highly recommended.

E-Mail Merge Programs

A second type of e-mail software allows you to send out personalized messages to people in the database you've developed from your forms-to-email responses. They work similarly to the mail merge features built into Microsoft Word. You can specify database fields in the e-mail message, and the program will insert or merge the data from the database into each individual personalized message. Each of these programs runs on a Windows 95 desktop computer. The limiting factor in sending out a whole bunch of e-mail messages from your desktop is the speed of your connection to the Internet. Sending messages via a dial-up modem is relatively slow, and thousands of messages will take hours -- and perhaps bring you to the attention of your ISP. So if you plan to do a lot of this, you'll probably want to get a faster Internet connection: ISDN, DLS, T1, etc.

Office 97/Office 2000

I am amazed that Microsoft missed the opportunity to build an easy e-mail merge system into their Office suite. Oh, you can do it with a combination of Outlook, Access, and Word -- and Word is a very powerful program indeed. But the memory of my experience trying this is spelled C-L-U-N-K-Y. Yes, it works, but slowly.

Revnet MailKing

Revent's MailKing (http://www.mailking.com/?wmt) is a fine program that reads data from MS Access or Excel files (as well as several other common formats), and allows you to merge that data into an e-mail message. It has some fairly sophisticated filters to help you select appropriate recipients. For $99, however, it beats the Microsoft Office combination, and is easy to use. I use it regularly to send out a 1000+ personalized mailing twice a month via a dial-up modem.

Arial Campaign

Arial Software Campaign (http://www.arialsoftware.com/?wmt) has been around for several years. The most recent versions of this software run on Windows 95+ and Windows NT platforms. Campaign provides all the features of MailKing, and works easily with MS Access and other common databases, but also allows scheduling of e-mail messages to go out a certain number of days after a client has taken a certain action. It sells for $495.

Mailloop

Mailloop (http://marketingtips.com/mailloop/t.x/15267/), distributed by Corey Rudl's Internet Marketing Center, is an extremely versatile program. It works alongside your current e-mail client program to pre-filter e-mail, extract forms-generated data from e-mail messages, strip e-mail addresses from any kind of file, merge your database into personalized e-mail messages, provide autoresponder-like responses, host newsletters, and process "remove" requests from those who want you to be removed from any of your lists. It runs on Windows 95+ and NT. To use it you'll need to export your existing databases from programs such as MS Access or FileMaker Pro into ASCII quote-comma-delimited format for them to work properly with Mailloop. It sells for $379.

Listserver Programs

E-mail merge programs run on your desktop, and depend upon the speed of your connection to the Internet. Listerserver programs, on the other hand, reside on web hosting service computers with a direct connection to the Internet, so they can pump out e-mails extremely rapidly. All include automatic subscribe and unsubscribe features, and allow a variety of lists -- one-way mailings such as newsletters, and discussion lists, both moderated and unmoderated.

Older freeware programs include Majordomo and ListProc. These provide good service for smaller lists, but begin to choke when they get above 10,000 to 15,000 subscribers. Their chief weakness is that they provide no automatic way to deal with the hundreds of obsolete e-mail addresses large lists have to deal with each month. See my article Majordomo Newsletters for the Novice (http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/majordomo.htm). 

Newer programs such as Lyris (http://www.lyris.com/?wmt) and the high-end classic LSoft ListServe (http://www.lsoft.com) provide automatic ways to deal with bounces. Lyris can store a subscriber's full name and do crude e-mail merges with that field. But Revnet's UnityMail (http://www.unitymail.com/?wmt) allows you to do very sophisticated merges and IF-THEN mailings from an online relational database using a Web browser interface, but it's pretty pricey. I've had good results from a third party list server company, SparkList.com (http://www.sparklist.com/?wmt), that uses high speed servers for a juiced-up version of Majordomo as well as Lyris listservers.

Smaller businesses will find four free mailing list programs useful: eGroups.com, OneList.com, Topica.com, and ListBot.com. Read our review in the July 1999 issue of Web Marketing Today (http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/free-lists.htm).

Take the time to get familiar with the e-mail marketing tools at your disposal, and then select the ones you'll need to make your online business a success.