Effective Mass E-mailing in HTML Creating Commercial Websites

You are probably familiar with Mass E-mailing. This is when you send the same information to an entire list of people. Mass e-mailing does the same thing,

but does so with the speed and efficiency of e-mail. One example of the advantage mass e-mail has over direct mail is in the case of a catalog.

Suppose you had a list of, oh, let’s say widget users. Traditionally, you might send a business reply card to these people, offering them a free catalog (as sending each person a catalog right off would be too expensive). You incur the printing, mailing, and return mail costs for the cards, and then must print and ship the catalog to those that request it.

Now, if you do this all electronically, you can simply send an e-mail to each person on your list, giving them the URL of your new catalog site. You can probably imagine the cost savings.


Note

Just as with regular mail, recipients are annoyed at having to sift through e-mail that is of no use to them. The first rule of e-mail mass mailing is only send out useful information. (Just because you have the e-mail addresses of people who bought your widgets, don’t send them information on llama rearing—they’ll start to delete e-mail from you without even reading it.)


How do you send a mass e-mailing? There are at least two options: a listserver and an ordinary e-mail program (Eudora, MS mail, and so on). The option you choose depends mostly upon the size of your list. If you have a small distribution list, you can avoid using a listserver and can skip to the Quick and Dirty Guide in this chapter, “Cheapskate Mail Delivery.” If your list is large, however, a listserver is your best bet.

The three main practical differences between these approaches are as follows:

  1. When an e-mail program sends out a mass e-mailing, it sends to each e-mail address separately. If your list is large, or the file you are sending is large, this could mean the program spends hours online sending the mailing—although you can usually automate the process so that you can begin the process before you leave the office for the night, and it automatically disconnects when it’s finished.
  2. When an e-mail arrives that has been sent as a mass mailing from a plain old e-mail program, the To: line displays the addresses of everyone the mailing was sent to. However, when a mass e-mailing is sent from a listserver, the To: line only displays the individual’s address.
  3. Some listservers are set up so that a reply to the message will go back to the listserver. In some cases, this may mean that each person on your list will receive the response. Obviously, you’ll want to make sure this isn’t the case.

 

Listserv

 

Listserv is an automated mailing list distribution system originally designed for the BITNET/EARN network. It sends a list of e-mail addresses to something called a “mail exploder” (part of an electronic mail delivery system that enables the delivery of a message to a list of addresses). The mail exploder works like this: You send messages to a single address, and the mail exploder takes care of delivering the message to each of the individual mailboxes in the list you’ve provided.

If you are interested in using a listserver, your first stop should be at your virtual host (if you have one). Many hosts offer use of their listserver, and provide this service free of charge or for a small additional fee. If you have no luck, there are many companies, like the one shown in Figure 14.4, that offer this service for a fee—a couple that we have found are Internet Tools Inc. (http://www.internet-tools.com/it_html/mail_list.html) and L-Soft International, Inc. (http://www.lsoft.com/ease-head.html).

Figure 14.4. A listserv service.

Setting up a mass mailing using a listserver can also be a do-it-yourself project, and there is already good information available at

http://www.earn.net/lug/notice.html.

Quick and Dirty Guide: Cheapskate Mail Delivery

 

One option for sending out a mass e-mailing is to use the same e-mail program you always use. Many e-mail programs have this capability, two of the more popular being Eudora Light and Microsoft Exchange. This is a simple option if your mailing list is short.

So let’s get started. The goal for this project is to send an e-mail to a list of 20 recipients, informing them that we are having a sale on an item for which they have previously requested information (widgets). First, you must choose the e-mail program you would like to use for this project. Read on if you plan to use Eudora Light; skip ahead to “Using MS Exchange for Mass E-mailing” if you plan to use Microsoft Exchange.

Using Eudora Light for Mass E-mailing

Eudora Light (freeware) is available at Eudora’s home site (http://www.eudora.com) as well as various shareware software sites. Eudora also makes an advanced version called Eudora Pro, which is not freeware. For this project we employ Eudora Light because it is so widely used. Its home page is shown in Figure 14.5.

Figure 14.5. The Eudora home site.

  1. Open Eudora Light.
  2. Hit Ctrl+L to open the Nicknames dialog box.
  3. Click the New button to open the New Nickname dialog box.
  4. Type the name of the mailing group you wish to create. (In our example we name this “widget” to signify that the mail group consists of viewers who have previously requested information on widgets—but you probably guessed that.) Select “Put it on the recipient list,” and click OK.
  5. Your nickname will appear in the Nickname box, and your cursor will appear in the Address(es) box.
  6. Enter a recipient’s real name (in quotes), and that person’s e-mail address in brackets, like this: “John Doe” <jdoe@mydomain.com>. Repeat until all your addresses are entered (Figure 14.6).

    Figure 14.6. The Nickname dialog box.

  7. Once you have entered all your addresses, click To:, which will open a new message box addressed to your mailing list.
  8. Type the subject of your message, in our example it’s sale on widgets.
  9. If you want to attach a file to the e-mail, you can do this by pressing Ctrl+H and selecting the file to attach.
  10. Type your e-mail message (Figure 14.7).

    Figure 14.7. Typing in a message.

  11. Connect to the Internet and click Send to send your mailing.
  12. When the e-mail arrives at all those addresses, it will look something like Figure 14.8 (yes, we are viewing this through Notepad, and no, we didn’t really send this mailing to all those fake addresses).

    Figure 14.8. A mockup of how this e-mail would arrive.

You’ll notice that the To: line includes not only the address of this recipient, but of all the recipients on our mailing list. This is one of the reasons we don’t recommend this method when sending to a large mailing list.

Using Microsoft Exchange for Mass E-mailing

  1. Open Microsoft Exchange.
  2. Press Control+Shift+B to open the Address Book window.
  3. In the File drop-down menu, choose New Entry to open the New Entry dialog box.
  4. Choose Internet Mail Address and click OK.
  5. Fill in the display name (the person’s real name) and e-mail address (you can also fill out the additional information if you would like to keep more contact information here), and click OK (Figure 14.9).

    Figure 14.9. Filling in a real name and e-mail address.

  6. Repeat Steps 3 through 5 to enter all of your recipients.
  7. Close the Address Book.
  8. In the Microsoft Exchange Compose drop-down menu, choose New Message to compose a new message.
  9. Type the subject of your message in the subject line (in our example, it’s Sale on Widgets).
  10. Type the body of your e-mail. (If you want to attach a file to this e-mailing, choose File[el] from the Insert drop-down menu, and select the file.) (See Figure 14.10.)

    Figure 14.10. Typing the e-mail and clicking the To: button.

  11. Click the To button, which will reopen your Address Book.
  12. Select a recipient from the list and click the To button. This entry will then appear in the recipient list.
  13. Repeat Step 12 until all the desired recipients appear in the recipient list, and click OK.
  14. Click the Send button, which will place this message in your outbox.
  15. When you’re ready, go online and send.
  16. The e-mail will then arrive at all those e-mail addresses. (Note: When the viewer receives this e-mail, the To: line may display everyone on your recipient list—which is one of the reasons why we do not recommend this method for large mailing lists).

Summary

 

In this chapter you have

  • Discovered how e-mail can be used to your advantage
  • Learned how to develop an e-mail mailing list
  • Learned about autoresponders
  • Discussed mass e-mailing and how it can be achieved using Listserv, Eudora, or Microsoft exchange.

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