Mailing list

[Martin]

After a trade show I have a few hundred people who would like information
emailed. We also have a few hundred more from past events.

What's the best way to manage this with Outlook?

I don't want to add 300+ people to my address book. I suppose I could
create another account and use it as the repository of email addresses for
such purposes.

I thought that it might be useful to be able to use something like Excel to
hold the email addresses and merge them with a personalized document as well
as related attachments for emailing. The fact that Excel won't go beyond
65K rows is of no concern as we will never have that many people in the
list. I would gues that anything above about 1K to 2K names would be
outside the reasonable range.

Also, is there a way to automatically handle folks who want to be removed
from the list? Everyone we have has requested information by having their
expo card swiped during the trade show. Nevertheless, some might not want
any more info after the first mailing (we are planning on doing only a
couple per year). They could be erased manually or automatically. However,
I don't think Outlook is suited for the latter.


Thanks,


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Euredjian

To send private email:
(e-mail address removed)
where
"0_0_0_0_" = "martineu"

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

A mail merge using an Excel worksheet as the data source would be a very good solution.

However, if you want to maintain a mailing list that people can remove themselves from, I'd recommend that you go with a third-party provider that can manage that and also handle the expected 10% bounce rate. Google Groups is one free option for a smallish list, but there are many other options.

 

[Martin]

By using vendors I would be concerned about people not realizing that the
email comes from us.

Are you suggesting I use mailing list software, as in a Majordomo type
solution? It migth be a good thought. I can certainly setup a slow server
on the network. I mean, for a couple of mailings a year to a few hundred
customers this wouldn't be too big of a deal. They could unsubscribe very
easily simply by replying.

BTW, I just ordered your book through Amazon.

Thanks,

-Martin



A mail merge using an Excel worksheet as the data source would be a very
good solution.

However, if you want to maintain a mailing list that people can remove
themselves from, I'd recommend that you go with a third-party provider that
can manage that and also handle the expected 10% bounce rate. Google Groups
is one free option for a smallish list, but there are many other options.