Email Software for Targeted Database Mailings?

[imcarthur]

Email Software for Targeted Database Mailings?

Small firm. We need a simple solution (cheap & easy) to do small targeted mailings to customers. Price changes, new products etc. The contents will be attachments rather than html.

The database is in MS Access. The girl who will do it ain't the brightest bulb so it has to be bulletproof.

Any suggestions for off-the-shelf solutions?

Thanks

Ian

[widebody911]

The first question for me is: do these people want this spam^H^H^H^H mail?

[imcarthur]

Not spam at all. This is infrequent price changes, promotions & new product info for product lines that they are dealers for & buy from us.

They often complain that we don't mail enough.

Ian

[id10t]

Hire a geek like me to write a simple shell script that will grab addresses from a text file (exported from access), or a little more elegant would be to use a sql server instead of access so you could dynamically pull lists of addresses to send to.

[bryanthompson]

wanna buy some amway?

j/k

[imcarthur]

Amway? Not quite.

We're North American distributors for Focal Home product amongst other goods.

id10T : I would if you were in Montreal. But simple & cheap is what we need now. A bandaid. Longer term we will trash the stand-alone Access & use our accounting software which does have the capability.

Ian

[Don Plumley]

Here's a list of programs that I might choose from:

http://downloads.zdnet.com/search.aspx?kw=email+list

Years ago I used Mailing List Express Pro.

[deathpunk dan]

check out constant contact (roving software in Massachusetts). Great value for the money spent.

The reason I recommend gonig with a company like Constant Contact instead of just sending the email yourself is that CC and similar businesses are almost always whitelisted with the ISPs. Many, many businesses have a hard time emailing their own customers if those customers have AOL, Yahoo etc email addresses.

Constant Contact and other email marketing software companies also provide HTML newsletter templates for the newbies but also allow you to import your own designs, provide ways to build multiple interest groups/lists, lots of tracking metrics etc.

There are better solutions than CC, but none that offer the level of services for the little money they charge.

Just my .02 as a e commerce manager with a good deal of email marketing experience.

[imcarthur]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. That ZDnet link should yield something.

Ian

[campbellcj]

"old school" works well for us, like id10t describes. We have our contact database in Oracle (extensively categorized/tagged) and use very simple SQL and shell scripts to query it and pump out html emails - essentially just web pages you can built in Frontpage or Word or whatever - using blat (a Windows command-line mailer utility).

Be sure you include appropriate mechanisms to unsubscribe or submit contact info/preference changes, and also it is best to have a dedicated 'generic' mailbox to send these things from and to get the bounces and replies, i.e. don't use your own personal email address.