Yesterday morning, due to a conversion upgrade we were left with no incoming phone calls for the morning. I wanted to send an email to all of our customers. I ran a report on all active customers into Excel. Now, the first thing I realized is that we still have a lot of clean up to do. I deleted the obviously not updated accounts and those with no email. Then I ran a report to get emails for our brokers. All in all I ended up with roughly 3500 emails. While our IT folks were trying to get me set up to send from a "Generic" email, it occurred to me that sending to that many addresses in the Bcc field might just get our server blacklisted. By the time we were discussing this, the phones were back so I never sent the email. Obviously this situation is (hopefully) few and far between, but it would be nice to be prepared if we do face this situation again.
I asked our marketing gal about iContact that she uses for newsletters for certain groups of our customers. There is a monthly fee for that, and what we already pay is for a fraction of what I needed. I suppose I could sign up for a month, use it, and cancel it afterward.
Is there a better way?
(Hopefully if we ever need this again, our database will be cleaned up by then. Still, wondering how to get this accomplished without looking like a spammer.)
Using a service would be a start. However, for 3500 emails, they might not all go out at once, so that would be something you'd have to ask the provider. I use a program, that I purposely host off-site, to send mass emails and it sends out x number at a time with x minutes between each group to reduce the risk of being flagged as spam. "Reduce" is the keyword though, because the receiving side can always make up it's own mind. Some email servers will delay your connection if it feels that you've been sending them too much email along with many other variables at play.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you'll want to ask the right questions if a mass email is going to be time sensitive - you want to know what the time between hitting send and all 3500 emails landing in an inbox is. Maybe places like Constant Contact can spread the workload and are instant - I don't know.
MailChimp is another one to look at.
I've used Constant contact with good luck. No contracts - you can pay monthly for what you need.