Virtual Internet Marketing Assistance for Busy Business Owners

I wanted to share with you an email tactic that is used by a fellow business contact (who I hasten to add is NOT a client of mine). This person sells health and beauty products and regularly emails her contacts with snippets of news and reminders about ordering products. I get these emails too.

The content of the emails are absolutely fine. They’re chatty, informative, non-aggressive and actually it’s nice to hear from this person because I don’t regularly meet them anymore.

What does damage her reputation is that these are bulk emails sent to all her contacts in the one same email. It’s so obviously a bulk email because it starts ‘Hi all’. What’s even worse, is that she doesn’t use the bcc facility so all her email recipients get to see each other’s contact details, and the list is huge and grows with each email – a massive faux pas in email etiquette.

The biggest email etiquette error

is not using bcc. When you cc all the recipients, they can all see each other’s email address and ‘reply to all’. That might be acceptable in some cases where you want to let everyone reply to everyone and have everyone read the responses and access to each other. However for a business communication, unless If you’re confident that everyone knows one another and it’s acceptable for them to ‘reply all’ then you need to bcc the recipients. That way they won’t be able to ‘reply all’ and no-one will take offence to having their email details shared with a load of strangers.

What’s wrong with ‘Hi all’ emails?

If you have a small number of emails to send a bulk email and they all know you personally, then ‘hi all’ is a perfectly acceptable way to begin an informal email. This isn’t always the case for a business communication. In fact, this is the best way to let them know this is a bulk email, not necessarily for them and probably doesn’t need to be read at that particular moment, so ends up being buried deep in the depths of ‘unread’ or ‘read later’ never to surface again in the email graveyard.

It is proven that personalised emails are more likely to be opened and read. When I receive an email ‘Hi Vee’, even though I know it was probably sent to me as one on a mailing list, I’m more likely to at least scan read it and take some action if I thought it was required.

How to personalise lots of the same email

Obviously it’s not practical for my networking friend to write individual personalised emails. As a self-confessed time-saving and streamlining geek, that would be a non-productive use of time. It is possible to send a personalised email using MS Word and Outlook (it needs to be the paid version of Outlook and NOT the free Outlook Express). You set up a mailmerge and when it comes to merging, you merge to email. It works like a dream for small lists of up to 50 email addresses.

Anything more than 50 emails, you start to run into problems with sending that many over your mail server and they could freeze you out for an hour or so. You can overcome that by making sure you don’t send more than 30 an hour. But is that an efficient way of using your time? You could end up taking a day to send out an email to your list and that wouldn’t be something I would advocate either!

The efficient way to send bulk emails

I have a number of clients who happen to be in the same health and beauty industry as my networking friend. They also send out bulk emails to huge lists, in one case over 1,000 contacts.

All their emails are personalised, they know how many emails get opened, how many links on their email get clicked and how many times. The emails have a consistent look and feel with contact numbers and web links always displayed and details of forthcoming events. These emails take a few minutes to compose and set up and they can forget about it. They even have ‘forward to’ and ‘subscribe’ links so their list can grow without having to manually add them and, unsubscribe links so they don’t have to manually track down the email to remove them so that they are ICANN/Spam compliant.

What is the name for such such a great email system? There are lots of different Mail Management Systems on the market and my preferred for newsletters is Constant Contact. You can sign up for a free 60 day trial with this link. Constant Contact set up can be a little tricky when you’ve never done it before, so at My Super VA, we’ve made it easy with our Constant Contact set up service from just £97.

The bottom line is the bottom line…. If you want to look professional, save time, be ICANN compliant while you grow your business then you use a newsletter service like Constant Contact to keep in touch with your business contacts. If you cc or bcc a ‘hi all’ bulk email to your business contacts, what does that say about how seriously you treat your business? And how seriously will they treat you?