Bulk Email Marketing. The Whys and Hows.

Bulk email marketing is currently considered to be one of the most effective ways to sell products and services online. If do not you send out bulk emails now, you should definitely consider adding this powerful marketing weapon to your arsenal of selling techniques. Why is bulk email marketing so popular nowadays? Very simple - it's inexpensive, it's easy, and it works!

So what is bulk email marketing? Well, as the name implies, it is sending out a large number of emails in order to market your products or services. What's the difference between spam and bulk emailing? I'm not even going to go there, I will just ask a different question - what is the difference between smart bulk email marketing and dumb email marketing? If you think that bulk email marketing means buying a CD with 16 million e-mails for twenty bucks, you will be very disappointed by dismal results of your marketing campaign. For about past six months I've been getting weekly messages from some company in South Korea. I don't speak Korean, never been to Korea, so this is a great example of stupid bulk e-mail marketing - I can't even read these emails. You do need to make sure that the recipients of your emails will be able to understand you. Geotargeting (targeting certain geographical area) is also very important. If you sell mountain bikes in California, why market to people in Montana?

If you don't have your own mailing list, you can purchase it. There are quite a few companies that gather e-mails and they can sell you a list that will sell your products for your. For example, if you sell photo equipment, they can pick only e-mails of people who subscribe to photography newsletters, work professionally in this field, or selected photography as their hobby, when filling out a questionnaire. After you obtained a mailing list, you should think about the format and the content of the e-mail you are about to send. We will talk about e-mail format and composition next week. Your last, but very important decision is the software you use to send e-mails. We recommend Atomic Mail Sender and here is why:

• Built-in list management tools - add new addresses, delete invalid ones and so on.
• Internal SMTP server. This one is very important, since it saves you a lot of time and nerves. You can't just send out thousands of e-mails from your ISP e-mail account. First, it will take hours. Second, your account will be shut down the same day. Third, it's just impractical.
• Support for text and HTML format. This feature is standard nowadays, but nevertheless very important, since the research shows that messages sent in HTML format are more effective.
• Unlimited number of e-mails.

Another software you should look at is Atomic Subscription Manager. This program processes the requests from the mailing lists users automatically. Someone should send SUBSCRIBE or REMOVE message to your account and his address will be added to the list automatically.

Next week: The message!
Prev week: Learn how you can automatically gather emails from files and CDs

Relevant links:

  • Atomic Mail Sender, a program to send bulkmail
  • Atomic Mailing List Manager
  • Bulk email programs for your needs

Subscription options:

Entire news archive is available here.
Want to receive the news by e-mail? Subscribe now, it's free!