Software for Bulk Emailing - any suggestions?

valve90210

valve90210

valve90210

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Essentially this is a simple question, does any one know of any/have experience with any bulk emailing software?

A bit of background info as to why I'm asking.

At my work (a school) we have a database of all our old pupils. At the moment we are able to do bulk emails about events etc but due to limitations in the software we currently use there is no way of making these emails look nice, it is purely plain text, with not even the options of making text bold, or italic or anything such like, nor can we attach anything so attaching a pdf for example is also not an option.

What we would like to be able to do is create nice looking emails with pictures, links, colour etc etc.

I know this would be possible using just normal email software but Outlook which we use here can't cope with the number of addresses we need to send to (something like 6,000 or so).

In an ideal world the providers of the database would introduce better creation tools but despite having been asked and chased about this numerous times, nothing has happened on this front.

It has been talked about to migrate to a new database, but I think this is a little silly when apart from these bulk mailouts the database works really well.

What would be good would be some software which would allow us to import the email addresses generated by reports within the database, allow us to create nice looking emails and bulk send.

Does anyone have any experience or recommendations of any such software?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Valve
 
What sort of budgets are you looking at?

If you're looking at a one off fee, I'd look at something like Group Mail. It has a scheduler, ODBC connectability and you can create your own designs in HTML then send them out. Though we've had issues with it sending out large amounts of mails (20,000+).

If you don't mind paying each time you send out an email, look at something like Campaign Monitor. It costs just a few £ to send out an email (litterally around £2 or so) and you then pay less than 1p per recipient you're sending to. Campaign Monitor handles subscribers, bounces, gives you templates for your emails and has a full CMS that you can use to create your emails as well. It tells you who's opened the email, who's ignored it, who's clicked what links... the reporting in it is incredibly useful.

It also has the added advantage that you're not sending the emails through your own servers or network as the handle all the load.

I highly recommend CM, we use it for all our clients (as you can use it as a reseller tool and set your own prices per client) http://www.campaignmonitor.com/

We send mass mails upwards of 50-60,000 subscribers through CM and have never had an issue.
 
knock up an MS ACcess database? im sure if you google it there is already a simple database that lets you email an outlook template to lots of people...

its not going to fire them out very fast but then again you probably dont want 6k emails trying to be sent at the same time..

do you ahve MS exchange? if so you can create a dist list..
 
nikebee said:
What sort of budgets are you looking at?

If you're looking at a one off fee, I'd look at something like Group Mail. It has a scheduler, ODBC connectability and you can create your own designs in HTML then send them out. Though we've had issues with it sending out large amounts of mails (20,000+).

If you don't mind paying each time you send out an email, look at something like Campaign Monitor. It costs just a few £ to send out an email (litterally around £2 or so) and you then pay less than 1p per recipient you're sending to. Campaign Monitor handles subscribers, bounces, gives you templates for your emails and has a full CMS that you can use to create your emails as well. It tells you who's opened the email, who's ignored it, who's clicked what links... the reporting in it is incredibly useful.

It also has the added advantage that you're not sending the emails through your own servers or network as the handle all the load.

I highly recommend CM, we use it for all our clients (as you can use it as a reseller tool and set your own prices per client) http://www.campaignmonitor.com/

We send mass mails upwards of 50-60,000 subscribers through CM and have never had an issue.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the info, I'm not really sure what funds would be available, just looking into the idea really as a possible alternative to changing to a new database when the one we have workd perfectly with this one exception.

Both of those sound like pretty good options, certainly something that can be taken along to the IT department here who are a little...erm...'tricky' at times.


edscdk said:
knock up an MS ACcess database? im sure if you google it there is already a simple database that lets you email an outlook template to lots of people...

its not going to fire them out very fast but then again you probably dont want 6k emails trying to be sent at the same time..

do you ahve MS exchange? if so you can create a dist list..
Click to expand...

We do have MS exchange but our IT department tell us it's not up to the task of importing so many email addresses, at least not in the way they are pulled from the database.

Creating distribution lists would be one way but we often send out to different sets of people which vary wildly so it wouldn't really be possible to do it that way.

And as for making up a database...that would mean our IT department doing it, which on previous form would take years!

Valve
 
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