Marketing Tip - Bulk Email

Today almost all of your customers can be contacted by email, and many people prefer to communicate over this medium. Bulk Email is an efficient way to keep in contact with your prospects and clients, and has become an indispensable marketing tool.

To effectively send out Bulk Email, you need a tool that meets a number of criteria:

• able to handle a large number of emails by communicating directly with your Mail Transfer Agent (e.g. exchange, sendmail). Having your Email client (e.g. Outlook) handle each email separately is not efficient

• able to format the body of the message in a variety of ways, such as plain text and html

• integrates with your CRM system, so you can email to pre-defined or filtered lists of contacts

• able to personalise the messages based on data in the CRM package

• able to attach one or more files to the email message

Commence Connect

Commence Connect has been designed to meet these requirements, and provide an effective, scalable solution to your Bulk Email requirements. 

Commence RM: Australian Edition focuses on CRM-oriented data management, whereas Commence Connect focuses on supporting targeted Email campaigns to Commence contacts.

Commence Connect allows you to select your SMTP email server (e.g. exchange) and communicates directly with the server. You get a log of all the emails sent, included a success/fail message and the elapsed time to complete the mailing.

You can also configure a "public" and "private" library of documents and email messages. Typically the public library may be used for company wide standard documents, while the private library could be used for individual campaigns. These libraries are easily selected in Commence Connect under the Tools > Options menu.

Also under Tools > Options you can predefine toolbar buttons for common mailing lists. Firstly you open the required view in Commence and set any required filters. Naturally you need to include the Contact’s email address in the view so Connect has the address to send to. Save the view in Commence then in Connect you assign this view to a toolbar button and map the email field.

To complete the process, in Commence Connect click on the Contact View you defined. You will see a list of contacts, and you can check of which are to receive the email, or select all with Edit > Select all. Specify the document body and attachments, click on the Send E-Mail, specifying the subject, and your done.

In the body of your email, you can also embed field codes to extract the value from a field in Commence. So for example, if you wanted to start the email with the contact’s first name, you would embed the code (%First Name%) in the email body (assuming the required field name is "First Name"). Commence Connect will then replace the field code by the Contact’s first name in each email sent.

Hint: Commence must be able to read the field code, and it must be valid. If your message body is in html and your html editor changes the field code, enters new lines or embeds other html codes within the field code, the merge will not work. You may need to edit the raw html to correct this.

Finally, Commence Connect can make an entry in your Notes category back in Commence to indicate that the email was sent. This is very useful if you are working with the contact at a later time; you immediately see a record of all communications.