A great inexpensive solution to manage your email marketing....

Email is a great way to stay in contact with your prospects and buyers, and there are hundreds of hosted solutions and applications available out there to help you with this process. But there is some confusion by many people as to how this whole thing works, and I want to help clear that up if possible…

Here is the scoop.  It doesn’t matter what you use to "send" email.  Typically you can use any email program, and any SMTP server to “send” email out through (you should have had one provided with your internet service).  For example, I use Roadrunner for internet access, and there SMTP server is smtp-server.tampabay.rr.com.  So this is what I use when I set any software settings for outbound mail delivery. Anther words, this is the server that will handle the routing of the email when it is “sent out”.

So what does this mean exactly?

Well, sending mail out can be done independent of your mail client (Outlook, Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, etc).  But all mail being sent "To You" will be sent to your inbound mail server.  Then you receive responses in your preferred email viewer.

So essentially you can have one program to manage your email blasting, and get all your responses in your regular email inbox in your preferred email program.

Now, the trick is to send out your email properly so you don’t get caught in SPAM filters... as would most definitely happen if you tried to stuff 3000 contacts into a BCC field.  That is no good.

I use a program called Mailloop (www.mailloop.com) for all my email marketing and autoresponders, etc.   However, if you just need a simple program to manage your email blasts, here is one that I found on jitbit.com for under $30.

(Mailloop is a much more robust program that can handle any aspect of your email marketing, and it installs on your computer so you do not have any monthly expenses…  I have tried them all, and this one works great!  The other program available from Jitbit is a simple program that can be used for just sending out large email blasts.  It’s a very inexpensive solution, but has some limitations.)

What these programs will do is allow you to design your email message, and then import your list, and then it will send each email individually, and allow you to drop in fields for personalizing each email just like RealProspect does. 

In the settings for these programs, it will ask you for your SMTP server address.  In this case, use the one that is given to you with your internet provider (i.e. smtp-server.tampabay.rr.com).  Then set your response email address to be the email address that you use for handling your prospect responses.

Now you have a program that can make your email marketing very efficient, highly personalized, and most importantly not prone to getting snagged by those SPAM fileters!