The Software Requirements of a Bulk Email Marketing Campaign

The software requirements of any bulk email marketing campaign are designed, not only to make life easier for you, but also to carry out tasks that you could not possibly do yourself when dealing with thousands of email addresses.

Bulk emailing is essential to the success of any home business, since it is well known that prospects need to be exposed to a product several times prior to the deciding to make a purchase.  This is the reason why TV advertising is so persistent, and that individual campaigns are run for a specific length of time: to ensure the required level of exposure for maximum effect.

You are doing the same in your email campaigns, and you can even include audio and video in your emails.  Emailing just a few prospects now and again will do nothing for you.  You will be lucky to get even one sale.  You need a list of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands are common. You should build this list personally from your own website rather than purchase a list, because you get a far better response from people that have expressed an interest in your website or product than from a purchased list drawn up from people who have agreed to get paid for opening emails.

So what software do you need to build up your list and make best use of it?  First you need a means of adding addresses to your list.  This called an opt-in list and your software package should include a list builder, such as Prospect Subscriber, that generates an opt-in list that you can put on your website.  This collects names and email addresses of prospects that are interested in what you have to offer.  You must have seen these forms that you fill in online for more information.  Often they offer you a free gift or newsletter for filling in the form, and you should do that too.  Provide a good incentive for people giving you their valuable email addresses.

The software should add the data from the list to a database that will make up your list.  Prospect Subscriber is designed to do this, and to help you build up a good list of targeted prospects in as short a time as possible.  This is the waiting part of your bulk email marketing campaign, since you can’t start till you have a list. As people join, however, you can offer them a regular newsletter, or email course sent out at intervals after them joining. 

Your bulk email system should also be able to answer emails sent by prospects requiring information.  This is a sophisticated requirement that needs software that can identify the type of response needed from keywords used in the message.  You have to respond immediately, and again cannot do that manually.  Prospect Autoresponder can do exactly that and save you a lot of hard work while keeping the wheels of your business turning.

Now that you have your list, and are able to respond automatically to emails from it, you need to be able to administer and organize it.  You need a means of adding to the list from sources other than your opt-in form, such as Outlook, or any other emailing system.  You need to be able to remove email addresses of people who click on your unsubscribe button.  Every email you send must offer the reader the option of leaving your list.  They joined voluntarily and can leave voluntarily, unless you want to be accused of spamming.  Your emailing system should include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email and be able to automatically remove subscribers.

You also have to be able to sort the list into smaller sub-lists for specific products or product types. Finally you will want to find out what email addresses are no longer valid and clean up your databases.  Software such as Prospect Remover, Prospect Verifier and Prospect Manager will carry out all of these tasks for you without you having to lift a finger other than click a button or two.

Without a doubt the Prospect suite of email management software is an ideal way of building a list and maintaining your bulk email programs, and Group Mail Plus is the daddy of them all.  Your bulk email marketing campaign can be of critical importance to your online business, so make sure that you have satisfied your software requirements with an integrated suite that does everything you need of it.  Otherwise you might fail.