how do I personalize emails sent to my contact list? HELP!

[waddsy]

I have about 2000 contacts whom have signed up to my newsletter. I have the basic capability to either import a list of emails into my website mailer and send out generic emails.. problem is i really want their first and last name in the email (more personalized) now i have these contacts in excel format and also in my outlook.

Instead of hand emailing each one is there a program or a way to do this. for example below

Bob Smith,

Our site is now offering free shipping to all artworks purchased in the month of November.

Regards,

Billy Bob

(TOP PORTION "Bob Smith" IS PERSONALIZED)

(BOTTOM PORTION "the content" IS THE GENERIC MESSAGE)

so the email obviously has to match up with the persons name.

CAN ANYONE HELP?

[bill]

If you have all the contacts in Outlook then use the Mail Merge Wizard. Outlook's help menu has more information on how to personalize your messages.

[Boogie_Jack]

I use a program called World Cast by Fair Logic to send personalized email to my mailing list. I'm not recommending it, though you can try it for free, but be forewarned their support is sporadic and minimal at best. Still, you can look over the features and search for other, similar programs. The main feature you want is "mail merge" -- the previous reply is correct, you can do this with Outlook and also with Word, but you'd better clear it with your ISP first. Many, if not most, don't allow mass mailing.

I also use aweber.com for a much larger list, about 25,000 subscribers. They actually host the list for you so you don't have to worry about losing your internet access by running afoul with your ISP. That is a more costly alternative though, I forget the exact price, something like $55.00 a quarter, but if I remember the TOS right you can send as many emails as you like and have a list as large as you can grow it. I would guess there is a practical limit, but I think that's what they advertise, or used to, check for their current policy if you go that route.

Hope that helps.

Dennis

[edited by: engine at 12:22 pm (utc) on Nov. 1, 2005]
[edit reason] No sigs, thanks. [/edit]

[sailorjwd]

I do this for a lot of customers using a Microsoft Access database. You can build the text of the email any which way you want based on the data records of the contacts. With the database you can also select contacts based on characteristics and records response rates too.

Only problem is you need to know a little Access and some visual basic.

Sticky me if you want to see the example code.

I find the Word mail merge gets to be a pain if doing something other than address and name.

[kamakaze]

A combo of PHP/MySQL would be ideal for this problem.

First, the subscribers information would need to be entered into a database.

Second, you could use PHP's built-in mail function to send a draft email with your subscribers information added to it.

I used this combo to manage a mailing list of about 1,000 subscribers. I could send out all emails out in less than 10 seconds.

<snip>

[edited by: physics at 7:04 pm (utc) on Nov. 1, 2005]
[edit reason] No service promotions please. [/edit]