Tutorial 1, April 2001 - Using Word to Manage Bulk E-mailing

For many businesses, e-mail has become a vital part of day-to-day communications. It's quick, simple and, when used properly, can be cost effective. It's a great idea to collect your customers' e-mail addresses as part of your list or database of customer details. Of course, before you send out any e-mails to your customers, be sure you have their permission to do so - some people can become mighty upset at receiving unsolicited e-mails (also know as "spam").

In the example shown in this tutorial, we've used the Word 2000 Mail Merge feature but the steps are very similar in Word 97. The great thing about using the Mail Merge feature to bulk e-mail is that each recipient sees only the information relevant to them; they won't see a whole list of other e-mail addresses in the To: or Cc: fields when you come to actually send you e-mails.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to use Word to do a bulk e-mail. Basically, the steps are:

1. Create a list of your customer details including their e-mail address (we've used Word for this to keep it simple but you can store this data in many different ways including Excel and Access);

2. Create a Word document and write the body of your e-mail leaving spaces where you might like to add personalised information (such as the recipient's name and company);

3. Merge the customer detail information with the body of the e-mail;

4. Send off the e-mails you have created in your usual e-mail program (we've used Outlook and Outlook Express successfully; this should work with most other current e-mail software).

In this example, we have used a fictitious company called Super Stationery, sending out an e-mail to their existing clients notifying them of a special offer on specialty paper.

So, let's get started...
 

Step 1. Create the List Containing Customer Details 

If not, you will need to take the time now to create this list of details. We've used Word to compile a simple table containing:

• Title
• First name
• Surname
• Position
• Company name
• Street address
• Suburb / City
• State
• Country
• Postcode
• Email address
• Fax

If you would like to use our free template, right click here and select "Save Target As" from the pop up menu. Select a location to save the template to your hard disk. Once you have done that, you'll be back on this page. 

Once you start entering your customer data, you may like to add additional columns to distinguish, for example, between those customers who wish to receive a newsletter and those that don't.

When you have entered the customer details in your table and saved the information, you are ready to go on to writing the body of your e-mail.

Click here to continue to Step 2...
  

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