How to send a mass email?
Recently I have been reading a lot about algorithms and automation of business processes. Mainly with my clients' projects in mind, but also about my business. Time is money, so if we can save a few dozen minutes every day by automating certain tasks we can focus on things really important for our business. One such time-eaters are emails, notifications, and regular messages to users of our system, application, website, or any other service on the web.
To send a mass email you need a separate tool for sending newsletters. This is a much better and safer way to send emails to multiple receivers than Outlook or Gmail. First, compile your email address list and then import into that tool, write your message, choose the time of delivery, and press send.
The problem of mass email
One day we found a problem of a customer abandoned by another company. At first glance, a trivial problem of sending e-mails. Every blogger does it in the form of a newsletter. This client copied the entire list of over 600 emails and pasted them into a hidden copy of the email program when sending notifications. TWO times a day! However, the list and frequency of e-mails quickly exceeded the possibilities of a cheap e-mail operator. In my career, I have met only a few such cases, mainly due to a lack of tools and appropriate solutions. After all, this is why we have programmers and the whole field of IT to solve such problems.
From two hours spent on mailing a day, we went down to ONE click and then to complete automation for specific events. I don't recommend checking the sending of 600 emails through your mailbox, but from what we've established it took about 5-10 minutes. Their server was processing and after some time it notified about the e-mails being sent or about an exceeded script waiting time error. This is completely incomprehensible for a non-technical person. What script what waiting time?
How to correctly send thousands of emails in one go?
Many companies have been using different solutions for years. From more expensive hosts to mailing services of external companies. Because of cost reduction and maximum simplification of the whole process, I decided to use GetResponse or MailerLite.
GetResponse is not the cheapest service of this type, but so far the most reliable and offering the possibility of connecting our system with theirs. I know that some people export the entire list of saved contacts and import it to similar tools. That's not the way! This is another waste of time. After writing a dedicated connection between the website and GetResponse everything happens automatically.
So many problems fixed with one solution right?
By registering, the user launches an appropriate process that adds his e-mail address and name to the previously prepared list on GetResponse. From the administration panel, you can easily send notifications or newsletters to all registered users of your application. Manually or automatically, depending on your needs.
However, we did not stop at the newsletter. We quickly collected all the situations in which the client communicates with users in bulk. This was, for example, automatic notification of a change in the terms and conditions or information about a new functionality of the service. This can be done from the website code level, sending emails in small groups every e.g. 5 minutes, but why? Why bother when you have a dedicated e-mail service?
What have we not done with mass email?
Well, all the notifications related to individual cases of a user, e.g. payment notification or all the functionality associated with resetting the password or deleting the account.
Is mass email a solution for you?
It certainly is not for everyone. A lot of services offer e.g. a free number of e-mails sent monthly like the already mentioned MailerLite. If you have a small blog and quite a shortlist of readers there is no point in overpaying.
In the case of databases with over 1000 contacts, I recommend GetResponse. If you have a complicated model that could benefit from automation like the case described above, all the more so! Integrating with your website (GetResponse API) shouldn't take a lot of time for a qualified programmer and you'll spend the time you save on development.