Most ordinary users work with e-mail directly on the site. The functionality provided by him is enough to create and receive letters. But what to do if you need to send the same letter to a large number of people, you need to send a certain message at a specific time, continue to send letters without the participation of a person while he is relaxing on the beach on vacation? In such cases, various programs and services of automatic mailing come to the rescue. They differ in functionality, payment / free of charge, features of work and many other factors, but what unites them - for work they do not need a constant human presence. Mailing can be carried out round the clock with various adjustable intervals.
Why are newsletters necessary?
The opinion that the main and most effective marketing tool is a website is far from the truth. Most of the buyers of a product or service with a single visit to a web page is not yet ready to make a decision on making a purchase. The reasons can be various, and banal forgetfulness is not in the last place. Customers simply do not remember seeing something that caught their attention. Some potential buyers have to repeatedly remind themselves until they finally make a purchase. And the automatic email sent serves as such a reminder.
Opportunities of email clients and services
There are many programs and services for automatic mailing of correspondence, both paid and free. Their functionality is not limited only to sending letters without human intervention, its capabilities are much wider:
- Before mass mailing, the effectiveness of letters can be tested on a selected group of users, having studied the statistics of sending and delivery of these letters, customer activity after receiving them.
- Services allow you to regularly update the list of subscribers, processing service messages about delivery errors. Thus, the resources of the system are not wasted on useless actions for sending to non-existent addresses.
- The statistics on click links in letters will help evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign.
- Built-in technology for determining the location of subscribers will allow you to select letters for distribution based on geography.
- The base for mailing can be replenished in various automatic ways, for example, by scanning sites on the network.
Also, automatic replies to letters are configured. This will be useful, for example, when leaving. You can inform the writer that the letter has been received, but the answer will be upon returning after some time. If there is a change of email address, then it is very easy to get mail sent to the old address - just set up forwarding. But how to tell everyone who writes that the old address is no longer relevant, and the next time it’s better to write immediately to another? And this will help automatic writing.
Such programs usually have templates of typical letters that can be easily modified for you. Thanks to all this, automatic mailing allows you to promote goods and services with minimal time and money for advertising, processing and analysis of correspondence.
What to send?
The most popular letters are greetings (for example, after registering on the resource) and letters of appreciation (for example, for a perfect order or long-term cooperation with the company).
Greetings are the most widely read letters. People are used to seeing them; most of them open up in search of some useful or interesting information.
Letters of gratitude may contain information about the order, delivery method, various promotions and discounts by a regular customer. All this attracts people, and such letters, as a rule, are also read, or at least casually scanned.
Automatic writing may offer products that are related to those that a person has acquired, or with which he was interested. Letters will allow you to congratulate, for example, happy birthday, making an individual favorable offer.
To work with the complex problems of customers, of course, specialists will already be needed. But simpler issues thanks to automatic emails can be resolved around the clock and daily when users need them.
Among all the variety of programs and services, Microsoft's Outlook program is well known, therefore, the methods for creating mailings, automatic replies, and forwarding certain letters to other addresses will be examined using its example.
Newsletter
To send a letter to a large group of people, there is no need to add them to the mailing list manually each time. To do this, you can create a mailing list. On the "main" tab in the program, select "create a contact group", then specify a name for this group and add members to it. The list of participants and the name of the group, if necessary, are edited or deleted completely. One and the same contact can be part of an arbitrarily large number of user groups to which automatic mailing of messages will be performed. This saves a lot of time.
Automatic writing: how to do
Sometimes it is necessary to send an automatic letter at a strictly defined time, and in the absence of the sender himself at the computer. Automatically sending Outlook letters allows you to do this. You should write a regular letter, if necessary, attach the necessary files to it, indicate the addressee (s) or the mailing list, and then go to the “options” menu section. Further in this section, the item “delivery delay” is selected, and then “do not deliver to.” Then all the necessary parameters are configured, including the date and time of sending the letter, the presence or absence of delivery and reading notifications, etc.
After indicating all the necessary data, you should send a letter. It will be saved in the folder of sent letters, but it will really go to the recipient only on the specified day and time. It is important that the computer is turned on at this time, the program is running on it, and there is also an Internet connection. If these conditions were not created at the right time, then automatic sending of letters will occur at the moment when they are finally met. This is not very convenient, but there is nothing to be done.
Automatically forward Outlook emails
Forwarded from the first addressee to other letters can be in two ways - forwarding and redirection. Forwarded letters are distinguished by the presence of the abbreviation FW in the subject, and the recipient sees from which address the letter was sent initially, and from which it was then sent to him. The redirection is not noticeable for the recipient, he sees the letter as sent by the first sender.
Shipment management
You can configure either the forwarding of absolutely all letters, or create rules governing what should be forwarded and when. At the same time, redirected messages are saved in the Inbox. The program analyzes the sent letter, and if it meets the conditions specified in the rules, it performs the action specified by this rule. This can be not only the automatic forwarding of letters or the answer to them, but also transferring it to a specific folder, i.e. sorting, deleting, etc.
To create rules for processing incoming mail, you must select the "rules" item on the main tab of the program. Further, in the “rules and alerts management” menu, the processing algorithms of received letters are already directly configured.
Shipping Forwarding
Some letters cannot be forwarded - this happens when the sender installed protection on his correspondence that would not allow the recipient to share this information with anyone else. This restriction is removed only by the sender, the recipient will not be able to do this in any way.
Also, in companies, the system administrator can set their own rules that restrict or prohibit the complete sending of letters outside the enterprise network, and sometimes inside it. This is to protect corporate information.
Auto Answer
If there is no addressee on the spot due to a business trip, vacation, illness, or for some other reason, automatic answers to letters can be set up. If the mail is located on a corporate mail service, then you can also create different answers to letters received from other employees of the company, and to those received from outside.
To enable this function, in the “file” section, the “Auto Answer” item is selected in the program menu, where you need to select “send auto answer”. In this section, the text of the letters is written, as well as the period during which these replies will be sent. If before the end of this period the user appears on the network, he will be asked to disable the function.
For the period of validity of automatic replies, you can set the rules for processing mail, for example, for sending them to other employees of the company who can resolve issues, etc.
The program provides detailed help, as well as tooltips to help you avoid common mistakes when working with it.