Keith Shirley

You’ve just sent your complete customer list to your competitor. Not only that you’ve told them what your current best offers are so they can then follow up with those customers directly and offer them a cheaper price.

No way!, you say. Well you may have done that multiple times over the past year and not realised it.

Last week I received a monthly newletter from an IT company with a list of their current sales prices. That in itself is not a big issue. What surprised me was that when I looked at the TO: address on the email it had a huge (HUGE!!!!) list of, presumably all, their other business customers. Ignoring any data protection laws for the moment – this is

• Bad for business
• Good for your competitors (I presume you are all signed up to your competitors mailing lists)
• Very embarrassing (especially for an IT company)
• Putting you at risk of being brought to court – suppose it was an email for a support group on some personal matter.

There are a couple of ways that you can avoid this:

- The easiest way is to use the BCC option of your mail client. BCC means Blind Carbon Copy and it allows you to send mail to numerous people without them knowing about each other. In some clients it’s always available. In Outlook click the TO button when writing a mail and you will see BCC at the bottom of the window that appears. Microsoft have some extra info on using BCC with Outlook on their website. For other clients – dig around in the help file. If you can’t find it then let me know in the comments and I’ll add some extra info.

- A good newsletter should try to be personal. i.e You should at least use the persons name. What you need for this is an option called mail merge. It allows you to create a template and then automatically fill in details. It has the advantage that the mails get sent one by one and it looks nicer when it works. When it breaks it looks really bad – no one likes to receive a mail with Dear firstname lastname at the top. Unless you are sure of what you are doing I suggest to avoid dealing with mail merge directly.

- To do mailing lists properly I suggest you learn how to use one of the professional tools available. I can recommend Mailchimp and Toddle. These are easy to use web based tools that will allow you to easily send professional looking mails.

Proper mailing list managers will handle failed messages for you and make it easy for people to remove themselves from the list. The mails they create look much more professional than most people can manage themselves. Try them out and let me know of any successes or problems you have.