Get Results with BCM's E-mail Marketing Service

  • Article

E-mail is a great way to stay in touch with your contacts.  Your contacts appreciate thank-you notes, informative newsletters, sale announcements, special offers, and project updates that keep them informed. BCM makes it easy to send these communications to your valued contacts.  BCM's E-mail Marketing Service (EMS) offers several advantages over regular Outlook e-mail delivery:

  • Click tracking - Web links in your e-mail are automatically tracked so you'll know how many recipients clicked at least one link in your message
  • Reply tracking - Replies are tracked, so you'll know how many recipients responded to a given mailing
  • Unsubscribe tracking - EMS tracks which recipients opt out of your distribution list.  Knowing the opt-out rate helps you improve the content of your messages
  • Unlimited mail volume - Send large volumes of e-mail without exceeding the limit in the service agreement from your Internet Service Provider
  • Specify an alternate, text-only message - Not all e-mail programs support HTML formatting.  You can decide what the text-only version of your e-mail contains so it is easy for all recipients to read.

I'll start by creating a Word document that contains the information I'd like to share with my recipients.  In Word, click the round Office button and select "New...".  Then search for a good e-mail template by typing "e-mail" or "html" as part of your search terms.  To make sure it will display properly in e-mail, save the Word template as HTML, close it and re-open the HTML file to see how it looks.

You can personalize your EMS message by adding contact fields.  To do this:

  1. Select the "Mailings" tab in Word and then click "Start Mail Merge | E-mail Messages"
  2. Click "Select Recipients | Select from Outlook Contacts..."
  3. Double-click "Business Contacts" to connect to the datasource
  4. Click "OK" when the list of Business Contacts is displayed (we'll select our recipients later).
  5. Now place your cursor where you'd like to insert the customer's name and select "Insert Merge Field | First"
  6. Click the "Preview Results" button to see how your message will look with personalized fields
  7. For more information on EMS personalization, see this help topic

If you're still working with the HTML version of the Word document, save back to .docx to ensure that images are displayed properly.  Now make sure that the .docx file is less than 200 KB.  If it's too big, try resizing images smaller, then use Word's "Picture Tools | Format | Compress Picture" option.

Now that I've saved my Word document, the next step is to select my audience.  In this example, I'd like to send a newsletter to several travel agents to keep them abreast of the latest vacation packages. 

To do this I'll open the Business Contacts folder in Outlook and select recipients by holding the CTRL key while left-clicking on individual contacts.  Next, I'll right-click on one of the selected contacts and choose "Create | New Marketing Campaign for Business Contacts".  I'll select "E-mail Marketing Service" as the Delivery method and then click the "Browse" button to locate the Word document with my travel package prices.  Clicking "Launch" will start the EMS wizard.

BCM users can currently send 50 free messages each month through EMS.  If you provided contact information when you registered BCM, you'll receive a one-time bonus of 150 credits when you setup your EMS account.  If you need to send additional e-mail messages each month, EMS offers two plans: 1,000 or 10,000 per month.

Before sending your e-mail messages, be sure to send a test e-mail message to your own account so that you can see how the e-mail message will look in various e-mail clients such as Outlook and Hotmail.  If you've added personalized First or Last name fields to your Word document, you'll see <First Name> and <Last Name> in the test message to show you where recipient names will be displayed in the final e-mail messages.

After sending the e-mail campaign, the Marketing Campaign form will switch to the "Track" page to show you the list of recipients and the delivery status of each e-mail.  At the bottom of the page, you'll see a tracking totals for your campaign.  To refresh the status list and totals, click the "Refresh Data" button in the Marketing Campaign Ribbon.