Mass Mailing Software

Alpha Five comes with a free license to use HighImpact eMail v3. This software is designed to simplify the process of sending personalized email messages to your emal list. More and more companies are using this method to carry their "brand" along with their email-based newletters, bulletins, and press releases. HighImpact has a direct link to Alpha Five databases, and so it is an easy choice for Alpha Five users.

I compared HighImpact to several other mass emailing software packages (all under $500), here is my comparison to one product, Anconia RocketSales.

Both products have you follow a similar process to send emails:

• Create one or more email lists via import, manual entry or reading from existing tables (e.g. Alpha tables)
• Select and then edit an email template including mail merge to personalize each email
• Select an email list to mail to
• Send the emails

HighImpact (www.templatezone.com) has almost a thousand very nice templates to choose from, and it is equally good at sending one email as a thousand. The program creates an icon on your email program's toolbar, making it easy to attach a fancy template to your daily emails or launch a mass mailing. They provide free internet storage (called "ReadyShare") where you can store images that are referenced in your email - you should always place images at a web location rather than embedding them directly in the email. This ReadyShare is a good idea for novice users and is fully integrated in their model. And, HighImpact has a direct link to your Alpha Five table, meaning you don't have to export your mailing list if it resides in an Alpha table.

I did have a couple problems seeing this as a business solution. Most notably is that all of the sent email ends up in your Outlook or Express Sent folder. That is fine for a few dozen emails, but not if you have a sustained campaign of hundreds or thousands. The product makes it convienient to attach stationary to your daily email correspondance. But this, in my opinion, is not a business feature as most business minded people are annoyed when receiving such fancy email formats. The fact that it links directly to your Alpha table is nice, but since there is no feature to filter the records, you have to pre-filter what is in your Alpha table. It's very common that you want to exclude some portion of, for example, your customer list. Finally, HighImpact always sends email using your default Outlook or Express profile. That means if you want to send email from "news @ mydomain.com", you have to temporarily set your default to that, and then back to your own after the mailing is done. This is easy in Express, not so easy with Outlook using Exchange.

Anconia RocketSales (www.anconia.com/rocketsales) is more suitable for business applications. It also has a suite of attractive email templates; far fewer than HighImpact, but you will end up making your own template anyway. It has its own server built in that sends the emails, so they don't end up in your Sent folder. You create the email profile right in the product, so you can send the mail "from" any address. It has a seperate field for "bounces" so all of the rejects go to your special mailbox to handle those. It does allow filtering of your email list, so you could mail to all records in California, for example. It does read existing tables via ODBC such as Alpha's DBF tables.

It also has an advanced feature to Track your email blast. This tells you exactly WHO opened your emails, and what links they clicked on. This feature is integrated into the program, and you only need to do some initial setup to get it working. It is a very neat trick as you witness, in real-time, who is opening your emails. If you are serious about your email campaign, then it is highly important that you know how effective your email blast is; and this tool helps you do just that.

If you turn tracking on, it provides a link so the reader to automatically unsubscribe. The unsubscribe can be from all emails, or they can be directed to a page where they manage their "subscriptions". For example, they could unusubscribe from Marketing, but stay subscribed to News.

I do wish RocketSales had a seperate unsubscribe table rather than flagging an existing record as "unsubscribed". I swap out email tables often enough that I would lose the unsubscribed information unless I manually process them from RocketSales tables. I will unfortunately comment that Anconia ignores email requests to their support department.

Neither product has a good built in HTML editor. If you want to create a new template, or significanly edit an existing one, you will need a 3rd party editor. I use NVU (http://www.nvu.com).