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Many business need to send out regular information to their clients and email is the easiest and cheapest way to do it. The wrong approach is to create an email message, attach a document and send it out to 1000 of your contacts. This could cripple your mail server for hours and maybe even get you blacklisted as a spammer.

Here are the two most important tips for creating your own mailshots:

• Put all of your recipients in the Bcc: field instead of the To: field. If you they are all in the To: field, everyone will know who else you have sent the message to. They might even add your contacts to their own mailing lists.
• Don’t attach large files. Recipients with slow internet connections will not thank you for blocking their connection with a big file attachment. Your own server will also take a long time to process such a lot of data and send it out to the Internet. The best idea is to upload the file to your web site and put a hyperlink to its location in your email message. Then your message will reach your audience quickly and they can decide themselves when they want to download the file.

There are some big advantages to using an external service to handle your bulk email tasks:

• They will make sure the messages get through without being trapped as spam
• You can get statistics on who read the message and when
• You can see which hyperlinks in the message were clicked most and so be able to write more interesting content for your readers in the future.
• Mailing lists can be easily managed and unsubscribes handled automatically

All of these jobs can be done by you but with a great deal more cost than the monthly fee a dedicated mailing service would charge.

Check out dotMailer or Mail Chimp or call ISN for more advice on how to use IT to get more done with less effort.

The most important piece of advice for successful mailshots, however, is test thoroughly before sending live: test every link and check the spelling of every word in the title and body. We’ve all had those d’oh! moments after clicking “send” on an individual email. It is much more embarrassing when you mailshot a broken link to hundreds of clients.