We have recently sent out our email campaigns to all the people we’ve met who has given us their business cards – from a networking event. The software we chose to use for this project is called SendBlaster. This software only runs on Windows at this time, but it has been popular to many entrepreneurs who use the internet to build their email lists.

We have collected plenty of business cards from the networking events, so to make entering the contact information of the people we’ve talked to, we decided to use CardScan Executive business card scanner.  This neat USB device scans cards rapidly, and has a very good OCR software for translating the scanned image into text and storing them in a database.  I used the software to export the data to an Excel CSV (comma-delimited text) file.  I then cleaned up the exported data to make sure I have the right columns – names and email addresses, for me to be able to run our email campaigns.

When that was complete, I fire up Sendblaster, and import the data into a list.  Then I took the content for the email that Susan gave me, and composed our email message. It was important for us to be able to measure the results of our email campaign, so we chose to integrate TrackReport, which is an email tracking and analysis service that hooks up with Sendblaster.

Track Report is an email tracking/analysis reporting service that is currently in beta.  The service offers a credit for 50,000 events (emails sent) for users of the free and paid version of SendBlaster. Both Senblaster and Track Report companies, I believe, are located in Italy.  The grammar on their websites are not proper.  At first we were having a hard time signing up for an account on TrackReport. We thought we had to pay for Sendblaster Pro in order to get the 50,000 credit, because it would not let us create an account.

Then when I was browsing Sendblaster’s website, I found a live chat, and started asking their tech support some questions.  Track Report was not giving me any specific reasons why my sign-up attempt was failing.  Through persistence in “hacking” the sign up form, I figured out that the password field on their sign-up form only allowed alphanumeric characters (characters and numbers only). I was choosing a password that had a special character in it, and the page was rejecting it, but their program didn’t give an error message to let me know that it prohibits me from entering special characters (@#$%^&).  Finally when I entered an alphanumeric password , it allowed me to continue creating my account.

So the next day, I was ready to send the emails. In Sendblaster, setting up the SMTP email to our email server was easy.  I added the sender email address and name and our SMTP mail server info, and it accepted the settings.  Sendblaster has a feature for managing subscriptions / unsubscribes, where you enter your SMTP email info. Unfortunately, Hostgator did not allow us to use their server with mass mailing programs like Sendblaster. So I used a Gmail account, and that worked.

That was just me testing all the features of Sendblaster.  At Marblesoft, we use Aweber to manage our opt-in subscriptions.

We were evaluating SendBlaster – the free version, which is limited to only sending out 100 emails per batch. Our initial run was 230 emails, so I sent the first 100,  export a log of emails sent, and then go back to manage my list, and uncheck the first 100 emails, so I can send the next 100 emails. This is quite tedious once our list grows. By then we will be upgrading to the Sendblaster Pro version, which allows an unlimited number of emails.

Although Sendblaster comes with a lot of templates for creating HTML email, I was not too fond of the free templates.  As a WordPress designer who creates themes, I knew I can create my own templates.  To save time, however, I picked the simplest template that would allow me to drop our company logo and Susan’s picture, and put merge tags on the email body.  To comply with US CAN-SPAM law, we added an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.

Then my final step was to add the Track Report tracking code to the email. One thing to remember before you send out your blast is to save your finished email message to disk, and make sure the message is loaded, in case you closed the program. I made a mistake of loading a message from history, and that snapshot didn’t have my tracking code. I didn’t realize this until the first 100 emails went out.

Another lesson I learned – it is unfortunate that Sendblaster will not check whether you have a message loaded to send to your list. It will actually send blank emails if you forget to load the message. So I learn the hard way – through making a mistake. Fortunately, my instinct told me to abort after 20 emails to check if there was a message loaded. Sure enough, it was empty.  Too bad the software doesn’t check for me – I had to be smarter than this software tool and be on top of things. But other than these idiosyncrasies, the software is easy to use.

The good news is that after sending out our emails, we are able to track how many are opened, read and who clicked through.   When they clicked through, it took them to our Special Report landing page, where they get to sign up to receive the Special Report.  We have increased our subscribers and now have started building our list.  This is exciting because we are now reaching our target audience, and we are beginning to see measurable results.

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Mailchimp is a new email list manager that is gaining popularity with the WordPress crowd.  It’s actually free up to 500 subscribers.  It is a nice widget to start with when you are on a budget and you are not looking for anything fancy with your email newsletters.  However, unlike Aweber, Mailchimp only comes with a grey (bland) sign up form. Also, the code they provided to add to a web or landing page was so convoluted! It gave us a headache when we tried to figure out how to modify and use the sign-up form (we are a fan of clean code).  So unless you are up for tweaking XHTML and CSS code to make a decent looking sign-up forms, we recommend that you pay for AWeber instead.