• The email comes from someone you've never contacted or heard of
• The email contains information that you didn't ask for
• The email contains informaton on a topic that you're not interested in
• The email has typically been sent to upwards of a million email addresses
• The list of recipients has been harvested at random using dubious techniques
• There is often no way of stopping the sender from bothering you in future, (if there are removal instructions, these often do not work)
• The sender usually doesn't stop at one email, you often find yourself being bombarded with many copies of the same email, over a period of time, or all at once.

• the information came from someone you know and already deal with
• the information was something you asked the sender to provide you with
• the email contained only information which you'd expressed an interest in
• the email was sent to a small, carefully targetted group of companies
• the list of recipients was compiled from subscribers who "opted-in" to the list, either by filling in a subscribe form on a web site, or perhaps ticking a box on an orderform or other document
• the sender provided clear instructions on how to remove yourself from the list, and fully and immediately honoured any unsubscribe requests.
• the sender took care to make sure you only received one copy of a message

But can't anyone send an electronic mailshot, just by writing an email in Outlook, pasting in a bunch of email addresses, and pressing "send"? Well, this is certainly possible, but in so doing, you could be overlooking many factors which will harm the effectiveness of your mailshot, if not handled properly. For instance, your recipients will have a wide range of different email programmes, and your mailshot must look nice in ALL of them. (You can't afford to alienate anyone by sending them something which appears as gobbledegook on their system). Also, by using such a simple method, you might find you're giving away all the addresses on your mailing list to others. This would be a major problem, because you worked hard to get these contacts, and you certainly wouldn't want anyone else benefiting from them. (There's no guarantee that one of your competitors hasn't sneaked their details onto your mailing list). Also, monitoring and managing the responses from the mail broadcast can be very time consuming (and therefore not be done properly). You might miss a request to unsubscribe, which would also alienate the recipient. Most importantly, you probably won't have a good way of targetting the mailshot, that is, making sure that only those interested in the topic covered by the mailshot, actually get that information. If you're an estate agent, you shouldn't be mailshotting a list of properties "to let", to people who are looking to buy.

We recommend sending your own mailshot, only in cases where the recipient list is about 10 or 15 people. For anything larger, spending time with us planning the mail broadcast will provide greater return on investment, and make certain to avoid some of the enormous pitfalls if you get it wrong. The results of a bodged mailshot can be devastating. For instance, with one client we encountered who adopted the "DIY" approach, whenever anyone asked to be removed from the list, their request was sent to EVERYONE else on the list as well. This rapidly snowballed into a "Mail Storm", with recipients becoming quickly angry and frustrated. Some started responding with four letter words, which of course also went to everyone on the list. Starting from an idea to promote sales contact with existing customers, things massively back-fired, with people leaving the mailing list in droves.

Part of the challenge with email broadcasts, is to generate enough content (eg about your special offers), to enable a regular mailshot to be sent 3 or 4 times a month. To this end, Room101 often develops automated systems for building such mailshots. For example, with a company which emails 4 special offers a week, we built a form where the webmaster just enters 4 product codes and the mailshot is built and formatted automatically using information and copytext extracted from the products database.

Room101 has the tools and technique required to build value for YOUR customers through the use of targeted electronic mailshots. Probably the most important part of your campaign, is going to be the planning stage. There are lots of ways of doing things, ranging from how you collect the email addresses, through what formatting to use in the email, to how to monitor the responses. So why not give us a call to set the ball rolling !