Building Your Business With Email (FileMaker helps too)
Despite the enormous annoyance of spam, most any savvy internet user understands the enormous power and potential of the web and most any savvy email user, likewise, understands the power and potential of email.
There’s nothing new about this. Email is quick, easy, and dirt cheap and is a great way for small businesses to stay in touch or expand their customer base without the added cost of traditional direct mail programs. And since FileMaker’s modified ability to customize and batch send emails, I’ve been a big proponent to clients of including email functionality in FileMaker-based software. One primary reason is that FileMaker makes it easy by providing a free template to manage email campaigns. The template is hardly a full-service tool that manages results on par with something like Campaign Monitor, but it does, nonetheless, do a simple job and do it very well, and it’s free. The template is straightforward enough that it could be modified and plugged in to a solution fairly quickly and easily, yet still catalyze a great positive customer response.
Keeping all of that in mind, there’s a great post on Vitamin by David Greiner of CampaignMonitor.com that discusses HTML emails, their viability and their pitfalls. While FileMaker doesn’t have the ability to send HTML emails, it can obviously send email through your default email program on either Mac or Windows. The article on Vitamin provides some great pointers on how to set up a good and compelling email that doesn’t get bogged down by the user’s email security settings. Here’s a snippet of some of the guidelines provided in the article, to whet your appetite:
- Don’t use images for important content like calls to action, headlines and links to your web site.
- Ask your recipients to add your sending address to their address book every chance you get. This will ensure your images are displayed by default in a range of popular email environments.
- Add a text-based link to a web-based version of your email that will reveal your email in the browser in all its glory.
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UPDATE
The Campaign Monitor blog has a great post on the viability of Flash in emails (not much in a nutshell). Read for yourself.
#2
As if on cue, FileMaker Inc sent an email earlier today discussing successful email marketing, point your browser here to read more. That just goes to show you how I’m ahead of the curve in anticipating what’s important to FileMaker 
[…] On the note of FileMaker, email, and small business communication - which I brushed upon last week - Darren Rowse of ProBlogger fame is providing some more insight and research with mention of a study on how email newsletters are more emotionally engaging than websites. Some more reading here, here, and here. […]
Interesting piece on File Maker and its email marketing capabilities. The biggest issue with people who use desktop or in house applications to manage their mass email communications is that they sacrafice the reputation of their IP address. All it takes is for an overzealous sys admin at an ISP or large coporate network to place your IP on a black list. I know my advice is biased however it is always best to use an email service provider such as campaignmonitor.com or my service http://www.goldlasso.com which will assign you your own IP address for mass email purposes greatly reducing the risk to your in house IP address.
Elie Ashery
President & CEO
Gold Lasso, LLC
Interesting. I can understand that point but I would maybe think that it is more of an issue with users that are sending out thousands upon thousands of emails. I don’t think FileMaker is built for such things nor is it capable of handling emails in such bulk quantity. Under 10,000 is more likely and I don’t know which sys admins would ban IPs for such, relatively, small numbers of messages.
What’s to say that a GoldLasso or CampaignMonitor IP wouldn’t get banned either though?
Interesting. I can understand that point but I would maybe think that it is more of an issue with users that are sending out thousands upon thousands of emails. I don’t think FileMaker is built for such things nor is it capable of handling emails in such bulk quantity. Under 10,000 is more likely and I don’t know which sys admins would ban IPs for such, relatively, small numbers of messages.
What’s to say that a GoldLasso or CampaignMonitor IP wouldn’t get banned either though?
Emile,
You are correct, based on lower email volume, FileMaker would probably make a cost effective solution for the long run.
As for blocked IP addresses, this is something that happens all the time to legitimate opt-in email marketers mostly on the corporate level and not the ISP level. To combat this, Gold Lasso employs human contact with sys admins. If we encounter an unreasonable sys admin we simply reassign our client another one of our thousands of IP addresses.