I am seeking a DEPENDABLE, AFFORDABLE mass email merge program. As a
caveat, I do NOT spam people. I run a professional association and we
do things like:
a. Send renewal notices via email to all of our members that show
their name, email, username, password, amount due, and membership
expiration date.
b. Send messages to members that request updates on the status of
current items that we have on hand - we show their current status
in the email.
Thus, I want to be able to merge fields from a query in my access
database (or, if needed, from an excel spreadsheet generated from the
access query, but ideally directly from access) to a form email letter
and then send a personalized email to 1000+ people at a time so that
each email reflects their own personal information as we have it on
file.
We currently use Broadc@st from Mailworkz and have done so for 8 or 9
years (back when it was owned by a different company), updating
consistently as the program has been updated. This program
does EXACTLY what we want (and much more), unfortunately it is
extremely unstable. We'll have five parallel mailing lists to which we
are sending a letter, it will work perfectly on the first 2 and then
refuse to do the remaining three. Then it can be reinstalled and
sometimes we'll get another 1 and then it will stop working.
Dependability is of the utmost importance - it must work each time we
want to use it. It should accommodate up to 1000 emails per mailing
(and up to 5000 would be ideal) and be affordable. The Broadcast that
we own retails at $795 now - in part because it does much much more
than we want it to do and is made for large scale sales campaigns. We
are looking for something in the under $200 range if it is out there.
We're a nonprofit and just don't have the funds to spend another $800
on something that isn't dependable.
The program should be able to be used by office staff (basically thus
having an intuitive interface and not requiring programming). It
should make it easy to create mailing lists, resend to mailing list,
create letter templates, modify letter templates, etc. |
