I have learned a lot of new skills on the fly over the past six months, mainly involving technology. The skill I have spent the most time learning by a large margin is how to send emails to a large number of people as efficiently as possible.

I needed to learn this skill because a large part of my job involves educating practicing health professionals about health information resources. But I can’t do that if my target audience doesn’t know about me or my instructional workshops. So I needed to find a way to inform a large number of people about my workshop offerings that was quick and effective.

My first attempt at this was to import my CSV file of email addresses into my work Outlook account and create address books based on target county. Unfortunately, that functionality doesn’t exist on Mac Outlook, so my only recourse was to enter the emails by hand. I thought this would work out fine, since the first county I entered only had about 60 emails. When I was preparing to start on the next county, however, I realized that I would have to enter about 450 emails. That’s when I realized it was time to try something else.

So after some Google searching, I learned about the MailMerge feature of Word. You can use this to create personalized form letters that can be sent out to a list of contacts contained in an Excel file. This was exactly what I was looking for! But my enthusiasm was short-lived. The feature has a steep learning curve, and it took me about three hours to figure out all the quirks. And the resulting email doesn’t look terribly attractive. However, it allowed me to distribute information to my target audience relatively quickly, so I used it for my first round of workshops.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, that first round of workshops did not receive any interest and I ended up cancelling them. Looking back, I wonder if it was the lackluster bulk email technique I used. For the new year, I was determined to find something that would work better.

My most recent approach has been this: I design an email directly in Outlook with all the necessary information and links, as well as an interesting graphic or two. Then I go to my Excel file with the contact information and perform a random sort of email addresses. I copy the first 30 emails from a single county into the BCC line of the email, and enter my own work email into the TO line. After adding a catchy subject line, I send out the email! I repeat this process for each county, so that ultimately, I will have sent the email to a random selection of 180 people.

So far, this new email approach has garnered more interest than my previous methods. Although, it is also possible that my workshops are receiving more interest because people have more time after the holidays and/or because of the webinar format. I suspect it is some combination of the three factors.

I plan to keep using the method for the time being. At the same time, I am also exploring using a bulk email software called MailChimp, which has a free download option and promising reviews. The appeal of this product is that it would allow me to design more attractive emails and monitor statistics like open and click rates.

And if anyone has any other suggestions about sending bulk emails, I would love to hear them!