Evan Carmichael shows how to send a free newsletter using Excel, Word, and Outlook's mail-merge feature, but warns you'll hit ISP sending limits and risk spam filters. He recommends starting with AWeber ($19/month) instead, since switching platforms later means losing subscribers to re-opt-in requirements.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and today I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Felicity. Felicity is an Australian entrepreneur. She runs an online business, and she's asking about how to create a newsletter without spending a monthly charge to pay a company to help her with it. So, a newsletter is a great idea for any entrepreneur. If you have customers who've bought from you in the past, they're more likely to buy from you again if they had a good experience and enjoyed buying from you. So it's a great way to stay in touch and send them new offers. To do it without spending any money, how I first did it was I do a mail merge between Excel, Office, and Outlook. So you store all the names of your contacts in Excel, you create your newsletter in Word, and then you can combine it to a mail merge to send it out through your Outlook. This can be a great way, it's really cheap, uh, doesn't cost you anything except for buying Microsoft Office, which most people have. There are a couple problems with it though. Uh, some things to think about: as your newsletter list grows, You could be limited by how many emails you can send per hour. I found out with my internet service provider, it was 700. So once I sent out 700 emails in an hour, I'd get locked off, and people think that you might be spamming. The other thing to think about is if you then want to move to a new service, so I use AWeber as an example. I think there's a $1 free trial, and there's $19 a month to get started. So minimal investment, but I think worth it to invest into your business. To move people from an Excel file into AWeber, they're going to have to opt opt in again. So you're going to lose a lot of people through that process, and it's better to get started from the beginning using a software tool. The other thing I really like about AWeber is they'll give you spam filter scores. So every email that you send out, they'll tell you the likelihood that it'll get caught in the spam filters of your customers and give you tips for how to get out of it, changing different words around, changing your layout. So the quick and dirty easy way, not spending any money, is to do the mail merge with Excel, Word, and Outlook. If you want to see how that's done, just leave a comment below and I can do a quick tutorial on how to do it. It's pretty easy once you get started. But I would recommend thinking about the long term for your business and trying to make a little bit more of an investment in your company and building an email newsletter list through a software program like AWeber or another company, because it can have a serious impact on your business and it's worth the investment in my opinion. Anyway, I hope that helped. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. I'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback and please give give the video a thumbs up, and we'll stay tuned for the next episode.
