“Stop Sending ‘Dear Valued Client’ Emails”

When you address your correspondence to “Dear Valued Client,” you send the wrong message. It says you don’t care enough to personalize your message.

So, check out the email solutions described in “Stop Sending ‘Dear Valued Client’ Emails” by Bill Winterberg on his FP Pad blog. He suggests using a service like Constant Contact, which I use to send my newsletter, or mail merge, like the function available in Microsoft Outlook.

Allow plenty of time to get the hang of mail merge. It’s complicated. At least, that’s my experience.

And, be sure to test your mail merge on non-clients before your first email to clients. 

I discovered some unexpected problems the first time I used Outlook’s mail merge function. Luckily, I’d used my husband as my mail-merge guinea pig. So none of the prospective clients for my writing and editing business had to suffer through my mistakes.

March 13, 2017 update: The number of newsletter services has multiplied since Bill and I originally wrote about this topic in 2008. If I were starting my newsletter today, I’d look at MailChimp (free for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month) and other competitors to Constant Contact.

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