Emailing customers info about great food and services from around the ZCoB has been happening for a while. The IT department likes to call it enews, and we’ve helped make it a better way to share the Zingerman’s experience by email

When emailing a large group at once, ‘Cobbers were spending a lot of time creating and sending a message, and more time maintaining a list of recipients. This was done differently in each business, too - some used Excel, some used Outlook, some used special software - and none seemed satisfied.

The new web-based enews service stores address lists, saves messages, schedules delivery, and provides automated maintenance of new subscribers and unsubscribe requests. This saves senders a lot of time and energy.  And because of the service, Billie was able to make great looking, web-friendly email templates with the same look of our websites. Check out the Bakeshop daily specials emails and see the difference.

Before

After

Bulk mail, mass mail, spam. Call it what you will, but we’re calling it e-news now.

Our reseller account with StreamSend is all set up. I’ve created accounts for Gauri and Sara Richardson. Users log in at http://enews.zingermans.com. The admin account for IT is zingermans with our vendor password; click “Switch to Reseller Control Panel” after logging in.

Billie is working on templates and waiting for feedback from the businesses. I’m writing some documentation, and waiting to meet with Gauri to help upload her list. Gauri’s next newsletter will be the first Zingerman’s e-news campaign using StreamSend.

The Deli, ZingTrain, Bakehouse and most of the businesses in the ‘CoB send out regular batches of bulk mail to customers. Each business uses a different program or service, and none are very good.

ConstantContact, MailChimp, and StreamSend are some services I’ve been looking at for the businesses to use. These three are appealing because they’re user-friendly, but more so because they don’t offer lists for sale and they don’t want to steal ours. Using one of these services would relieve Pooh (and a few ‘CoBbers) of some serious stress, create uniformity and allow us to better support the people in charge of email campaigns.

StreamSend (SS) has the most appeal right now. Besides being managed by a former Deli employee, and being far cheaper than ConstantContact and MailChimp, SS offers us the kind of control/administration we want: one parent account to foot the bill and create and manage up to 25 other logins and partition the monthly allotment of 50,000 emails to each login.

So, how cheap is this service? ConstantContact charges $250 per month to send 25,001 - 50,000 emails. (It’s important to note that “emails” means recipients.) MailChimp, which does not charge per month but rather per email, is $500 for 50,000 emails. SS undercuts both these providers, charging only $50 per month to send 50,000 emails…and that’s not per login either.

You can check out each of the services for yourself. Use our vendor password with the following usernames:

• MailChimp: zingit
• ConstantContact: zing-it
• StreamSend: zingermans

The Bulk Mail Vision (DRAFT!)

DRAFT

July 30, 2006

It’s been more than a month since implementing the new mass-emailing service, StreamSend. The total monthly allotment of 50,000 emails for ZCoB is proving to be more than enough, but is an affordable amount that comfortably allows for list growth. Each Zingerman’s business has an account and at least one mailing list. (Mail Order continues to use Gammadyne.) The Deli has the largest list (plus some other lists, like Duff’s Chocolate), and Creamery has the fastest growing list. Accounts are administered and supported by ZingIT, and there are more than 10 active logins. Users are also aware of, and employing StreamSend’s external support and documentation.

Billie’s HTML work is receiving rave reviews from senders and recipients. Senders can retrieve sent emails from StreamSend, cut & paste the body of a new message, save it, and send it. After initial set up and instructions, mailing hundreds of customers is basically a few clicks of the mouse. Scheduling features of StreamSend, and its management of unsubscribe requests and bounce-backs is allowing senders to spend less time at their computer and less time managing their inboxes, and lets them quickly clean up any external customer database.

DRAFT

Comments, questions, corrections, additions…all are welcome.