The Internet is believed to be faster, better, cheaper, and easier to conduct surveys than using more traditional telephone or mail methods. You eliminate the need for extensive paper work and man hours.

No matter how striking your website is, if your website developer doesn’t make the direction-finding system user-friendly, you’ll be undetectable to the search engines. Whether you like it or not your web site will remain virtually invisible to the bulk of the internet online businesses unless you take the appropriate steps to draw interest to it.

If you plan to do serious marketing via e-mail you’ll need to put in some first class tools. Not all people respond well to online surveys and to email web marketing. They see this as a nuisance and if you don’t package it well, they’ll probably just block all your efforts.

E-Mail Client Programs.

The first type of e-mail program you need is a fundamental e-mail client. Settling for the built-in program included with your web browser is not advisable. One of the essentials is the classification of filters that will arrange e-mails by keywords as it comes to your site.

By creating a group, you can send out multiple e-mail messages and files to individuals or just by pasting multiple addresses into the To: field, but it’s a mark for beginners, since each one of the recipients see the e-mail addresses of all the other recipients, which can be awkward to look at, and subjects your links to spamming from others.

When pasted into the Cc: field, it has the same purpose and works the same. But when you put the e-mail addresses into the Bcc: field (which means “blind carbon copy”) nobody can be able to see the addresses of the recipients. If you have little list of contacts to e-mail to, this will be acceptable.

Here are some of the most excellent programs available:

Eudora Pro

Eudora Pro (http://www.eudora.com/) is the father of brilliant e-mail handling programs. Its use of filters and stationery gives you permission to send automated responses to e-mails containing keywords, such as those you set up with forms-to-email systems. For example, one option a customer might choose and include the keyword “birdbath” which would automatically trigger Eudora to send an e-mail reply about your Electronic Birdbath product. Eudora’s filters are very powerful and reliable, but its contact information section is pretty rough, and difficult to put up in a database arrangement that allows you to send personalized e-mail to contacts.

Outlook 98 and 2000

Microsoft Outlook 98/2000 (http://www.microsoft.com/outlook/) is an outstanding e-mail program. Its filters are not as strong and reliable as Eudora’s, but the way it integrates e-mail with contact information, e-mail addresses, categorization, journals, calendaring, etc. make it supreme for people-intensive small businesses. One weakness of Outlook 98 is that not all fields of its contact information can be used in an e-mail combine operation.

Pegasus Mail

Pegasus Mail (http://www.pegasus.usa.com/) by David Harris is a high quality, multi-featured freeware e-mail program adored by users and it’s highly recommended.

Revnet Mail King

Revent’s mail king (http://www.mailking.com/?wmt) is a well program that reads data from MS Access or Excel files (as well as several other familiar formats), and allows you to merge that data into an e-mail message. It has some moderately sophisticated filters to help you select suitable recipients.

Arial Campaign

Arial Software Campaign (http://www.arialsoftware.com/?wmt) has been around for several years. The most recent versions of this software run on Windows 95+ and Windows NT platforms. Campaign provides all the features of Mail King, and works without difficulty with MS Access and other common databases, but also allows scheduling of e-mail messages to go out a certain number of days after a client has taken a certain action.

Mail loop

Mail loop (http://marketingtips.com/mailloop/t.x/15267/) is an extremely flexible program. It works alongside your current e-mail client program to pre-filter e-mail, extract forms-generated data from e-mail messages, strip e-mail addresses from any kind of file, merge your database into personalized e-mail messages, offer auto responder-like responses, host newsletters, and process “remove” requests from those who want you to be detached from any of your lists.

List server Programs

E-mail merge programs run on your desktop, and depend upon the rate of your connection to the Internet. List server programs, on the other hand, reside on web hosting service computers with a direct connection to the Internet, so they can pump out e-mails extremely fast. All include automatic subscribe and unsubscribe features, and allow a variety of lists, one-way mailings such as newsletters, and discussion lists, both moderated and unmoderated.