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Okay. So you’re ready to send out that marketing e-mail. Your fingers are crossed that you’ll get loads and loads of responses. But wait. Have you thought it through? What happens if you get a deluge of 150 e-mails straight into your in-box? What if you send out a newsletter with three different offers, but you don’t know which one each person is responding to?

Your ideal scenario
Let’s say you’re in financial services. You’ve just sent out an e-mail to 2,000 clients on your mailing list, telling them about three opportunities: superannuation, income insurance and unit trusts. Each opportunity had a “click here” for more information and

it was simply an e-mail to you. You have a late lunch and go home.

The next morning, instead of having 200 e-mails sitting in your in-box (a nice response to your e-mail) you only have your normal incoming e-mails in your in-box. But in your in-box folders, there is a blue 95 next to superannuation, a blue 30 next to income insurance and a blue 75 next to your unit trust folder.

All those e-mail newsletter responses have come in and were automatically sorted into their correct folder. And you know exactly who is asking about what offer. Is this a miracle? No. It’s just using:

• A pre-coded e-mail subject line or
• A unique e-mail address for each offer
• Pre-set up folders
• The Rules Wizard

How much time and energy did this save?
Not having to open 200 e-mails individually to see which offer they inquired about. Not having to leave it to the reader to type in “I want more information on superannuation” (as opposed to writing "I want more information" and you pulling your hair out wondering which one!)

1. Pre-coding e-mail subject lines
You might not know that can automatically set what the subject line of a reply e-mail will be. In our scenario one subject line read “info on superannuation”, “income insurance”, and the third “unit trusts”.

How?

In Outlook, when you type in your reply e-mail address, at the end (without leaving any spaces) add ?subject=and_your_text. See how I included an underscore (_) after each word so it doesn’t break. Here’s an example debbie@successis.co.nz?subject=subscribe_to_our_Newsletter

If you’re in Word, hit Control + K or from the Tool menu, select Insert>Hyperlink. Then select e-mail address. Then type in the information.

2. Unique (variable) e-mail addresses
If you are the administrator of your Web site, then any “wrong” e-mail addresses will come to you, right? Well, another trick you can do is make up an e-mail address to use as the response mechanism. From our example instead of pre-coding the e-mail address, it could have been sent to superannuation@yourcompany.co.nz

3. Pre-set up folders
Folders keep your in-box tidy and help you store e-mails according to the categories you create. Folders are important for the next step – using the Rules Wizard to automatically put e-mail addresses into different folders as they come in.

4. Rules wizard
Outlook and Outlook Express have filtering systems that help you screen and move e-mails as they arrive. I could write an entire article on how much I love rules and the many ways you can use it. For example filtering out unwanted mail, sorting through inter-office memos and the like.