Email Menu - Bulk Email

Use this command to send the same message to many people. The message can be text, a text survey, or an invitation to take a web survey. To use bulk email, you should:
  1. Create a message file. If you are sending text survey, go to File Export Text(Email); then save the file. If you are sending invitations for web surveys, the message could be a standard message, or mailmerge. A mailmerge takes information in the address book (or project database) and inserts it into the email message, either in the subject or the body. To write a mailmerge file, place fieldnames inside braces as in this example:

    Dear {NAME},

    Please fill out a survey online at http://www.raosoft.com/

    This way, you can personalize each message with information from the address book. If you are using userIDs and passwords, click on the link below to see more about customizing the link.

  2. Create an address book. An address book may be an EZSurvey address book or any other database (for example, from your EZSurvey project) with a question named EMAIL. The EMAIL column should contain the complete email address of the person to whom you want to send a message. An address book also has a STATUS column that Bulk email uses to keep track of which messages were sent successfully.

    When you select Email Bulk email from the menu, you get the Bulk Email window above. Type in the name of the message file. If the file is in the same directory as EZSurvey, type in the filename myproject.txt. If the file is not in the same directory, type in the full path to the file, starting with the drive letter. C:\My Documents\myproject.txt This path must be exact, an error will cause the wizard to fail. Check "Treat this message as a mailmerge" if you are sending invitations and want to customize the messages. Check "Invite people to your website" if you did not create your own message and want EZSurvey create a standard one for you. Select whether you want to use the current project's database or a separate address books. The address book has to be a tab delimited ASCII or a dbf file.

    The second and third option following "Only send messages to people who have..." are for use only if you selected the project's database as an address book. This way, you can remind the potential participants if they didn't take the survey after the first invitation. You can also send a thank you message to those who took the survey. Select Save to send the messages. EZSurvey will then connect to your mail server and send individual messages to everyone in your address book. This could take some time depending on your internet connection and mail server speed. If there have been any errors, you will receive notice within a few minutes. Since this is a bulk email process, some mail servers (free mail services in particular) may not let you run this feature. This happens due to restrictions aimed at reducing unsolicited commercial email (SPAM).

See also...