As part of marketing and self-promotion I took the opportunity to run a webinar. This was part of a series that a tools vendor runs (They hold one or two webinars a month, since they have a bigger mailing list than I do, it was a good opportunity to get my name/face/attitude/brand out there to more people).
I've presented webinars for other companies before, this was the first one that was paid for - the money doesn't cover the time to prep the webinar but it was better than nothing. I've been asked to present 'paid' webinars before but previously the recording has always been behind a pay wall. I figure if it is going behind a pay wall then its going to be my paywall. The recording for this webinar is behind free registration wall - which I'm comfortable with.
I'm becoming more sales and marketing savvy so I negotiated some additional marketing requirements. The contract had to be amended to include these so I assume they don't normally do this.
I made sure that we had in writing, an agreement that:
- I would receive a recording of the webinar and I could use it in my own marketing (they originally wanted sole copyright of the recording)
- I would receive a list of the emails for the people who registered for the webinar
- I was allowed to send an email to everyone who registered, after the webinar with a link to sign up for my own mailing list
- I was allowed to include upsell links to discounted products in the email and during the webinar
The webinar was run through on24, which is a good, but expensive webinar software. To present the webinar we had to use the phone line. I normally use a mic connected to my PC which has great sound quality. I was a little concerned about the audio quality over the phone, but it was their request so I went along with it.
As part of the webinar I made sure that I recorded it locally on my irig mic, and also recorded a webcam session from my laptop. So I could later splice these together and create a 'high quality' replay of the webinar live stream. I created this by editing in Camtasia Studio on Windows.
For my email marketing I use Mailchimp. But Mailchimp doesn't like sending bulk emails to people who haven't double opted in. Neither do I. So I needed to find a bulk mail tool.
I don't trust email applications that would sendout bulk emails with bcc, I've received too many emails from agencies where my email address has bled out to other particpants through the agencies inability to use the email software properly - I didnt' want to take the risk of doing that.
After looking at a whole bunch, I found that Mozilla Thunderbird has a MailMerge plugin. That would allow me to setup the email list as a csv, and iterate over each email address sending an email using the MailMerge.
After a few test runs to my gmail account using 'plus' addressing. I clicked 'send' onthe mail merge that would iterate out over 1000+ emails.
In the MailMerge (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/mail-merge/) I used 'send later' so that I could review the emails before sending and could start and stop the email sending by using the "Send Unsent Messages" feature.
After sending 600 or so emails, my web host blocked my IP address. I couldn't send emails, nor could I access my web site. I had to phone them to unblock my IP Address. But I still have 600 or so emails to send out.
I started up my trusty VPN and every 100 emails I stopped the mail client, changed VPN to a different IP address, and then re-started the email sending.
I suspect that if I do this again that I will investigate the Amazon bulk email service https://aws.amazon.com/ses
