We are a small industry-leading company with coverage in all of the US and Canada, and we're trying to figure out what application out there will help us put out our direct mail marketing. We have a newsletter that some of our clients like to receive electronically, but which most prefer to receive in hard copy. In total we send out this newsletter to about 2000 clients and interested parties.

 

We have been using the mass e-mail option for contacts and accounts in Salesforce, but the mass mail merge component hasn't been meeting our needs. We like the record that is created within Salesforce for each contact/account with the mass e-mail, but all of the bounced e-mails and responses are coming directly to our inbox. Then we have to go in and manually update the database with the changes.

 

The snail mail list is even more of a nightmare to put together. We have been exporting our contacts and accounts to Excel, reviewing it for any duplicates, overlap and insufficient information, and then using the Excel mail merge function. It works relatively well, and it does make us regularly do a clean up on our data, but we have no tracking capabilities. There is no record in Salesforce that we've mailed these people anything.

 

I'd say 20% of our contacts request e-mail, and the rest get snail mail. This process is taking way too long. I've looked at some of the applications on offer out there, and they almost seem like overkill. Most of the features on these packages would go unused by us, and it seems ridiculous to pay for them.

 

Are there any other small operations out there that have found a good direct marketing application, that isn't overkill?