NOTE: For best results, create a new folder in your My Documents folder for saving all email blast-related documents. This could include your email rich text list, the copy for your cover letter, the latest version of your credentials package, etc.

The first thing you want to do is prepare your email “cover letter.” Our best advice is “short and sweet.” No one wants to read a long cover letter that reiterates everything that your world-class credentials package presents so well.

Create a powerful subject line—be careful not to make it too long or it won’t all be displayed. Be aware of the terminology you use—you don’t want it to sound like SPAM.

Make the body of your email short and basic. All you want to do is communicate your area of expertise and tell the recipient how to access your online resume portfolio. Also, many recruiters are deluged with submissions, so you want to make it convenient for them to have your credentials package if they don’t have the time to go online and look at it. So you will want to let them know you are attaching a Word version for their convenience.

Finish off your email with all your contact information: name, address, phone number(s). It’s not necessary to add your URL in this “signature file,” as you have already given it to them in the body of the email

Here is a sample of a good cover letter:

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You can write your cover letter in Word, or compose it directly in a blank email message. Feel free to copy the above letter and customize it to fit you. Be sure to include full contact information in your signature.

Since your cover letter indicates you are attaching your credentials package in MS Word format, be sure to save your latest Word credentials package in a convenient folder on your computer for ease of attaching. Just as a precaution, open it up and review it to be sure you have not mistakenly saved an old “track changes” copy for sending out with your email blast.

Once you have selected your criteria and saved your “recruiters” search in CareerSearch, Joelle will prepare your email list.

Your email list will be saved in rich text format and can be opened in MS Word. The list will be displayed with one email address per line (it is not necessary to convert this to a comma delimited list). The illustration below shows a piece cut out of the list displayed in MS Word:

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The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure the email addresses are complete. This will save you a lot of time and headache when it’s time to send out your emails.

In MS Word, this is very simple. Be sure your spelling checker is enabled—go to Tools?Options and select the Spelling & Grammar tab. Make sure the box is checked next to “Check spelling as you type.” Now any incomplete email addresses will show up with a squiggly red underline. It’s a simple matter to scroll down your list and just scan for that red line. Fix or delete any incomplete email addresses.

Note in the above example, the “om” has been cut off “.com” on akron@thereservesnetwork.com. You could simply type the “om” back in to correct the email address.

During the course of this, you may discover a bunch of email addresses that you don’t want to send your e-blast to—the most common one that comes to mind is kellyservices.com. It’s best not to waste a lot of time scanning the list to find all the “unlikelies,” but if you see a big batch together, you can quickly delete them.

Your next steps are dependent on this final email list. Once you have your rich text list ready to work with, check the number of pages. In the example above, note the 1/62 in the red circle at the bottom. This tells you that you have a total of 62 pages.

Open your Outlook or Outlook Express program. If you currently use a Web interface for your mail, such as Hotmail or Yahoo, you can find instructions for using Outlook to send out mail in their help files. Call Joelle if you have difficulty getting this set up.

It is crucial to use Outlook or a similar email program for this email blast, as you will need to have multiple blank emails on the screen at one time and, to our knowledge, Hotmail and Yahoo don’t have the ability to do that.

You should have these items open: Outlook, your email copy, and your rich text email list. It is best to close all other programs.

In Outlook, click on the “New” button to open a new email message:

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Reduce the size of the email message window so it can be moved around on the screen easily. Since we will have many messages open at one time, you will want to have the ability to “stack them” in the window for easy processing.

TIME AND TROUBLE SAVER: When you have opened the first message, look at the header on the message and be sure you can see a “bcc” field. We will want to have one in every successive message, so we must turn that feature on now if it is not enabled. If you do not see a “bcc” field, go to View on the menu bar (in the message window) and click on “Bcc Field.” Every successive email message that you open will have a bcc field.

Minimize (don’t close) the main Outlook window. Your screen should look something like this:

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**If you compose your “master” email message right in the new message, be sure to tuck it away in the left corner of your screen so you can find it easily again when we have to paste pieces of it into the other messages. DO NOT minimize it!

Based on our example, you will want to open 31 blank email messages. The rich text document you receive from Joelle will contain about 54 or so email addresses per page. You don’t want to send your email message out to more than 120 people per message, so plan on two pages per email. Dividing 62 pages by two gives us 31 messages that will eventually be sent out.

After you have minimized your main Outlook window (and any other windows you may have had open) and have one blank email message on your desktop (as shown above), hold down the Control key (Ctrl) and press the “N” key*. A new email message should open on your desktop. Do this 29 more times. Outlook will stack the messages up on your desktop.

* Ctrl-N will also work in many other MS products: Word, Excel, etc. It is the shortcut for “new document.”

OK, we are ready to tackle creating the email messages.

The plan is to get your email messages put together with the least work. Following is a comprehensive, step-by-step process that should cut the time you spend doing this e-blast into the minimum necessary. There is method to this madness, so please read through all the instructions before you begin to make sure you see the “big picture.”

Since attaching the Word document is easy to forget, let’s do that first.

You should have your main Outlook window and your Word window minimized with all your email messages stacked up on your desktop. On the first message window, go to Insert—>File (or click on the paper clip icon on the message toolbar). Browse to your email blast folder and select your Word document.

For best results, your Word document should be named with your last name. If a recruiter or hiring manager downloads it, we want him/her to be able to locate it easily. And the recruiter or hiring manager doesn’t need to know the revision date or version number, so avoid using a document with a long, meaningless name like: “smith-rev2-102003.doc.” It’s best to just use “smith.doc.” Or, if you do have a common last name (like Smith), you can do something like this: “smithtom.doc.” You just want to use your last name first, as that is how people will most likely look for it.

Your Outlook will attach your document in one of two ways: it will either 1) show it as an attachment in another line in your email header, or 2) it will show it as a pasted icon in the body of the email. We have no clue as to why it does one or the other—it seems to be random in our email program.

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In the example above, the document has pasted as an object in the body of the email. Although this isn’t as neat and pretty as we’d prefer, it is the easiest to use for attaching to multiple messages.

If you single-click on the object within the body of the email, it will show an outline (as shown above) and you can now treat this attachment as an object that can be pasted. Once it is selected, copy it. Everyone has his/her favorite way of copying something, but for our purposes today, it is most efficient (and least wearing on your mousing hand) to use keyboard shortcuts. To copy a selected item, press Ctrl-C (“C” for “Copy”).

NOTE: You only have to “copy” once. The “copy” function places whatever you copied onto the “clipboard.” Thereafter, you can paste that same item hundreds of times without having to go back and copy again. This is the reason for having all the messages open, so we can paste again and again with minimum effort.

Now drag the message that has the Word document pasted into it to the upper right corner of your desktop. DO NOT minimize this message window, or you will create a nightmare for yourself. We want to keep ALL messages open and manipulated right on the desktop. Click in the body of the next message and press Ctrl-V (“V” for “moVe”) to paste the Word document there. Repeat this process, stacking up the documents along the right of your desktop as you go.

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After you have pasted the Word document, press Enter twice to prepare the staring point for the body of your email. This will save you time and stress when pasting the body.

Continue pasting the Word document until all 31 messages have it pasted in.

If your attachment shows up in its own line on the header, you will have to go to each email message and click on the paper clip icon (or go to Insert—>File) for each message.

When all the Word documents are attached, we can proceed to the subject line. If you composed your email copy in Word, click on it in the status bar at the bottom of your screen.

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Highlight the text for the subject line.

If you composed your email copy right in your original email message, go back to it (tucked away in the upper left corner of your screen) and click in the subject line. To select the entire subject line once you have clicked in it, press Ctrl-A (“A” for “All”).

Press Ctrl-C to copy the highlighted subject line, click in the blank subject line of the next email message and press Ctrl-V to paste it. Now all you have to do is click in the subject line of the next message and paste. Repeat this for all subsequent messages, moving them from the right side of the screen to the left (being careful not to lose track of your “master” email), or back to the middle of the desktop so you can see your “master” easily.

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Once you have finished pasting the subject line in all 31 messages, repeat the process for the body of the message.

Once you have the Word document, subject line, and body text in place in all 31 messages, it is an excellent idea to save them. Then, if any emergency arises, you haven’t lost all this hard work!

The best way to keep track of what you’re doing at this point is to click into a message window and press Ctrl-S (“S” for “Save”). Then click on the red “X” in the upper corner of the “active” message to close it (inactive messages appear faded out a little—the active message shows in full color (see illustration above). By doing this, we are sure to save every message without fail.

NOTE: If you REALLY want to be efficient and save keystrokes, save the message and close it as soon as you paste the last item in each message. Press Ctrl-V to paste the item and then press Ctrl-S to save it (you don’t even have to release the Ctrl key between strokes—just hold down the Ctrl key and press V and S in succession). Then click on the red X to close that saved message!

We also chose to do this so we could go through the process of saving and reopening documents in case you don’t complete this process in one sitting.

When you have saved and close all active messages, they are stored in the “drafts” folder of your Outlook. If you do not have a “Drafts” icon on your shortcut bar, you can go to View—>Folder List and click on “Drafts” to view all your draft emails.

Your emails should all show up with a subject line and a little “paper clip” icon next to them to show that the Word document is attached:

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When you are ready to open them all, click on the first email in the drafts folder. Hold down the Shift key and then click on the last email in the folder. This should highlight all the draft emails. Right-click on the highlighted messages and select “Open.” You will probably get a pop-up box that informs you that it could take some time to open so many messages. “Are you sure?” Click “Yes.” It generally doesn’t take any time at all to open them.

If you still have your email address list open, click on it in the status bar to bring it up on your screen. Starting at the top of the first page, highlight two pages of email addresses.

Press Ctrl-C to copy the two pages of email addresses.

VERY IMPORTANT: Minimize your word document after you copy the email addresses. This will open up your screen so you can see all available messages. It can get very confusing if you try to open messages individually from the status bar.

Paste the email addresses into the “bcc” field of your email message. It will paste in as a left-justified list, but will convert to a delimited list when you save the message.

You can send out your email blast in two ways. The first is to just paste in the email addresses and send right away. The problem with this method is that your email can get backed up with so many being sent out at once. It only takes a few seconds to paste in two pages of addresses and click “Send.” The best strategy is to get all the email addresses pasted in and the messages saved before you begin sending out your emails. Then, when you begin sending them out, send out two or three and step away from your computer for about 10 to 15 minutes. Continue this process until you have sent all the emails out.

Timing: The optimum time to send out an email blast is Tuesday or Wednesday. You don’t want your mailing to get lost in the TONS of mail the recruiter receives on Monday and has to sort through from the weekend. You also don’t want your mailing to be received late Thursday or on Friday, when people are starting to wind things down for the week. By Tuesday or Wednesday, the work week has settled in and your message has the best chance of being received well.