Mar 20 2008
Email newsletters and other types of email marketing (or bulk email) is increasingly common these days. And it's not just for the big boys anymore. Many small businesses are using this medium as a way to connect with customers and stay in their sights. This is all good but one of the biggest "issues" I see happening is the use of free bulk email solutions.
Most of these bulk email solutions are perfectly acceptable if all you want to do is send out emails in one swoop and if your list size is under 100 (give or take). Once you get above that you're headed for trouble.
Solutions such as these send email from your own domain and email server. That may not seem like a big deal except when you consider that the companies who offer email marketing services work carefully with ISPs such as Google, AOL, Yahoo! and Hotmail to ensure the emails get delivered. As a small organization or individual you just can't do that. When you send out a lot of emails what ends up happening is that some folks may start to complain that your emails are spam, no matter how careful you are. The more this starts to happen, all of your emails will start to be labeled as spam. Worse, your domain or server could be blacklisted.
If your domain gets blacklisted, major ISPs will refuse to deliver any email from you, even if it's a personal email to a friend or business email to a colleague that has nothing to do with your mailing list. If your server gets blacklisted, not only is your domain affected - other people's domains on the same server are affected as well.
To make matters more complicated, most hosting companies will put a limit on a the number of emails you can send per hour. Some are more generous than others but everything counts here. If your host puts the cap at 100 emails an hour and you have a list of 90 people, in one hour you could easily bust your limit simply by sending 10 or more one-off messages to other people not on your list. This essentially renders your email useless - you can't get any and you won't be able to send anything out.
And let's not forget bandwidth. For the most part, hosting companies offer generous amounts of bandwidth, so this may be a smaller issue than the above. But sending out emails takes up bandwidth. If you send out HTML emails, you need a place to store the images within the email, which is usually on your server somewhere. That takes bandwidth too. And if you have links in your email that point back to your site... yep, more bandwidth used. Again, considering that more and more hosting companies offer wads of bandwidth, this isn't a major issue, especially if your list is small. But if your list is in the hundreds and especially in the thousands, that's when you can take a hit.
Do these things sound like they could cause serious headaches? It's because they can. And they likely will. If you're serious about email marketing to more than several dozen people, and serious about growing your subscriber list, there are many options you should consider instead. In addition to saving you from the headaches described above, most of them will also give you a more in-depth look at how your email list is doing - something that any decent marketing tool should be accompanied by. Here are a few options to take a look at: