Using your standard email account (e.g. Outlook, Hotmail or Gmail) to send mass messages is not the right way to do it. Why not? Because your standard email account is not designed for email marketing and therefore has limitations that can actually undermine your email marketing efforts.
Here are four reasons why a good ESP (Email Service Provider) is a must for sending mass emails:
1. Higher deliverability
Because your typical email client, Outlook or Gmail for instance, is not built for email marketing, the messages you send out may end up labelled as spam by ISPs (internet service providers), not even arriving into your recipients’ spam folders, much less their inboxes. Most ESPs are whitelisted, or approved by ISPs as a legitimate permission based email delivery service. ESPs also offer easy methods to authenticate your email, which will prove to ISPs that you are who you say you are, a legitimate non spammer sending emails to those who want to receive the information.
2. Comprehensive tracking and analytics
Most ESPs provide customers with comprehensive tracking for all of their email campaigns. You can find out the number of people who opened your email, which links were clicked and by who, deliverability success and track your unsubscribes.
Some ESPs such as NewZapp will also provide you with Google Analytics integration, social media tracking and information on which email clients are being used to open your emails and whether your subscribers are on a desktop or mobile.
3. List management
Trying to manually keep all your data up to date can quickly become a time consuming task. ESPs will store all your subscriber details, updating them as you import, removing the duplicates, unsubscribes and invalid email addresses.
Bounce management is also included with most ESPs – automatically removing hard bounces and soft bounces after a bounce threshold has been reached. Bounces often occur because the email address you’re sending to is invalid or the mailbox full.
4. Easily create HTML emails
With WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, creating a professional HTML email is a breeze. There’s no need for HTML knowledge as the coding is automatically created for you. Most ESPs will also include several well designed HTML templates for you to customise and use for your own campaigns. There are also options for you to have bespoke templates created to suit your needs.
Gracie Stewart is Email Marketing Executive at NewZapp Email Marketing.
