Do I really need an email marketing program?

Q:  Why use an e-mail marketing system instead of just sending out e-mails to your clients?

Daisy Curtis

A:  Great question, Daisy!  There are numerous reasons:

1.  Excessive amounts of email sent in one day from your personal email account may result in you being labeled a spammer and blocked from sending any emails at all and/or loss of your ISP account.  Most ISPs won't disclose what is "excessive."  However, when you breach those limits, they typically don't give you a second chance and you have to find another ISP.  With an email marketing program,  the only limits you face are based on the nature of the package your purchase.

2.  List management.  When you send emails from your email program (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) the people on your list don't have the option of automatically opting-out of receiving emails or changing their email address.  Instead, they have to email you to do that manually.  This is a PITA for both you and your recipient because it takes extra time on both ends to make that happen.  With an email marketing program, typically an "unsubscribe" or "update" link is automatically appended to the bottom of each broadcast so that a recipient can opt-out/update account details through the email marketing service interface.

3.  Blocked emails.  Most email marketing services work diligently with major ISPs and spam-blocking services to ensure that their email is always considered spam-free and gets through to the recipients without a problem.  However, unless you want another full-time job <g>, you probably don't have the resources or the time to do that yourself.  Buy the services of a reputable email marketing program to make sure that your recipients always get your email.

4.  Determining your open rate. When you send out emails through your email program, you have no idea who or how many people actually got and opened the email or clicked on any of the links inside.  As you start tracking the success of email promotions and broadcasts, these figures become more and more important as you test new subject lines and content.  A reputable email marketing program lets you track stats like these, and more.

5.  Legal protection.  It's so easy now for a disgruntled recipient to label you a spammer and report you to your ISP, your web host, and your domain registrar, which may result in the loss of your domain, your hosting account, and your ISP.  A former client had this happen to him and experienced a 3-month loss of business while he tried to rectify this situation and regain use of his domain name so that he could republish his web site.  When you use a reputable email marketing system and set your list to double opt-in, you have a greater degree of protection against these kinds of losses because most email marketing programs track the time. date, and IP address of anyone confirming an opt-in to your email list.  Therefore, if someone claims "I didn't subscribe to your list," you can tell him/her all the details of when they did opt into your list.

The email marketing service I use and can highly recommend is GetMoreClientsAutoresponder.com for all of my email marketing.  There are others that are less expensive, but I know how hard aWeber works to help its clients maintain list integrity and email deliverability.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.