A common question I receive from people interested in my real estate, mortgage and insurance customer newsletters is whether they can send them using their own email software rather than the hosted service I offer.
(With a hosted service, you upload your email list to a website, which looks after the design, list management and sending of your email newsletters.)
I strongly believe that anyone serious about sending email newsletters needs to use a professional email service.
Here's what I told someone who asked this very question yesterday:
Thank you for your message.
To answer your question, we only offer a "hosted" email service, which means you need to upload your list to the site.
Let me explain why this is the best way to do it.
The main reason is that you will comply with anti-spam regulations and protect your own email address from being added to spam blacklists.
But there are also several advantages to using a hosted service.
Avoiding spam problems: The U.S. CAN-SPAM regulations state that you need an easy way for people to unsubscribe from your list. A hosted service will provide links on each mail for people to use to unsubscribe - without this you will have to do it yourself. A hosted service will also help to protect you against false accusations of spam; hosted services have a good relationship with ISPs and between them they work to distinguish between erroneous spam allegations and true instances of spam. This will help protect your messages, helping more of them get delivered. And, because you are using a hosted domain to send messages from, your own email address will be protected from ending up on a spam blacklist (and you'll also avoid complaints from your own ISP for sending out bulk emails using your account).
Easier to design: Sending HTML emails using your own email software isn't as easy as just pasting in an HTML file. One reason is that you will need to host images if you are sending the email yourself - the images will need to be saved to your website, then your email will need to link to these images so that the recipients of your email can see them. A hosted service handles all this for you, and will allow you to add, subtract and move images without having to fuss with HTML code or having to contact your webmaster. A hosted service will also help ensure that your email design appears as it should on everyone's computer. (The thing about sending HTML in email is that, unless you design it very carefully, it doesn't always show up as you expect it to.)
Easier to manage your contacts: Hosted email services provide many tools for managing your contacts. These include flagging bad emails, duplicate emails and bounced emails to ensure your email list is kept clean and to make sure you don't send more than one email to your recipients. Hosted services can also tell you which of your recipients has opened the email and which links within that email they have clicked. This will help improve the content of messages in the future.
Easy way for people to join your list: Hosted services provide sign-up boxes you can place on your website so that people can join your list to receive your newsletter. An important success factor in online marketing is capturing the email addresses of people who visit your website so that you can star building a relationship with them. Hosted services make it easy to do that. (See the home page of my site for an example.)
More emails delivered: It's a fact of life that email newsletters are harder to deliver than they were in the past, mainly due to the quantity of spam and the sensitivity of filters designed to combat that spam. The result is that many genuine emails - particularly if they are designed in HTML - get blocked. Hosted services have a good track record of getting emails delivered because that's their main job - they work very hard at working with every party in the process to distinguish their emails from spam.
Anyway, these are the main reasons why a hosted service is preferable. I have personally been using a hosted service for many years and would never return to sending these kind of emails from my own email account.
I believe that anyone who is serious about email marketing should follow this route.
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
All the best,
Simon
To answer your question, we only offer a "hosted" email service, which means you need to upload your list to the site.
Let me explain why this is the best way to do it.
The main reason is that you will comply with anti-spam regulations and protect your own email address from being added to spam blacklists.
But there are also several advantages to using a hosted service.
Avoiding spam problems: The U.S. CAN-SPAM regulations state that you need an easy way for people to unsubscribe from your list. A hosted service will provide links on each mail for people to use to unsubscribe - without this you will have to do it yourself. A hosted service will also help to protect you against false accusations of spam; hosted services have a good relationship with ISPs and between them they work to distinguish between erroneous spam allegations and true instances of spam. This will help protect your messages, helping more of them get delivered. And, because you are using a hosted domain to send messages from, your own email address will be protected from ending up on a spam blacklist (and you'll also avoid complaints from your own ISP for sending out bulk emails using your account).
Easier to design: Sending HTML emails using your own email software isn't as easy as just pasting in an HTML file. One reason is that you will need to host images if you are sending the email yourself - the images will need to be saved to your website, then your email will need to link to these images so that the recipients of your email can see them. A hosted service handles all this for you, and will allow you to add, subtract and move images without having to fuss with HTML code or having to contact your webmaster. A hosted service will also help ensure that your email design appears as it should on everyone's computer. (The thing about sending HTML in email is that, unless you design it very carefully, it doesn't always show up as you expect it to.)
Easier to manage your contacts: Hosted email services provide many tools for managing your contacts. These include flagging bad emails, duplicate emails and bounced emails to ensure your email list is kept clean and to make sure you don't send more than one email to your recipients. Hosted services can also tell you which of your recipients has opened the email and which links within that email they have clicked. This will help improve the content of messages in the future.
Easy way for people to join your list: Hosted services provide sign-up boxes you can place on your website so that people can join your list to receive your newsletter. An important success factor in online marketing is capturing the email addresses of people who visit your website so that you can star building a relationship with them. Hosted services make it easy to do that. (See the home page of my site for an example.)
More emails delivered: It's a fact of life that email newsletters are harder to deliver than they were in the past, mainly due to the quantity of spam and the sensitivity of filters designed to combat that spam. The result is that many genuine emails - particularly if they are designed in HTML - get blocked. Hosted services have a good track record of getting emails delivered because that's their main job - they work very hard at working with every party in the process to distinguish their emails from spam.
Anyway, these are the main reasons why a hosted service is preferable. I have personally been using a hosted service for many years and would never return to sending these kind of emails from my own email account.
I believe that anyone who is serious about email marketing should follow this route.
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
All the best,
Simon
So here's a question for anyone involved with email newsletters: do you agree with my analysis? Is there anything missing? Are there any errors? Please leave a comment below.
Simon,
Great article addressing a very common question!
The FTC's CAN-SPAM Act is an important thing every email marketer should be aware of. Many getting started aren't familiar with it, and you're right, a professional list management service, or hosted service, will usually help you stay compliant. Here's our summary of FTC's latest updates from May 2008: http://blog.mailermailer.com/2008/06/can-spam-updates-from-the-ftc/.
Oh, and a couple more benefits to add:
- Faster delivery (due to dedicated servers in a secure data center specially designed to deliver bulk emails)
- Reporting (companies sometimes offer this feature to show how past emails performed)
Cheers!
Maggie
Posted by: maggiemailer :) | January 29, 2009 at 11:06 AM
Hi Simon,
Great article. Anyone who has tried email marketing on their own knows what an advantage everything you discussed could be.
Like Maggie mentioned I think Reporting is one of the strongest advantage points to using an ESP.
For owners of small businesses there are limited resources for marketing and testing. If you have facts and figures about who opened, clicked and purchased off your email marketing efforts you have an incredible advantage. It allows you to show which type of emails or offers work with your audience as well as segment your lists and see which leads are truly hot, a question all sales people would like to know.
Thanks for starting the discussion!
Jenna
VerticalResponse
Posted by: Jenna | January 29, 2009 at 12:03 PM
Who would you recommend hosts our emails?
We are a very small business and are currently using a large marketing company that charges the earth and allows me very little creative input to the design.
The previous owner bought a large qty of email addresses which I have now inherited.
In total I would now send out 6 000 emails every month.
Thank you Sean
Posted by: Sean Nisbet | May 28, 2009 at 07:09 AM
Hi Sean,
I have personally used aWeber and Vertical Response and would recommend both. It's a matter of seeing which has the features you need, and which provides good customer service (both these do.)
However, I'm nervous about the list your inherited. Many email service providers won't allow you to upload a purchased list because there's a fine line between purchased lists and spam. So check whether your ESP will allow you to do that, and also (imho) find out about the nature of these email addresses and whether you can legitimately (legally and morally) email them without causing spam complaints.
Sorry, that's not the answer you want, I expect, but purchased email lists can cause problems in some circumstances.
Posted by: Simon | May 28, 2009 at 09:34 AM
A common problem is that there are still plenty of websites that offer newsletter subscription but don't allow the recipient to choose whether they want TEXT or HTML messages. The people who generate the "newsletter" then stupidly assume that everybody wants HTML messages, which of course we know is wrong.
When you use a hosted mail service, any decent software will send the messages as "multipart", which means that people who configured their email client for TEXT will see the message too. This just doesn't happen when you use Outlook, or some other personal email software.
Posted by: Ivan Lutrov | July 20, 2010 at 09:41 PM