DesignB Studios

How To Choose an Email Marketing Vendor

Posted by Brian on 17 June 2008 | 1 Comments

Tags: email, email marketing, email vendor

Email marketing can give you significantly greater response rates than direct mail marketing at 5% to 10% of the cost. With the execution of an opt-in email marketing campaign, you can see new and increased sales faster than previously believed, keep your current customer base interested, understand your current and prospective clients' wants and desires, and significantly improve sales.

HTML email marketing, when done correctly, is an incredibly technical and complicated process. Yet, email marketing services can be done for a very small amount of investment. Anyone with a mail server and some inexpensive software can send a broadcast email. One could even send out tens of thousands of emails per day by sticking names in the "to" or "bcc" boxes of Outlook Express or a similar email client.

However, there is a tremendous cost in lost revenue when opt-in email marketing is done in a simple and cheap manner. With the Internet-wide problem of viruses, spy ware, and spam (also known as unsolicited commercial email), ISP's, companies, and individual computer users have developed a virtual fortress that blocks the vast majority of unwanted email. Even opt-in email is blocked during the imperfect process of protecting inboxes from spam.

You can expect to see response rates become 2,000 times better when comparing the worst html email marketing technologies and networks to the best.

So when looking for an email marketing company, make sure your email campaign is sent through an Email Service Provider that answers the following questions:

Will your email get through at the ISP, IT department, email box, and personal challenge-response levels? Run a deliverability audit of your email marketing company's system. Do they monitor your delivery rates, have means to improve them, and remedy problems? Remember that most spam filters do not send out a bounce notification to the mail server - they simply "eat" the email. Therefore, if your email marketing company tells you that you had a 95% successful delivery rate, your numbers were probably lower.

Is your email legally compliant? The Can Spam Act of 2003 enacted by Congress strictly regulates all forms of commercial email. Your message must have various technical and content requirements in order to meet Federal law. Violations of the Can Spam Act have penalties of up to 5 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines.

Will recipients of your message see it in the format/design that you intended? HTML email marketing and messages with graphics have been proven to have the highest response rates, yet not everyone is able to receive an HTML message with graphics. Various email recipients will see your message differently depending on their ISP settings, personal settings, email client settings, and anti-virus software. Can your email marketing solution automatically sense which version of a message to give each individual recipient on your email list?

Is your email marketing company black listed, white listed, or neither? If your email marketing provider fails to follow the strictest standards and latest protocols for sending email, odds are that they are black listed and a large percentage of your email is simply being "eaten" by spam filters. There are numerous public black-lists that you or your email marketing company could be on (Spam Cop, S.P.E.W.S, XBL, CBL, RSL, DSBL, and SpamHaus just to name a few), as well as any major ISP's internal black lists.

In addition, your email marketing provider should have white list agreements with major ISP's and white lists. This will make a huge difference between your email getting through and your email being stopped by a spam filter.

Does your email marketing company allow you to get a dedicated IP address? Even if your email marketing partner's network is not blacklisted, the bad activities of their other clients could cause your email to be blocked if you are sending out through a shared IP address.

Is your email sent at a proper speed per ISP and is your host Sender ID compliant? Some ISP's will assume that you are sending spam if you send too many messages per minute to their email servers. Your PBM firm must account for this. If they fail to study the major ISP's blocking algorithms and update their sending procedures accordingly more and more of your email will be blocked.

In addition, your message must be Sender-ID complaint. Microsoft released the Sender-ID update in 2005 and many ISP's are gradually integrating it as a mandatory component of a successful email delivery.

Is your database automatically updated in real-time for various types of bounces and unsubscribe requests? Many ISP's will assume that you are sending out spam and block your email if they receive too many attempts for delivery to invalid email addresses from your mail server. It is critically important that invalid email addresses are automatically purged from your email list in real-time. A company offering email marketing services should also be able to differentiate between a soft bounce, a continuous soft-bounce, and a hard bounce in order to ensure that you do not lose valid email addresses. In order to cut down on spam complaints, you need to remove recipients from your email list as soon as they unsubscribe from your database.

Can your email marketing solution track the activity of your recipients and all sending statistics? Every campaign that you send out should be able to track open rate, successful deliveries, unsuccessful deliveries, bounces, removal requests, and click-through statistics. All of these factors are critical in measuring the successes and potential problems that your email campaign may run into.

Can you automatically track the activity of each recipient on your email list, automatically segment your database in useful ways, and send automated/triggered messages beyond the basic "batch and send"? The more you segment your campaigns and find out the wants, desires and behavior of your recipients, the more successful your campaigns will be.

Can your email marketing company advise you in regard to your copy and template for both content-based spam filters and salesmanship? The content of your message such as font size, font color, wording, and text-to-graphics percentage can have a significant impact on spam filters. In addition, certain types of ad copy and keywords are proven to elicit a desired behavior from your recipients. Subject length, from name and from email address can also have a significant impact on the success of an email campaign. If your permission based email marketing firm has a lot of experience and knowledge in these areas, your email campaigns will be much more successful.

In summary, when looking for an email marketing company it is important to analyze your cost per website visitor and the volume of visitors that you are bringing to your website per email sent. Sending out an opt-in email marketing campaign for a few pennies per email is very inexpensive when compared to the financial benefits gained from effective email marketing services. It is far more costly to under-utilize a database by sending out 100 emails and only having 30 be successfully delivered than to pay a little more and have 98 out of 100 emails successfully delivered.