What’s Wrong With Using Outlook To Send Your Mailings?
A lot of people start off in email marketing by sending out newsletters, holiday greetings or other messages using Outlook. Sometimes they attach a Word Doc, or a PDF file.
Inevitably, they run into problems. Their HTML emails break when viewed by people who don’t have Outlook (users of Apple Mail, Yahoo!Mail, Gmail, Etc.).
Outlook isn’t really built for sending email newsletters to a large list of customers. Sure, you can send an HTML email to a few friends every now and then, but not to a list of any size. One of the main reasons is that Outlook sends HTML email in a way that it really only displays properly for other people using Outlook. This means all the other people who use services such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc., may not see the email properly.
In addition there are other problems such as if you send too many emails from your own computer, your ISP will think you’re a spammer, and will most likely block you. It depends on your ISP, but this can happen with sending as few as a hundred emails a day.
What about all the bounces, auto replies, requests to unsubscribe, etc., can you efficiently deal with them on a manual basis?
If you don’t remove the bounces from your list you will get blacklisted sooner or later. What about the people who click the report as spam button available on major services such as AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail? Are you setup with the ISPs to know who reports you as a spammer so you can remove them from your list so you don’t get reported repeatedly and get blocked by the ISP?
According to the CAN-SPAM law, if someone requests to be removed from your list, you must do so within 10 business days. Most people who send their emails from their desktop computers don’t have systems in place to help them automatically process unsubscribe requests. They simply ask people to “reply with unsubscribe in the subject line.” That’s prone to mistakes, and that’s prone to a CAN-SPAM lawsuit from the FTC.
Outlook and other desktop email applications don’t come with tracking tools to show you how many people opened and clicked your campaigns. How will you know how many people opened your email? Click on a link in it? Unsubscribed? Bounced?
The proper way to send emails in any volume is to use an email marketing service such as MustangList.com
Some of the benefits to using an email marketing service include:
- Automatic list management: They manage your email lists, automatically clean bounces, and instantly remove unsubscribes, so that you don’t have to manually maintain spreadsheets of subscribers and customers.
- Comply with Anti-spam laws: Email marketing services help you comply with anti-spam laws, by inserting one-click unsubscribe links, and your physical mailing address.
- Affordability: Most are extremely cost effective.
- List Privacy: They don’t just “CC:” your entire list. They send emails individually to each recipient.
- Personalization: You can merge data and personalize your messages (ex: Hello FIRST_NAME_HERE).
- Better Delivery Rates: Most professional email marketing services have established relationships with major ISPs and anti-spam organizations, to help monitor their servers, and stay off blacklists.
- Reporting and Stats for campaigns: The really cool thing about these services is they tell you how many opens and clicks your campaigns got, so you can tell if your recipients are responding.
Try MustangList.com - We make it really easy to get started - Give us a call at 847-541-2811