The True Cost of Email Marketing: Your Reputation

Many marketers who are considering email marketing often shy away after learning that sending email campaigns actually cost money.

After all, we can send our campaigns through Outlook right?

That’s right, but the true cost of email marketing isn’t the cost of sending the individual emails. It’s your reputation that’s more costly.

With a button click, your reputation can go down the drain (spam folder) and join the ranks of ‘replica watch’ peddlers, fake million dollar offers and *shudder* - penis enlargement vendors.

That’s the risk you take when you send bulk mail from software not suited for the job. Desktop email clients like Outlook or Eudora are great at personal email communications, but aren’t very good at bulk email in the following ways:

• No subscriber management. There’s no way for recipients of Outlook email to remove themselves from the address book. Trust me, if you are that guy who keeps sending me email even after I’ve replied to “Unsubscribe”, it’s a one way express ticket into the spam folder. Plus, imagine if you had to process all the unsubscribes manually…

• Low email limits. Most basic web hosting plans have a typical limit of 1000-2000 mails per day (example). Same goes for free email providers like Yahoo! and Hotmail. Also, there are hourly limits so your email will be queued for hours before getting sent out.

• No special arrangements. Serious email marketing service providers will have relationships with the major email providers and ISPs like Yahoo!, AOL or TM Net. These relationships ensure that your emails are whitelisted and don’t get marked as spam. Does your company have such relationships?

Without these features it becomes really risky to your business’s reputation when sending bulk email campaigns. Even if you don’t mean to spam your customers, it’s easy to fall over the edge if you forgot to manually remove unsubscribes. Also, once you’ve been flagged as a spammer enough times, your email will be blacklisted and even your internal emails will be blocked!

Dedicated email marketing service providers like SimpleMail takes care of all the above to help you safeguard your reputation and get your emails delivered. Plus, all of our features work together to give you a simple and hassle free email marketing experience.

One last point, I’m not trying to demonise Outlook in any way. It’s just an example that every one knows and was most suitable for this article.