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Joel Rivera
29,401 PointsEmail Marketing
What is the best approach when it comes to email marketing? Is there a way to do a blast email of over several thousand emails without using a service like mail chimp or the others? Is there an in-house set up that can be created? I know there are several components in play. Such as the cap that can be sent by a server, isp but how could I set up a system to send out a large batch of emails without having to pay for it?
Also, how do you prevent your email from getting into the spam folder?
Thanks
3 Answers
Dan Gorgone
Treehouse Guest TeacherHi Joel, theoretically, you could send out all those emails by yourself. If you have to deal with recipient limits, perhaps you send them out in groups of 50, 100, or whatever increment. But aside from the cost factor, the advantages of doing it this way are pretty slim. Using other services offers better options for quality, security, and analysis.
One advantage to using MailChimp (which you can in a limited basis for free) or other services is that they are trusted mail providers. Essentially, they have a positive reputation with the spam blockers because they are known to hold their users to a high standard, i.e. forcing users to abide by FTC regulations, sending only to users that opt-in, providing physical address, easy unsubscribe link and so on. Sending your email personally or through your corporate email runs the risk of getting flagged by email systems and spam blockers.
Another big advantage to using a service is the easy access to analytics. Being able to see open rates and other basic stats is helpful, but MailChimp and others offer deeper looks at who opened your emails, as well as which links in your email were most effective.
Not ending up in the spam folder means sending trustworthy emails. Your subject and content must be clear and not misleading at all. In addition, you should abide by all the FTC rules for sending email, and the CAN-SPAM act in particular.
Whatever you do, just make sure you have permission to email whomever is on your list, and make it clear what you're sending, why you're sending it, and how the user can remove themselves from your list in an easy fashion.
James Barnett
39,199 PointsFor a light hearted overview, check out this video series on how not to be a bad email marketer
Mark Flavin
10,199 PointsJust to reiterate what others have said you could build your own service and send out emails but there really is no point unless that is your business goal. Between managing all the best practices and rules - nevermind the infrastructure - there are only a few edge cases where such an investment would make sense. If however you don't want to send the emails via template driven system but still want to be can spam compliant and follow best practices I would suggest looking into transactional messaging service. Mailchimp has excellent easy to implement system called mandrill which would be a good place to start.