Professional marketers you may be surprised to know that there are still a substantial portion of people who are absolutely resolute that they can achieve email marketing success by sending mass emails through their internal email system.
In such discussions, phrases such as “it’s free” and “does the job” seem to be the standard response when debating this topic. It’s a shame that these people placed in marketing roles cannot comprehend the success they could actually achieve by switching to an ESP. “It’s free” could actually prove to be the opposite if many messages are marked as junk or complained about to spam houses and actually be damaging to your business. “Does the job” may not be accurate either as you read on below.
Using a professional ESP to broadcast your message has many, many advantages and we cover a small but very significant portion in this blog.
Dedicated Sending IPs
Your internal email system and your website will be using a dedicated IP and domain. Why would you want to tarnish that IP reputation and domain by sending mass marketing emails? Campaignmaster provides dedicated sending IPs, which keeps your marketing messages separate to your website and internal domain use. This will keep your IT department happy too in the knowledge that marketing are not reliant on them to provide extra bandwidth, or manage any complaints or blacklisting of your website or internal emails.
Personalisation
When you send emails most times you will address the person by name. This won’t be possible when mass mailing through Outlook, but a good ESP can easily manage the personalisation easily for you.
Spam Analysis
How do you plan on scoring your email against spam in Outlook before sending it? For all you know every single one of your emails could be ending up in junk folders just because you didn’t perform a simple, one click spam analysis which may have highlighted any spam related issues in your email and avoid landing in junk.
Out of Office Replies
Sure you may get some actual replies, but it’s very likely that they could be hidden within a mountain of out of office messages. Campaignmaster manages out of office replies nice and neatly for you so you can go through at your leisure with no interference to your general inbox.
Attachments
The bigger the attachment the more chances that your email could get blocked. If you used a good ESP then you could upload your attachment and link to it. Easier access and measurable too.
Bounces
You can also add to the mountain of out of office replies the bounce messages you will get for any incorrect email addresses. Another basic function that can be automatically managed by a reputable ESP.
Opt-Out
How would you manage those people who want to be removed from your mailing list? Very manually I suspect! The opt out process should be as simple as possible and shouldn’t really involve having to reply to an email. You would have to manually remove that person from your future marketing lists to ensure you don’t send to them again – that would be called spamming!
Email Analytics
What’s the point of sending a mass email with no results as to how your email performed? With our detailed tracking data you will know within seconds how your email is being received. How many opens, clicks, what device, what inbox – all this and more is what you get with Campaignmaster’s comprehensive email statistics.
Mobile Optimised Emails
It’s a no brainer to send emails that display beautifully in mobile devices when you consider that around 64% of emails are opened in the UK on a mobile device. Want to send a beautifully presented email? Mobile optimise it and oh yes, test it out on various devices before you send it too with Campaignmaster’s advanced rendering tools.
Scheduled Send
Doesn’t matter if you’re not in the office to hit send as you can schedule your campaign to launch itself at a set date and time. So go and have that coffee break and the campaign will go when you have set it to go and you don’t need to be at your desk to press send.
Just some reasons to avoid using Outlook for marketing emails, but the list goes on and on.
