Email marketing can be VERY effective and relatively cheap. But even if you have an immaculate customer database, I do not recommend that you do a mass mailing from your Outlook.  Instead, use the services of an E-mail Marketing service.

If you ignore my advice and actually send the emails out yourself, you are likely to have the following problems:

1. A lot of your emails will bounce or be classified as SPAM. SPAM filters are very tricky to understand and keep changing. Having too many people in the email To/Cc/Bcc can get your email classified as SPAM, as can sending too many emails through the same gateway within a certain period of time. The E-mail Marketing services keep up to date on the “rules” that each major ISP (Internet Service Provider) uses to classify spam and these services take responsibility for making sure your messages get through.
2. You need to make sure you comply with the CAN-SPAM laws that regulate email marketing. One big requirement is that each message you send out provide a way for users to opt-out and remove their email addresses from your database within 10 days. The E-Mail Marketing services take care of this for you. If you had to do it yourself, you’d be implementing some custom code on your website or putting in a lot of manual work.
3. Keeping your email list pristine, current, and free of duplicates.

Email Marketing Services

Here’s a list of email marketing services for you to check out. This blog post is long enough, so I’m not going to compare and contrast them right now.  Maybe in a future post…

• AWeber
• MadMimi
• Bronto
• iContact
• Constant Contact
• MyEmma
• Campaign Monitor
• Vertical Response
• EmailLabs
• Lyris HQ
• Puresend
• BlueStreak
• MobileStorm
• MailChimp
• Enterprise Systems
• Epicor