The Recognized Expert

Why Owning Email Marketing Software Is A Good Idea

If you’re serious about using email to market your service, you have two choices. You can invest in email marketing software and host it on your server, or you can rent the services of an email marketing company. And like everything else in life, there are pros and cons to each.

In this article, we’re going to evaluate the advantages of purchasing professional email marketing software. And then in my next article, I will discuss the disadvantages of doing so. So, let’s get started.

Long Term Cost Savings

If you plan on building a big list and maintaining it for more than a year, owning your own email marketing software could prove to be a very good financial investment. Email marketing programs costs between $100 and $1,000 dollars and you can acquire a feature rich program for as little as $500 with no recurring monthly fees. And depending on the size of your list and the number of emails you send, you can save between $15 and $150 per month or more, sometimes a lot more.

Unlimited Use

When you own the software, you can do things with it that will save you even more money. Most professional email marketing programs allow you to create unlimited segmented lists. This means you can build and manage a list of customers who are interested in outdoor furniture and another for people who own swimming pools.

Some of the on-line services charge an additional fee for each list you create making ownership an even better value, particularly if you’re targeting more than one audience.
You can also acquire an unlimited number of subscribers, place them on an unlimited number of databases and create an unlimited number of campaigns without having to pay one extra cent.

Control

The next biggest advantage is control. When you own the email-marketing software and host it on your server, you don’t have to wait in a queue to have your message sent nor do you have to worry about a glitch on a server that you can’t access. When a problem arises, and it will, you determine when and how quickly it gets repaired.

Deliverability

Everyone who starts an email marketing campaign is under the impression that once a visitor opts-in to their email list that their email will avoid spam filters and go directly into their recipient’s in-box. This is simply not true.

There are hundreds of reasons why emails never get through spam filters, and you have much more control over this issue when you own the software. Most of the problems have to do with how the Internet service providers and the email services like Gmail, Hotmail and AOL perceive the trustworthiness of the emails.

If you invest in professional email marketing software, and make a habit of sending your list information they request and find valuable, your emails will have a better chance of avoiding the dreaded spam box.

The Only One Guilty Of Spamming Is You

When you own the software, you control all of the email originating from your server. And as long as you’re not sending spam to your list, the email companies will be more likely to trust you and deliver your email to the intended recipient.

On the other hand, if you had an online email marketing company send your emails for you, they would be originating from a shared server. With hundreds of list owners on a single server, there’s a very good chance that one of them is going to send spam to their list.

In doing so, the ISP’s and email services will see every email coming from that server as potential spam. And when they do, they’ll either send your email into your recipients spam box, or they won’t send it at all until the problem is fixed.

Unfortunately, you have no control over what other email marketers are sending to their lists. If they are accused of spamming, you’re guilty by association. However, when you own your own the software and host it on your server, you’ll never have to worry about sharing a server with spammer.

Now it is true that the email marketing services pay very close attention to insure that nothing like this happens, but if it does, they’re not legally responsible. This is a potentially huge problem that you won’t have to worry about with your own software.

Disadvantages of Owning Email Marketing Software

As wonderful as this sounds, there are disadvantages to purchasing email marketing software and I’m going to share those with you in my next article entitled: Email Marketing Software: What Are The Disadvantages. You can read that article and my five point criteria for owning email marketing software here.