Should I Use An On-Line Email Marketing Service?

Using an email marketing service may not be right for you. There are certain disadvantages of using one of these services and you need to consider them before entrusting your contact list with an on-line email marketing service. None of these things may be an issue for you, but if they are, there are alternatives you may want to look into.

Long Term Costs

One of the initial benefits to using an on-line email marketing company is the low cost of entry, but that can change quickly based on the size of your list. Once your contacts reaches 10,000 names, the fees can start to get a little pricy.

Most email marketing services will charge you in the range of $150 per month or $1,800 per year to maintain a list of that size and the fees go up from there.

The other thing to consider is the length of time you plan on having your list. If you’re investing $1,800 a year with an on-line service, you could use that money to purchase your own email-marketing software.

Control of your List

When you collect the contact information using one of these services, you own the list. The list companies have agreed not to sell or rent the names and email addresses you’ve collected.

They also do there very best to make sure your list is not lost or compromised. But, if something should happen to your list, they are legally not responsible. And things like this do happen.

The other thing you need to be aware of is that as soon as you stop paying for their service, they will remove your list from their server. It’s gone forever. That’s why you want to frequently download your list to your computer and save it as a back-up file. If you don’t, you could loose years of work and possibly your greatest business asset.

Deliverability and Spam Filters

The biggest potential problem by far has to do with deliverablity. Your email is only as good as the lowest level of trust that email services like Gmail and Hotmail have for the worst offender on the shared server where your list is hosted.

If you choose to use one of the many email marketing service to host your list, it will be stored on a server with hundreds of other email lists. Problem is, if just one of these list owners is accused of spamming their list, your list will suffer the same penalties until the service provide can prove that you were not responsible for sending the spam.

If something like this happens, there is a chance that your emails will either not get through or they will go directly into your recipients spam box. This is something the email marketing service providers don’t like to discuss because there is very little they can do about it until after the problem occurs. At that point, the damage has been done.

Speed

You also loose control over when your emails are sent. With hundreds of other list owners trying to send their email at the same time, there’s a very good chance you’re going to have to wait in line before your email is delivered. This is typically not a problem if you plan for it. It’s only an issue if you need to get time sensitive information to your list, so keep that in mind when you create your campaign.

The intent of this article is not to scare you out of using one of many on-line email-marketing services. For the most part, they do an extremely good job of handling their customer’s email marketing lists. If they didn’t, they would be out of business.

What Are The Professionals Using?

It’s important to note that the majority of professional Internet marketers use one of the on-line email marketing services to host their lists. They know the value of their list and I’m certain that they would not entrust it to a company they couldn’t count on to safeguarding their information.

Here’s what I suggest. If you’re new to email marketing, using one of the one-line email marketing services is a good choice, even with all the potential problems listed above. If the day comes when you want to purchase and host your own email marketing software, take what you’ve learned from your on-line experience and use it to your advantage.

The other thing I suggest you do is take the information you’ve learned from this article and use it to have an intelligent conversation with the on-line service provider you choose. As them to clarify these issues and tell you how they plan on safeguarding your valuable information.

The day is going to come, and it may be here already, when you discover that you need help with your email marketing campaign. Sending emails one at a time from your desktop computer just isn’t working for you any longer.

You have a few dozen or maybe a few hundred customers in your contact list, but you know you can grow that list quickly with some help. Using one of the on-line email marketing services seems to be a good solution. You know that most of the professional Internet marketers use an on-line permission based email marketing service, and maybe you should too.

Some of the more well-know companies that provide this service include: Aweber, Constant Contact, iContact, GetResponse, InfusionSoft and 1 Shopping Cart. There are literally hundreds of companies that offer this service, each with they’re own set of features and pricing, which can make selecting the best service provider a challenging task.

In this article we’re going to evaluate the benefits of hiring an on-line permission based email-marketing company to help you build and maintain your list.

Email List Maintenance

Let’s start with list maintenance. When you hire an email marketing service, they take care of all of the technical issues. They have technicians on staff who have a vested interest in seeing that your email marketing campaigns run without a hitch. If there’s a problem with the software or equipment, they have someone on-call 24/7 to take care of it immediately. For many email marketers, this piece of mind is priceless.

Initial Cost Savings

There are no up-front costs. You won’t have to invest hundreds of dollars in software and hundreds more to install it on a dedicated server. Nor will you be responsible for installing software updates or having to worry about creating a security threat on your server.

If you choose to use an email marketing service to maintain your email list, they’ll charge you as little as $15 – $20 per month for a list of up to 500 names. And, depending on your business, you may never have more than 500 people on your list. If you do, these services will easily scale up to meet your needs at a reasonable price.

But before you decide on which service you want to use, it’s important to check with them to see if their monthly fee is based on the size of your list or the number of emails you send each month. So, if you think email marketing is going to play an important role in your marketing mix, I suggest you invest in a service that charges a fee based on the size of your list rather then the number or emails you send. They’re generally a much better value.

Training Tools

The other thing I really like about most of email marketing services are the training tools they offer. In order to insure that you have a good experience with their service, they go out of their way to create a variety of tools to show you how to use their system. Some have training videos while others offer on-line help and free webinars. This is a huge benefit and one you really can’t appreciate fully until the time comes to use their software.

Feature Rich

Look for a service that provides all the bells and whistles. The companies I listed above offer some really cool features that will help you supercharge your email marketing campaign. Look for things like:

• Ability to import your current mailing list
• Ability to send auto-responders
• Ability to send newsletters
• Remove unsubscribed contacts
• Ability to group your emails contacts
• Automatically detect duplicate emails
• Add additional information fields in the sign-up box
• Required opt-in
• Ability to add and host images
• Ability to add hyperlinks
• Create plain text messages
• Create HTML messages
• Availability of templates
• See your email in WYSIWYG format
• View HTML source code
• Add email footer
• Create web forms
• Email scheduling
• SPAM test
• Email test
• Click-through tracking
• Conversion tracking
• Sent emails
• Delivered/Undelivered emails
• Bounced emails
• Opened emails
• Forwarded emails
• View unsubscribed contacts
• Integration with Google Analytics
• Email support
• Phone support
• Free trial
• On-line community
• High customer reviews

In Conclusion

Using and on-line permission based email marketing company could be just the thing you’re looking for to build your business and stay in touch with your customers. The cost of using one of these services along with the piece of mind that someone else is going to take responsibility for maintaining your list is priceless.

The thing to keep in mind is that once you begin to use a service, it will be very difficult to change in mid-stream. With a little research, you almost can’t go wrong using any of these services.

I would suggest you look hard at the service offered by Aweber. This is the service used by the majority of professional email marketers, and they’re using it because it works.

Before you invest hire one of these companies to run your email marketing campain for you, let me encourage you to read  part 2 of this article entitled: Permission Based Email Service: What Are The Disadvantages?

Feature Rich
Great Service
Great Reviews
Great Price
Scalable
Easy To Use
Best Value

I’ve done the work and here’s what I’ve discovered. You can go in one of two ways. You can invest in software and host it on your dedicated server, or you can use an on-line email marketing company.

These articles will help you decide if Direct Marketing Software is the right choice for you.

• Email Marketing Software: What Are The Advantages?
• Email Marketing Software: What Are The Disadvantages?

After extensive research, we decided to invest in email marketing software by Interspire and we couldn’t be happier. If you feel the software solution is right for you, I know you’ll be delighted with this software too.

But, this is not the route taken by the majority of professional email marketers. Most of them have gone with one of the on-line email marketing solution like Aweber.

After evaluating the top four most popular on-line services and talking to dozens of Internet marketers about their experience, I strongly recommend that you to start with the service Aweber. The reason is simple.

All of the email marketing companies offer you a free trial in order to get you interested in their service. Problem is, it’s only after you set up your campaign on their system that you will you discover why most of the Internet marketers use Aweber. Then you’ll have to go through the entire learning process again.

Many of the on-line services are good, but they’re not as good as Aweber. Anyway, this is what I learned from our experience at Recognized Expert and I hope it will help you.

Cheap Email Marketing

Before you hire an email marketing service or purchase professional email marketing software, let’s discuss why you shouldn’t run your email marketing campaign from your computer. In reality, you can’t.

It seems like a simple solution doesn’t it. You’ve been successfully sending emails to your family and friends for years, so why can’t you use the same system to send emails to your customers?  Here’s why.

One, Two And/Or Three?

If you’re like most people, your email account is set up in one of three ways.

1. You’re using one of the free email services like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.
2. You’re using an email address from your ISP or Internet Service Provider like SBC, Comcast or RoadRunner.
3. You’re using an email address from a share hosing service where your website is located like Hostmonster, HostGator or iWebHosting.

All of these services provide basic email service allowing you to send and receive a limited number of emails per day. None of these services are set up to send bulk emails, and all of them have policies in place to insure that their customers don’t use their service for that reason. Let’s look at the problems of trying to do so.

You Can’t Make Me … Oh Yes We Can

To start, all three services forcefully limit the number of outbound emails you can send to 50 per hour. They also have a daily limit you’re not allowed to exceed. Normally this isn’t a problem if you’re sending emails in accordance with their policy. But try sending an email to 500 people at a time and your email service provider will notice, and react.

If you do attempt to send more than 50 emails at one time, one of three things is going to happen.

1. Your service provider will lead you to believe that they sent all of your emails, when the reality is; they only sent the first 50 and disregarded the rest.
2. Your service provider will only send the first 50 emails on your list and not attempt to send the rest, but they will inform you of the problem.
3. Your service provider will see you as a spammer, someone who broke their terms of service and immediately ban your account until the problem is resolved. This is potentially an even bigger problem if you’re using a shared host, because they will also shut down access to your website.

50 Max

If you do decide to work within the restrictions set forth by your email service provider, you certainly can space out your emails and limit them to 50 per hour. But consider this; if you had 500 on your list it would take 10 hours to manually send each of them your message.

If you manually limit the number of emails you send at one time to 50, your emails will be sent, but that’s no guarantee that your message will get through to your recipient’s in-box. As it turns out, there is a much bigger problem.

I Didn’t Mean To Spam You

When you send an email using any of these services, you’re sending it from a shared server or shared host that has restricted access to the MTA or Mail Transfer Agent. What that means to you is that it will be impossible for you to implement several of the very critical anti-spam technologies allowing your emails to get through spam filters.

Without having these anti-spam technologies in place, you could easily set off a chain of events that would temporarily shut down your email account for spamming or have it removed forever. This is not a risk you want to take.

What Are You Trying To Tell Me?

It would sure look like using one of these email services would be the easiest and cheapest way to go about email marketing, but it’s not. If you want to test it, try sending a message to 51 people from your computer and then ask the 51st person if they received your email. Or better yet, just check with your ISP or shared hosting company and review their email terms of service.

And even if your emails do get through, which they won’t, you still have to deal with the bigger problem of having your account banned when your service provider discovers that you’re breaking their rules or at the least, bending them. Be forewarned, you don’t want to discover this after it’s too late.

Do yourself a favor and quickly dismiss any idea of running an email marketing campaign from your computer using any of these email services. It’s against their terms of service and it’s not going to work.

There have been thousands of others who have wasted days and weeks trying to figure this out, only to discover that they’ve wasted days and weeks trying to figure it out.

I Do Want To Do This The Right Way

If you want to do email marketing the right way, you’re either going to have to invest in professional email marketing software like Send Studio or hire an email marketing service like Aweber. If you try anything else, you’re going to waste a lot of time and possibly do irreversible damage to your business.

Why Owning Email Marketing Software Is A Bad Idea

In my previous article I discussed the advantages of owning your own email marketing software. I encourage you to read that article first and then come back and read part 2 on the disadvantages. Read “Email Marketing Software: What are the Advantages.”

Before you purchase email marketing software, it is really important that you understand the disadvantages of doing so. If these are issues you can easily overcome, owning the software may be the best solution for you.

High Initial Cost

If you purchase high-end email marketing software, you can expect to pay at least $500 for a quality program and it will most likely have to be installed on a dedicated or a virtual dedicated server. If you already have a dedicated server, this won’t be an issue. If you don’t, you can expect to pay no less than $60/month for this service.

You will also be responsible for the cost of software upgrades. Some upgrades are voluntary while others are mandatory. You don’t want to be responsible for running software on your server that’s a security risk to your business. Not investing in software upgrades can cause a much bigger problem than just loosing your email list.

Bandwidth is another expense that you’ll have to pay for every time you send an email. If you’re sending graphically rich emails to a large list on a frequent basis, this could become an issue. If not, bandwidth is not going to be a problem.

Technical Help

The biggest potential cost of owning professional email marketing software is the cost of a technician. If you’re not an email-marketing technical expert, you’re going to need access to someone who is.

Setting up and maintaining an email-marketing program takes the skill of a professional, and they don’t come cheap. Plan on investing a minimum of 4 hours for the initial software set-up and at least one hour a month to handle system malfunctions and maintenance.

These estimates are based on the time it takes a professional email-marketing technician to install and maintain software on your server. If this isn’t what your technician does for a living, it could cost much more.

You’ll also want to invest in the technical support offered by the software company. Their fees start at $100 per year and I would not consider purchasing software from a company that does not offer this service.

The annual service fee usually cover things like general support, setup and configuration questions, basic troubleshooting and access to the free software upgrades that you’ll be responsible for installing on your system.

However, don’t expect them to do the heavy lifting. They’re not responsible for configure your MTA to use DomainKeys, DKIM or SenderID.  Nor should you expect them to submit your abuse@domain address to major companies like Comcast, Yahoo! or Hotmail as your anti-spam feedback loop address.

Configuring your SPF, PTR and DNS records are your responsibility as well as insuring that your server’s outbound IP address and your domain name don’t end up on any of the major email black lists. That’s not what you’re paying them to do.

And if anything I just wrote about above sound foreign to you, you’re definitely going to need an email marketing technician to help you get started.

So in conclusion, should you invest in your own email marketing software or not? If you can answer, “yes” to these five questions, purchasing software is a good solution.

1. Do you have an initial investment of $500 – $1,500?
2. Do you plan to build your list to 10,000 people this year?
3. Are you planning to build more than one list?
4. Do you have your own dedicated or virtual dedicated server?
5. Do you have easy access to an email marketing professional?

If you couldn’t answer, “yes” to all five questions, owning your own software may not be right for you today. But that doesn’t mean this won’t be the best solution for you in the future. Here’s what I suggest.

If you’re not at the point where owning and hosting your own email marketing software is your best solution, start with one of the many email marketing services. You can learn everything you need to know about running a successful email marketing campaign from them without the substantial upfront costs of owning your own software.

Once you build your list and have access to a professional email-marketing expert, or become one yourself, then consider purchasing your own software.

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.

So, how does permission based email marketing work and how can you make it work for you? The reality is, you can use email marketing to accomplish lots of different things.

You can use it to:

1. Sell a product or service
2. Generate leads
3. Brand yourself as the expert in your field
4. Build celebrity status for yourself
5. Inform, educate and inspire the people on your list

Permission based Email marketing can do all of these things and more. You can even build multiple lists with different goals and target different audiences with different needs. The most important thing is to determine what you want to accomplish before you begin.

Here’s a simple example of how email marketing works. Let’s assume that you’re a professional landscape architect and you want to use email to sell your services to people who want a palatial backyard. Up until now, you’ve been sending emails to your prospects from your computer. Problem is, it’s not only time consuming but it’s not giving you the results you want.

After talking to a friend, you decide to give email marketing a try.

Step 1: Software or Service

The very first thing you need to do is to decide if you want to purchase email marketing software and run it from your server, or outsource it to an email marketing service company that can maintain your list for you. There are pros and cons to both, but for this example let’s assume that you decide to outsource this service. This is how 95% of the professional Internet marketers do their permission based email marketing.

Step 2: Gather Contact Information

The next thing you’ll need to do is gather the contact information of the people you want on your email list. If you have a website or blog, you can create a “Sign-up” box and encourage visitors to give you their name and email address there.

If you don’t have a website, you can acquire this information by asking every potential customer you meet to give you their name and email address and manually add that information to your software program.

Step 3: Write An Auto-Responder Series

Most email marketing programs allow you to send an email message to your list using either a newsletter feature or an auto-responder feature. Let’s start with the auto-responder. Here’s how it works.

You write a series of emails that the people on your list will find interesting and helpful. Since you’re a landscape architect, your messages might look like this.

1. How to convert your backyard into a zoo for children.
2. Five trees that will shade your house in the summer and sun it the winter.
3. Three cool backyard projects you can complete in a weekend.
4. How to build a water feature for under $300.
5. How to create a backyard scent for all seasons using herbs.
And so on and so forth.

You want to make sure that you let your prospects know that you’re available do these things if they don’t have the time or energy to do it themselves. And you can also direct them to an affiliate website where they can purchase the tools necessary to complete each project without your help. Either way, you earn money.

After your messages are written, you set the auto-responder to schedule your first email to be sent within minutes of someone signing up on your list. Then you schedule each additional email to be delivered every three days or every week automatically until all of your messages have been delivered.

Studies show that it takes between 7 and 11 positive contacts before a prospect feels comfortable enough to buy from you. By the time they’ve received and read all of your automated emails, the people on your list are going to see you in a different light. They’re going to:

• See you as an expert in your field.
• See you as a celebrity.
• Trust you.
• Like you.
• And most importantly, they’re going to think about you when they’re ready to landscape their backyard.

Step 4: Write and Send a Monthly or Quarterly Newsletter

You’ll also want to send a monthly or quarterly newsletter to your entire list so you can stay in touch with the people who have completed your auto-responder. The newsletter feature allows you to inform the people on your list about an up-coming event or tell them about a limited time offer or send them interesting industry news.

Think of it this way. The purpose of the auto-responder is to build your credibility, celebrity, trust and reputation as the expert in your field; and the purpose of the newsletter to stay in touch with your entire list so that you are front-of-mind when they’re ready to become a customer. This is how email marketing works.

Just a few years ago I would have suggested that you avoid email marketing if your clientele was composed of children or senior citizens. Not today. Almost everyone has access to email. And if they don’t have a computer of their own, they certainly have a friend or family member who accepts emails on their behalf.

If you’re not using email marketing as a major component of your marketing mix, now is the time to start, and here are nine reasons why.

1.    It Puts You In The Drivers Seat
As a professional Internet marketer I can tell you it’s a lot easier to get people to visit your website than it is to get them to come back. The vast majority of visitors to your site will not return unless you invite them back with a compelling reason to do so. Email marketing is how you invite them back to your site, and you can invite them whenever you want.

2.    It’s Easy To Get Started
Email marketing is easier today than at any other time in the history. There are some wonderful services and tutorials that can help you generate leads and stay in touch with your customers that did not exist just a few short years ago.
Not only that, but if you decide that you don’t have the time or don’t want to learn how to do email marketing yourself, there are virtual assistants all over the world who are very capable of writing and sending your emails for you. And they do a great job at a reasonable price.

3.    It’s Affordable
There are three ways of going about email marketing.

1. You can do it yourself from your computer for free, but this is generally not a good idea for a lot of reasons. If you have more than 50 people on your list, you really need something more professional.
2. You can hire an email marketing service to host your list and help you run your campaign. This is a great solution starting at about $15/month for a list of up to 500 people and they will take care of all the back-end technical issues.
3. The third solution is to purchase and install email marketing software on a dedicated server. This is a little more pricey, but if you have access to qualified technician and you don’t mind investing $500-$1,000 up front, this is a very good long term solution particularly if you plan on building a list of 10,000 or more.

Depending on your budget, the number of people on your list and your technical capabilities, one of these methods is going to work best for you.

4.    It’s Fast
Think how long it takes to type a letter, prepare an envelope, apply postage and have your message delivered. It takes days. And if you want to have it delivered next day, your only other option is to send it via FedEx or UPS or Express Mail with the Postal Service, and that’s not cheap.

Email is instantaneous. It travels at the speed of light. So if you have a marketing idea that comes to you in your sleep, you can role out of bed and send it to your list before you wake up. Now that’s fast, possibly dangerous, but fast.

5.    It’s Measurable
This is what I love most about email marketing. You can measure everything. You can determine who received your email, who opened your email, who acted on your offer, who passed your email onto a friend and who opted out of your list. You can’t do that with standard mail and you can’t do that with radio, TV or any other form of advertising.

6.    It’s Automated
Imagine spending an afternoon or a day creating an entire email marketing campaign and having it automatically start the moment your visitor signs up on your website. Now imagine this happening 24/7 for as long as you’re in business without ever having to look at it again.

Once you create your campaign, the software does the rest. You can automatically send everyone who signs up on your list a series of messages that move them closer to the sale while generating trust and branding yourself as the expert in your field.

7.    It’s Flexible
You can do things with email marketing that can’t be done in any other way. You can send audio, video, text, photos, surveys, computer files and more, all in the same email if you choose to do so.

If you use TV, radio or print, you’re limited in what you can do with that specific media. With email marketing, you can mix it up and keep your prospects interested.

8.    It’s Green
What kind of a conscientious human being would I be if I didn’t mention that email marketing is good for the environment? It doesn’t destroy the rain forest in Brazil or impact the living space of the Spotted Owl or Bald Eagle here in the United States. It doesn’t pollute the water or throw radioactive waste into the atmosphere. And it doesn’t contribute even a fraction of a degree to global warming.

Email marketing just does what it does best, with the full blessing of Al Gore and Ralph Nader. You can’t get greener than that.

9.    It’s Effective
The most valuable thing email marketing does for you is it works. It positions you as the expert in your field, it builds credibility and trust, and it sells your products and services day in and day out. Email marketing is a winner no matter how you look at it.

In my next post I’m going to show you how email marketing works, and how you can make it work for your business.