Finding an email service provider (ESP)
There are many things to consider when
selecting an email service provider (aka "ESP") to handle your mass email needs. Factors to consider are the
feature set, ease of use, pricing model (contract or month-to-month),
selection of templates, post-send reporting and finally tech support. Only after taking all
these aspects into account should you choose your email solution.
This site exists to guide you through
the various services out there and to hopefully save you some time in
sorting through all the features. We try to find the good points and
bad points for you, so when you finally buy into one of them, you don't
run into any surprises, especially the bad kind!
Who needs an email service provider anyway?
Many times small businesses and
organizations start out by using a personal email account through
Outlook or Thunderbird to send out 10s or 100s of messages at once
to their list. As the list continues to grow, this can become more and
more cumbersome to maintain. As a result, the system can collapse or become unmanageable.
Potential pitfalls of sending from your own email client:
- Upkeep time increases as you manually add and delete people from your list when they ask to be added/removed.
- Potential to re-add "unsubscribed" people to your list, causing a possible backlash and spam reports.
- Potential to send duplicate message to the same person. This can look very unprofessional.
- Your message will be addressed
to "Undisclosed Recipients", or worse, to everyone in the CC:
field where everyones email address is visible to everyone else!
- Lack of central control over your list.
If it's on one computer, in someones address book, is it safe from
virus attacks, accidental loss or even theft?
- If you send from your own unique
domain (ex. client-news@abc-hardware.com) and your domain gets flagged
as sending out spam by an angry recipient, it could easily interfere
with critical business email communication to and from your domain.
This danger is often overlooked, but it's a big potential problem.
If you have experienced these problems, it's
probably time to look into a dedicated email solution to help you send
out your mass email.
ESPs to the rescue!
To grow and maintain a large list
effectively, one of the best options is to launch your mass emails from
a service that specializes in providing the "pipes" or bandwidth to
quickly send out hundreds or thousands of emails at once, as well as a
central storage place to hold and organize your email list. Generally,
most services have dedicated databases which are fast and backed up on
a regular basis.
The main advantages to using a dedicated
email service provider are lowered maintenance time, increased delivery
rates, ease of use, website integration and security. Other perks are
based on the specific functions that the ESP offers, including the
ability to target members of your list by user preference or segment,
open and clickthrough reporting, hosting graphics and fancy
templates, sending polls, setting up auto-responders, etc.
Are there any risks to using a web-based solution?
Even if you change over to a dedicated solution, there are a few possible problems you may run into.
Potential pitfalls of using an ESP:
- Some services may force you into a long term contract, 12 month or more, essentially locking you into a monthly service fee.
- If someone else can guess your account
password, you could have your entire database stolen. Always use a
password that is difficult to guess!
- Some ESPs force you to display their
own logo at the bottom of your message. Upgrading to a more expensive
plan may take this requirement away.
- If the website goes down or the server crashes, expect downtime relative to the companies backup/recovery systems.
- If you look closely at the email headers
(technical stuff), you can tell that the message is actually being sent
from the ESPs domain and not your own. But most recipients won't know
the difference as when they hit Reply, it'll be sent back to you at
your own domain, not the ESPs domain.
What are the alternatives to using a web-based ESP?
There are a few alternatives to using a 3rd party to host your email database.
The
first option is to setup a php or perl script on your domain that helps
you send out your mass emails out. This can be a good solution for some
as there are a lot of free and commercial scripts out there to do this,
but you run into the same problem of putting your own domain at risk of
being blacklisted because you are still sending from your own domain.
The
second option is to setup something like a Yahoo group or list-serve
that enables you to setup and send to your list. Yahoo groups offer
very basic functionality but are free, so this may it your needs if you
don't need much in terms of bells and whistles.
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