Monday, June 30, 2014

3 Reasons You Haven’t Considered For Using A Professional SMTP Service Provider

Every ISP (Internet Service Provider) uses a server, a SMTP service provider, to allow you to send email. However, these SMTP servers are designed to handle personal emails and small bulk mailings. Most ISP SMTP servers are limited to about 250 emails per day and they will actively filter for what they can determine are bulk mailings using their free system.

Speed Up Business

For a business that is sending hundreds or thousands of emails a day an ISP SMTP server is too slow, too unreliable and too likely to filter out your emails. It also puts you at risk of being blacklisted with ISPs as a spammer. To prevent these issues companies of all sizes use a professional SMTP service provider. This gives you a dedicated IP address that is associated with all your emails, allows fast, reliable delivery and allows you to send literally as many emails per day as your computer system can handle.

While these are important reasons to choose a SMTP service provider there are other reasons that are essential from a business perspective.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework)

If you are using a professional SMTP service provider and have a dedicated IP then the company can identify the specific servers that will generate your emails. With this information hackers trying to set up phishing scams, sending messages that look like yours to your customers, will have much greater difficulty in getting those messages to your customers.

Analytics

Depending on the SMTP service provider that you select the analytics that they offer can be absolutely invaluable. Imagine if you could know what links in your emails your clients or customers clicked on and even the date and time they clicked the link. In addition you can also track geographic locations, when the recipient opened and read your emails, what ISP your client is using, at what time of the day your emails have the greatest chance of being read across your contact lists and even who unsubscribes and why they do it.

If you haven’t considered all the benefits to using a professional SMTP service provider it is definitely worth a look. You may be surprised to find the opportunities you are missing by not having a provider working for your business. As a top SMTP service provider we know how to get your email to your clients.

Avoid Basic Mistakes To Improve Your E-mail Marketing Program

Despite the best intentions of many company owners, marketing directors and entrepreneurs, e-mail marketing campaigns often end up with few actual results. There are several reasons why e-mail marketing programs can be ineffective and these simple mistakes are easy to spot when email design and marketing professionals aren’t involved.

One of the biggest failures of homegrown e-mail marketing programs is that consumers have difficulty in signing up for the newsletter, whitepaper or report. You want to have buttons on your website, your Facebook page, links on your Twitter feed and all other social media sites to get customers to sign up. Of course, you also have to make it attractive to get them to leave their email address, which means coming up with a way to provide information, advice, support or tips that are of value to the audience you want to market to.

Provide Short Segments, Not Long Articles

Ideally keep your tips, segments, text blocks or information to a manageable amount. This means using bullets that are:

  • Short and to the point
  • Give the reader useful information
  • Highlight what you need them to know
  • Emphasize your brand, product and service

You can link to longer articles on your website for those that want to find out more.

Avoid Little Mistakes

Typing errors, grammatical mistakes, irregular punctuation or writing style and even the font type and size will either make your e-mail marketing newsletter or report attractive and professional or messy and unprofessional. The most common mistakes include using tiny font that is difficult to read or using a font type that isn’t clear. Cursive types of fonts or extremely ornate calligraphy types of fonts are a challenge for many people and they will simply click on the next email rather than try to figure out the content.

It is also important to consider your target audience and customize the e-mail marketing to meet their needs. This may mean having different newsletters going to different groups and lists based on their interests. While this may create more work, it also is the most effective way to make sure your e-mail marketing is read and not ending up in the spam folder. We can improve your e-mail marketing program using our proven strategies and techniques.

Top Reasons To Use A Dedicated SMTP Server

Regardless of why you have to send emails it is also important for a company to have the capacity to send the information they need to the people that need to have it. This may be sending newsletters, providing monthly billing statements to your customers or even sending out daily, weekly or monthly sales emails. Having a dedicated SMTP server to handle all your outgoing emails ensures that you have peace of mind for several different reasons.

Avoid Not Being Able to Send Emails

If you are using your ISP SMTP server you will quickly discover that there are a set number of emails that can be sent from an email address through the system per day. Depending on your ISP this could be as low as a hundred or as high as a few hundred. However, once you reach this number you won’t be able to access outgoing email, sometimes until the next day.

Guaranteed Delivery with Tracking Ability

Since a dedicated SMTP server will never be identified as spam by other ISP filters, you email will get to your customer’s inbox each and every time you send. In addition, when working with a dedicated SMTP server you don’t have to just assume that is true, you will have the ability to track, in real time, if your emails have been received, read or responded to. You will also be able to track if a customer clicks on a link in your email and even how many times they went back.

24/7 Tech Support

With a dedicated SMTP server you have a whole IT department to help you out if you experience any difficulty in sending your emails or in the event of any type of error message. Look for a company providing servers that offers a solid uptime of 99.9% and 24/7 technical support.

Company Reputation

Finally, with a dedicated SMTP server, your email is never going to be listed as spam and our company won’t have to try to correct being blacklisted when you are completing bulk email campaigns.

In addition you won’t accidentally be blacklisted if some other company using a shared SMTP server is doing something wrong; you will be the only one using that server. This, and the other reasons listed above, are certainly top reasons to go with a dedicated SMTP server for your bulk emails.

We have more information on the value of a dedicated SMTP server for your business.