Two Types of Email Marketing Solutions

There are two major types of email marketing platforms out there. The decision about which one is the best one for you will depend on your business and where are you are in your list building.

The following are the questions you should ask yourself when evaluating email marketing software:

• Do you already have a list of contacts to import? Many of the popular email providers will not allow you to import an existing list of contact without sending a confirmation email to your subscribers. In most cases, this means you will lose 90% of your list during this re-confirmation process.
• How big and how fast do you expect your list to grow? Some of the solutions become very pricey when your list is big. Others stay more affordable.
• Do you need to integrate your email marketing with the shopping cart or your customer relationship management (CRM) solution? Some email solutions integrate with a number off-the-shelf software packages, some offer API that a programmer can use to connect two applications together, and some only work as stand-alone email platforms. 

So let’s talk about some types of email marketing software.

The first one is “hosted” or “cloud” solution. This means that for a monthly fee, you get access to the software hosted on someone else’s server. This approach is the most popular because it is the easiest one to get started with. It required the leave amount of technical knowledge. That’s the upside.

The downsides to this approach are as follows:

• All emails for all the users of that solution are sent through the same IP address, which means Gmail and other email readers will automatically flag your messages as mass email. 
• The rules these providers impose on you are typically very strict. You get a couple of spam complaints and your account can get suspended. And some of your readers may be clicking that “report spam” button simply because they don’t know the right way to unsubscribe from your list.

The second type of email marketing software is the one you would host on your own server. This approach is much more technically involved, however, if gives you greater control over your email marketing.
It is important that you pick and email script that automatically removes the unsubscribes and hard bounces, and also has the logic to handle soft bounces.

A script like this would send all the email through your IP address that is not shared with anyone else. This way your email score with blacklists and RBLs depends only on what you send out and not on what other people may be sending, as would be the case with a hosted email marketing solution.

There are ways to ensure a very high delivery rate from your self-hosted script, and that is by using an SMPT relay service. There are several to choose from, and they all add to your cost, however, that extra expense should be more than covered by increase sales due to better email delivery.