Being a provider of Outlook import/export products, we are aware of many customers that use (or want to use) Outlook for bulk mailing to some or all of their contact lists. However, there are some limitations and pitfalls associated with that process that many may not be aware of. Some of those limitations/pitfalls are as follows:
- Distribution lists (otherwise known as Contact Groups in Outlook ’2010) are used to simplify grouping of similar contacts together. Unfortunately, the size of a distribution list can be limited in terms of membership size so multiple DL’s may be required to send to all desired contacts
- There may be limits imposed on the number of emails that can be sent via your ISP at one time. This is done as a security measure to prevent individuals from sending out SPAM. Unfortunately, there is no way for the ISP to determine if what is being sent is spam or not.
- It is not uncommon for a recipient to simply mark any given message as “spam”. This could be a message from you or from a newsletter that they subscribed to even after having gone through a double opt-in subscription process. They either forgot who you are, forgot that they subscribed to something, simply made a mistake, or were just lazy and don’t care. Regardless of the reason, the net effect is the same – you get blacklisted. If enough people do that from an email sent directly from you, it could result in emails from your server or your email domain being blocked automatically which could impact anyone else that may be sending emails from your organization or using the same email server as you.
- Many spam prevention tools used by organizations view the “source” of an email to determine if the inbound message is to be considered as spam. This is done in various ways which includes checking the IP address of the sending email server, the inbound server’s name etc. For those using <shared resources>, a sending email server may be flagged by organizations as being known for sending spam and as a result block your message. While you, yourself, may never have sent out anything that would qualify as spam, there is no way to know if others, completely unrelated to you using the same email server are the cause of the problem. The benefit of using a professional email marketing service (such as Constant Contact) is that these are considered to be “trusted sources” by most spam prevention tools so the likelihood of your message getting through is much greater.
One of the best solutions we’ve found to circumvent all of the above in addition to making email marketing a very simple and fast process is Constant Contact – our preferred provider for the very large to smallest marketer.
In addition to avoiding the problems listed above – Constant Contact also provides:
- quick and effective communication with your contacts on a regular basis
- ability to effortlessly create professional and email communications that suitable for the type of message (newsletter, sales promo etc)
- comprehensive statistical reporting – know who opened your email and what was of interest to them
Try Constant Contact free for 60 days and see for yourself what a difference it can make.