5 Reasons Why Email Marketing Service Providers are a MUST

You’ve heard all the hype around email marketing, right? About how “email is still king” because it returns $40.56 for every dollar you put into it (in 2011, per the Direct Marketing Association). You might be thinking – what about social media? Isn’t that the more popular form of communication? Think – where to people receive notifications about that activity? Yep, still in their email.

Okay, so you’re probably already convinced about the importance of email marketing. And maybe you already have an email marketing program in place, or you at least send out a few promotional or relationship building emails every now and again.

Wait – don’t tell me – you send them out from your personal email account? Your gmail? Your yahoo? Your hotmail? Even if you bcc all your recipients… this can be dangerous for your business. Email marketing is NOT something you can do all by your lonesome (at least, not entirely) and here are 5 reasons why:

1 – Blacklisted

Yikes! That’s a scary word, isn’t it? But it’s true – if you use your own gmail, yahoo, even @yourdomain.com email account to send out your mass marketing messages, you put your own IP address at risk for being blacklisted by Internet Service Providers if you get flagged as spammy. What the heck does that mean? That means your regular everyday communications could have a harder time getting to your customers, partners and everyone else. Definitely not a situation you want to find yourself in!

Email service providers like MailChimp or Aweber have best practices in place to make sure this doesn’t happen. They keep a record of the opt-in when your subscriber signs up and also have things like spam filter checks to help you avoid the junk folder and being reported as spam.

2 – Subscription Management

If someone wants to subscribe to your list, do they just send you an email? What if they want to unsubscribe? Do you manually remove them from your list? What if they want to only receive your emails about a specific topic? How do you keep those straight? My guess is – you don’t. Or at least not perfectly.

With an email service provider, subscribers can easily subscribe and unsubscribe to your list or sublists without any manual data input needed! Yay!

3 – Did anyone even open that?

How do you know how successful your email campaign was if you send it from your own email account? Maybe you get a reply? You guess that traffic spike on your site was from it? I don’t like that kind of wishy data and you don’t have to either.

Email service providers can tell you EXACTLY how many people opened your email, which links they clicked on and even integrate with your website’s Google Analytics account. Bonus – they keep this data for ALL of your campaigns! So you can start to learn what is working and what’s not.

4 – Get your sleep and keep your sanity

If you’re sending an email campaign from your individual email account, you probably don’t have a way of scheduling your email so you have to stay up to your perfectly-selected email send-off time of 6am OR wake up early to send. Ugh. Stop that! Get some sleep!

With an email service provider, you can SCHEDULE your email to be sent ahead of time. Yes, for you overachievers out there, this means you could have your whole year scheduled out ahead of time if you were THAT on top of things (I’m definitely not!).

5 – Improve your campaigns like a scientist

How do you decide which email subject line will work best? Your gut? Sounds good but wouldn’t you like to REALLY know what gets you a higher open rate?

Email marketing service providers can help you with split tests – a scientific way of finding out how to improve your campaigns. MailChimp walks you through how it works with their service here. No more guesswork! And improved results. Win-win.

Want more on email marketing? You might want to check out 17 ways to get more subscribers for your list or 3 things you should NOT let your email marketing service do for you.

photo credit: Esparta via photo pin cc