Sending email marketing campaigns has become a must for any business, no matter how large or small they are. But, sending emails en masse can pose serious problems to your business. These risks are reviewed in more detail in this article.
What Are The Risks?
Some of the major risks are as follows:
- Limits will be placed:
If you go through the traditional Internet Services Provider (ISP), you are normally allowed to create as many email addresses as you need to and send as much email as you need to within reason. But if you exceed beyond this threshold on a consistent basis, your ISP will simply view these emails as “Spam”, and mark them as such. As a result, if any of them go through, it will be delivered at a much slower rate than normal. Or in a worst-case scenario, they may not be delivered at all. - Being blacklisted:
If your ISP blocks your emails, normally you can work something out with them, especially if you are a first time violator. But, if you keep sending emails on a bulk level basis, you run the grave risk of being blacklisted by an anti-spamming agency, such as Spamhaus. If this happens, not only will your emails be permanently blocked, but your entire domain will be as well. The result here is that your entire website will be made unavailable to your prospects and customers. Also, it is very important to keep in mind that it can take a very long time to restore your domain should this situation actually occur. - Using personal email addresses:
If you make use of an email address that originates from a Yahoo, Google, etc., you run a much greater risk of being marked as “Spam”. This simply means that your prospects and customers will simply not receive the emails you send to them, that is unless they make the effort to check their “Spam Folder”. You are far better off using your business email address, but again, even here, you have to be very careful in the amount of emails that you send out at any point time. - Unable to access analytics:
When you do an email campaign, there are certain metrics that are important to have access to in order to gauge the effectiveness of your campaign. Some of these include the following:*The Open Rate: This tells you how many of your prospects and customers actually opened your email.*The Click Through Rate: This reflects how many of your prospects and customers actually clicked on a link in your email message.
*The Conversion Rate: This describes how many of your prospects and customers actually took the desired action that you intended them to take in your email message.
Of course, there are others that are important as well. But the point here is that if you get blacklisted, you will no longer be able to access these key metrics. This even includes any historical data that you may have stored.
- The data privacy laws:
Although the original intention of these pieces of legislation has been to protect your PII (Personal Identifiable Information) datasets, the regulators of them are now also starting to crack down on bulk emailing, if it is not done within reason. Not every business is bound by the tenets and provisions of these laws (there are certain requirements that have to be met), but if you are required to be compliant with them and are not, you could face an exhaustive audit and even financial penalties. - Using the Blind Cabon Copy (BCC):
The temptation of business owners is to just send emails to all of the recipients at once using the “BCC” is very strong. After all it saves time. But in the end, this can totally backfire on you. For example, many ISPs now become suspicious if you put too many recipient email addresses in the “BCC” field. As a result, not only will you be blocked, but you could also be blacklisted here as well. The best way to avoid this is to actually send one email to each recipient directly. - Reputational damage:
Another grave consequence of being blacklisted is that your business could suffer tremendous financial loss from reputational damage. Not only could you lose your existing customers, but it could be more difficult to find new ones.
What Is The Alternative?
Believe it or not, there is an option that you can use in order to send out bulk emails even on a daily basis. For this, you will need to go to a service provider that specializes in doing just this. A prime example of this is a platform called “SENDGRID”. To give you an idea of just how much you can send out, here are their pricing plans:
- The Free Plan:
As the name implies, there is no cost. With it, you can send up to 100 emails per day. - The Essentials Plan:
This runs at $19.95 per month. With it, you can send up to 100,000 emails per month. - The Pro Plan:
This runs at $89.95 per month. With it, you can send up to 2.5 million emails per month. - The Premier Plan:
This is a customized tier, so the pricing will vary depending upon your email marketing needs. This is geared towards much larger sized businesses whose main “bread and butter” is the sending out of mass emails on a daily basis.
What is different here is that you are not sending out your bulk emails, SENDGRID is doing this on your behalf, using their own email servers, which have been certified for the sole purpose of bulk emailing. So by using this kind of service, you totally eliminate all of the risks that were detailed in the last section of this article.
Conclusions
Don’t take the risk of being blacklisted. If this ever happens to you, it is not easy to restore your domain. Take the steps now to learn how to avoid this by contacting us today.
