Do you use your regular email program like Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, Gmail or Hotmail to send mass emails?

If you are, you should consider using specialized software to get the job done. The only option for you to send bulk emails using such programs is to Bcc your entire recipient list. Quite often, you may find yourself having to send your messages in batches because your ISP limits the number of recipients you can include in the Bcc header. But that’s not the only shortcoming. Here is a list of other issues.

1. Deliverability
The single most overlooked aspect of email marketing is ‘deliverability’. Most ISPs impose a limit on the number of emails you can send out from your domain. This is usually between 200 to 500 emails an hour. Excess emails may get ‘dropped’ and some ISPs have been known to disable email accounts when such activity is detected. This means that what you see in your ‘Sent’ folder doesn’t necessarily represent actual delivery success.I met a prospect that discovered this restriction and began sending her emails in batches … every hour! While she had creatively solved the problem of delivery, she still had to Bcc 300 recipients every hour until she completed sending to her entire list of 12,000. You can do the math!

2. Reputation Risks
Another crippling effect of blasting emails this way is ‘reputation’. Occasionally, people use the ‘Report Spam’ or ‘Junk Mail’ buttons to stop receiving emails from you. Every time they do this, their email program sends information about your email server to an international black list.If you offend too many people, your domain may end up on a black list. This is bad because your regular messages (transactional emails) may not reach their intended recipients and your business communications could suffer.

3. Reporting
Your regular email program will not tell you how many opens, clicks, forwards or complaints that your campaigns receive. If you think these statistics don’t concern you because your only goal is reaching as many people as possible, then consider the following case study which explains how reports can help you maintain a good image for your company.We studied a client’s email marketing strategy and found that every time they sent out invitations for an event, the same customers from a pool of 200 would respond to the call-for-action and sign up. Their mailing list had over 100,000 contacts but open-rates were always hovering at a low 1.5%. We suggested cutting the next campaign’s recipient list to include only recipients who had opened their emails before (approx 3,000).The results to sales did not change!

It was clear that the other 97,000 people were not interested in what our client was offering. By creating better subject lines, we managed to increase open rates to 4,700 within 2 months. However, that figure stagnated for another 4 campaigns. The client agreed to cut the other 97,000 contacts from the list so as not to risk being labeled a spammer. This is just one example of how reports can help you improve your email marketing strategies.

4. Bounce Management
When emails fail to get delivered, they are often ‘bounced’ back to the sender. Your regular email program receives these bounced emails in you inbox, mixing them with more important messages. While you can create filters to automatically folder these messages, you still have to diligently cross-reference these bounces with your address book to remove contacts with invalid email addresses. It’s still not that simple.Bounces are categorized as hard or soft. Hard bounces indicate that a contact’s email address is no longer in use. Soft bounces come with statuses such as ‘mailbox full’ or ‘out-of-office replies’. This means when you clean your list, you have to read every bounce email and interpret it’s meaning.

5. Personalization
Unless you send individualized emails to all your recipients, you will not be able to personalize your messages by addressing contacts by name. Instead, you would have to use introductions like ‘Dear Customer’ instead of ‘Dear John’. Personalization is important because it’s the little things that count.

Mark Claudius Png is a guest blogger at Bionic Creative. He is the first Email Marketing Lobbyist and also the founder and applications developer of Shoutlabs.

Mark’s mission is to educate business owners on the mechanics of email marketing and prospect management. He does so by actively engaging marketeers with new ideas and encouraging them to be more active with email branding, a cost effective and extremely powerful method to deliver branding messages.

Off-work hours, Mark clinks beer glasses with Vicki, who also believes that Erdinger is a sign that God loves us.