Building your list, distributing email newsletters and grow sales with email marketing is the hottest sales lead generation trend on the web today. Bulk email sending is one of the quickest and cost effective yet tedious processes around. Some businesses choose to outsource their email marketing tasks while others run email campaigns in-house.
How do you choose the best bulk email sender to distribute email newsletters at your own computer? Follow these tips to avoid spending your hard earned money for bad software.
Here are my top 10 questions to ask software selling company so you can reach your goals and benefit from email marketing:
- Once I purchased software, are there monthly subscription costs? If you have to pay monthly, you’ll get the same features and capabilities for more money than if you paid one time only. Just an example. If you have a list of say 25,000 subscribers, you pay $149 per month using an email service provider. This makes $1788 per year vs. one-time fee of $349 for desktop bulk email sender software.
- How many email addresses can I send the message to with your software? Ask the company about the list size limitation. If your mailing list is growing fast, you’ll just waste your money if the program cannot work with large lists. And ask them if you need to upload your list to their server or database, or your list will be stored in-house on your own computer. It’s important for your list of privacy and safety.
- Does your software have a built-in SMTP server? Ask this question if you don’t have your own mail server you can send emails through and if you can’t use your ISP SMTP settings due to email sending restrictions. If the software does not support SMTP free delivery or any other delivery method like Integration with Amazon SES API you could use instead, it simply won’t work for you.
- Is your program capable of processing bounce email messages? If it’s not, you’ll have to spend more bucks for a bounce processing tool or do this tedious task manually because you can’t afford to send to invalid email addresses. You care about your email list validity and your email sender reputation. That’s why ask the selling company if you will be able to easily process bounce email messages with their software and remove them from your list. Any reputable software must have bounce processing capability.
- Does your software provide any kind of opt-in link? Never buy or harvest emails on the Internet if you don’t want to end up on blacklists after a couple of sent emails. Ask the company if and how you will be able to collect opt-in recipients using their system. Probably they have some free tool or plugin you can use to place a sign-up form on your website or blog. If it’s possible, wonder how you will be able to send email newsletters to your subscribers. Is there an export option? Or is their software capable of connecting directly to the subscribers’ database on your server?
Make sure that bulk email sender software you choose fits your email marketing goals and target audience, reduces the cost and complexity of your email marketing efforts, and that the support will guide you every step of the way. Follow these tips to ensure you get what you pay for! If not, you could be headed for failure.