Berkhamsted Web Design

What is a bulk email service provider?

Sending out an email newsletter to people that have specified an interest in your products or services is a great way of strengthening your brand and the good news is it now even easier with pay as you go bulk email service providers (ESP). ESPs’ provide a way for business owners to send out large amounts of email to prospective and existing customers.

Campaign Monitor

Here at Berkhamsted Web Design we are massive fans of using Australian based Campaign Monitor to send out email on behalf of our customers. The service provided is reliable, inexpensive and is backed up by a friendly support team.

How much does it cost?

First things first, it costs $5 to send a campaign, and 1¢ per recipients (USD not AUD), so if you had 250 email addresses that you wanted to send an email out to it would cost you about £4.60.

Before sending your first newsletter

There are lots of technical aspects to consider before sending bulk email, such as adding SPF and DomainKeys to your preferred sending domain. Using the Campaign Monitor interface to manage your lists and emails is made super easy allowing you to control the various aspects of maintaining an email newsletter list. The signup process can be customised with custom responses to the various actions, subscribes, unsubscribes, thank you pages and emails. There is an API allowing seemless integration of your lists within your own website (see our PHP example – Integrated within CMS Made Simple). There is a template library where you can select predefined designs or add your own. It will also allow you to setup multipart emails, where you have an HTML and a plain text version for users who disable HTML email in their email client. It even has single-click integration with Google Analytics.

What happens after sending?

After creating your first list and sending your newsletter, you get statistics on who opened, clicked, bounced and unsubscribed. Bounces are handled automatically, hard bounces are automatically added to the supression list, whilst there is a threshold that handles soft bounces. They have feedback loop reporting and will alert you if the number of SPAM complaints is too high, giving you the chance to do something about it, such as adding a permission reminder to your email.

What about SPAM?

Campaign Monitor take the issue of sending SPAM email very seriously, before sending to a list, you will need to be vetted by the CM team to ensure that your newsletter subscribers actually want to receive your email (permission based email). You can ensure this is the case by making your potential subscribers go through double opt-in, i.e. after completing your subscribe form they will need to click on a confirmation link sent to the email address they used to subscribe.

We can help you get started with sending bulk email, contact Berkhamsted Web Design today to discuss your requirements.

Related posts:

1. Bulk Email Newsletters
2. Integrate Campaign Monitor API into CMS Made Simple
3. e-Marketing in Berkhamsted

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Tags: bulk email, campaign monitor, email newsletter, spam, subscribers

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 7:03 am and is filed under Website Design & Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.