The Messaging Times

One of the benefits of working with a company whose products are used in over 160 countries by individuals and organizations of all types and sizes, is that you get to talk to some really interesting people. Recently, I talked to the Harlem Globetrotters and a guitarist for the Oak Ridge Boys, both GroupMail customers.

More often than not, the questions come from our not-so-famous (but equally important) customers, like one gentleman who asked if GroupMail could send messages to a list of six million email addresses that he had acquired [yesterday]. Of course, my first inclination was that this list of six million was acquired by some means other than opt-in, permission marketing. I explained that technically, the software allows users to create groups of an unlimited size, but that processing messages to such a volume of recipients would necessitate a robust mail server among other things. It turns out, he wanted to just send them through a free mail server like Hotmail without spending any money on anything but the software.

For the sake of all of us, I dissuaded him.

Another call was a bit more realistic in scope. A woman had an opt-in list of 5,000 recipients and wanted to use GroupMail to send personalized HTML newsletters to her list on a monthly basis. Her ISP (one of the big ones) has an email sending policy that prohibits customers from sending more than 200 messages per day through their STMP mail server. They also block Port 25 so GroupMail’s Direct Send mode wasn’t an option. Bulk Send mode doesn’t allow personalization, so that wasn’t an option for her either. I explained that GroupMail or any other desktop email marketing software doesn’t circumvent the email sending policy of her ISP. I suggested that she:

1. Contact her ISP to see if they have a business account that allows more messages to be sent each day (Comcast, for example, allows residential customers to send 1,000 messages per day while their Business customers can send 24,000 per day);
2. use a secondary outgoing mail server, like AuthSMTP, to route her messages through; or
3. acquire a web hosting company who offers full SMTP services and process your messages through your domain-hosted server. Sometimes, domain-hosted SMTP servers are more liberal with their email sending policy than large ISPs

Again, she didn’t want to spend any money on sending her messages out.

As your email list grows, so does your budget. While email remains to be the most cost-effective method for communicating directly with your prospects and customers and provides the best ROI; it’s not free. Aside from the costs required for email marketing software and access to a supporting outgoing mail server, effective email marketing requires time and effort on list maintenance, design, testing, delivery and measurement.

Effective email marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. But it certainly isn’t free.

Update: Seth Godin discussed another cost of email marketing today in his post, Friction

By default, GroupMail is set to process messages over Port 25. Sometimes, mail servers use other ports. Gmail, for example, uses Port 587 – as do a number of other providers.

To change the SMTP Port settings in GroupMail, click on “Tools”, “Account Manager” and “Modify” to edit the settings of your GroupMail Sender Account.

On the Account Properties screen, click the “Delivery Options” tab and click the “Advanced” button at the bottom of the screen.

Then, simply highlight the SMTP Port Number and change it to the Port number used by your provider.

Some mail servers require a secure SSL connection. If this is the case, ensure that you check the “Server requires and SSL connection” box.

Today was D-day for our Infacta Shave or Dye event in support of the Irish Cancer Society. The pressure was on, as the Irish team stepped up to the plate early. It was my turn today!

Before

After

And here’s the video evidence of my emasculation

Still not too late to donate to the Irish Cancer Society in support of my emasculation.

You can see some before and after photos of our Irish team.

Our team at Infacta is happily (if not somewhat reluctantly) participating in the Shave or Dye event on February 18th. On that day, Infacta employees will either shave their heads or dye the hair on top of it.

Although we love our collective hair; we like the thought of helping to find a cure for cancer more and we want to take part to raise awareness of the continued need for support in cancer research and treatment.

We will provide before and after photos and video of the events, which will take place both in our Ireland and US offices on February 18th. You can keep up with our progress and, most importantly, donate to our cause on our GroupMail blog.

Go on, make our baldness worthwhile!

Donate today to the Infacta Shave or Dye Event!

Although most email recipients today receive HTML email, some prefer to receive a text-only version of your message. GroupMail allows senders to include an automatically generated text version of their HTML message or a custom text-only message part for those recipients who prefer text-only format. If you create a text-only part for your message, then that portion will display only when recipients have their email clients set to view text-only format.

More importantly, the text will display to antispam filters who check the image/HTML to text ratio. Adding a text-only part to your HTML message will help to satisfy this criteria of antispam filters.

To create a text-only portion for your next email campaign, simply click on the Plain Text Message Part tab at the bottom of GroupMail’s message editor when composing your message.

Here, you can select to have GroupMail auto-generate a text version or create your own custom text version which is neatly formatted for text-only recipients.