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

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.

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.

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!

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.

If you have customers, it’s a good time to send them a note of thanks and warm wishes for a Happy New Year. The holidays also provide a great opportunity to send a generous gift or discount coupon to your customers. Have you ever considered taking a portion of your advertising budget and spending it directly on your existing, loyal customers rather than on potential business relationships? Think about it.

Here is a selection of holiday email templates available in GroupMail.

GroupMail also allows you to import your own HTML email holiday templates and save them in GroupMail’s template folder. Have you designed a holiday email template that you’re proud of? If so, provide a link in the comments of this post so that we can get inspired.

The pilgrims were thankful after traveling to an unknown land – a land that did not have hospitals, transportation, housing or schools. They came with a dream and a hope for a better life. And they built it. Would we be so brave today? Here’s to all of today’s leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators and activists who take risks in hopes of creating something better for everyone.

“Thanksgiving Day is a jewel, to set in the hearts of honest men; but be careful that you do not take the day, and leave out the gratitude.” -E.P. Powell

I and the entire team at Infacta wish all of our customers, friends and families a very Happy Thanksgiving.

Thank you for being part of the Infacta community.

After entering these details, click OK and Ok again on the Account Properties screen to save those changes.

For more information, watch my video tutorial, How to Configure Your GroupMail Sender Account.

1. Open GroupMail and click on “Tools”, “Account Manager” and click “New” to create a new sender account.

2. Complete the User Information on the Account Properties screen using your Gmail email address as the “From” address.

3. Click on the “Delivery Options” tab and enter smtp.gmail.com as the SMTP server and check the “Requires Authentication” box. Click Setup.

4. Check the “Use SMTP Authentication (outbound) box, keeping “AUTH Login (default)” and enter your full Gmail email address and password for that account. Click OK.

5. Click on the Advanced button at the bottom of the “Delivery Options” screen and change the SMTP Port from 25 to 587 and check the “Server Requires an SSL Connection” box (keeping the default STARTTLS setting). Click OK.

6. Test your settings by clicking the Test button at the bottom of the “Delivery Options” screen and “Test” again.

7. Close the Test screen and click OK on the Account Properties screen to save your settings.

If you have more than one Gmail account, you can create a new GroupMail Sender Account for each Gmail account that you have.

Here is a short list of some things that email marketers wish they were were independent from:

1. Non-standard HTML rendering across the growing number of email clients that cause HTML email to appear different to each recipient on your list.
2. The ever-growing number of delivery hurdles that email marketers must jump over to get legitimate email delivered to recipients.
3. Stringent email sending policies of mail SMTP hosts and ISPs which make it difficult for small businesses to communicate with their customers. It’s time to start understanding that even small businesses have big lists of customers today.
4. Over-zealous anti-spam filters that prevent legitimate email from reaching the inbox and yet somehow allow large volume spammers to get through.
5. Recipients using the “Report as Spam” button rather than the available unsubscribe mechanism.

For all of our US customers and friends, we hope that you enjoy the celebrations.

Happy 4th of July!