Six Reasons Why You Need an E-Mail Service Provider (ESP)

Using Outlook or any other e-mail client to send mass e-mails is like playing Russian roulette. It’s only a matter of time before the spin of the cylinder goes against you. The fallout can be fatal to your business. The small investment in technology can help you send professional-looking e-mails. Here are six ways that a good ESP (E-mail Service Provider) is superior for sending bulk e-mails:

1. CAN-SPAM Compliance. Using an ESP goes a long way toward insuring that you are compliant with U.S. CAN-SPAM regulations. You should also be aware that all e-mails that come from your business are subject to these rules, outlined on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) site (www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.htm).
2. Deliverability. Much of what ESPs do for you is behind the scenes. A major task is maintaining the highest possible deliverability rates for their users. Most have full-time personnel who manage relationships with all major ISPs, ensure that all their IP addresses are whitelisted, resolve spam complaints, and stay abreast of ISPs’ changing rules that affect deliverability.
3. Tracking. The whole point of launching an e-mail communications program is to build stronger customer relationships, reach more people, and increase your revenues. If you don’t have access to detailed campaign statistics, you’re flying blind. An ESP comes to the rescue with detailed, real time campaign statistics and tools to automate managing your customer information, subscribes, unsubscribes, and bounces.
4. Management. Trying to manually keep all your contacts’ data up-to-date can quickly become an onerous task. More critically, manual updating is prone to mistakes being made that can negatively impact your bottom line. E-mail marketing applications are, basically, sophisticated database management solutions designed to automate all those time-consuming "housekeeping" tasks that take you away from doing what you do best.
5. Formatting and Design. Some people love graphical e-mails. Others just want the facts in plain text. Still others read e-mail on the commute home on their Blackberries or Treos. So you want to send beautifully formatted HTML and text messages that get through all the filters and that anyone can read. Even though you’ve been told that you can build and send HTML e-mails with Outlook, there are no guarantees it will maintain formatting, whereas an ESP bases its reputation on doing exactly this.
6. Protecting your contacts’ privacy. How many times have you gotten an e-mail where everyone has been "cc-ed" and their e-mail addresses are exposed for the taking? How many times have you been warned that someone’s address book has been compromised by a virus and you start receiving all kinds of weird (as in SPAM) e-mails? Outlook is not meant to be used for mass e-mails. Neither is your Outlook address book a secure place to store and organize all your data. All ESPs provide secure storage for all your customer data, accessible by password. These programs make it impossible to expose e-mail addresses to other recipients.

So make the investment in your business, yourself, and your reputation. Don’t play games with your customers’ information. Just like you would seek legal advice from a lawyer or dental care from a trained doctor of dentistry, you need to entrust these valuable assets to a professional ESP that can help you be successful.

Lydia Sugarman, our e-mail marketing expert, serves clients through her e-mail marketing and communications company, Private Label Interactive (www.PrivateLabelInteractive.com).