When I consult with my clients on email marketing and email deliverability best practices, one question that comes up often is:
“Why do we need to pay to use something like Mailchimp or Constant Contact? We can send our newsletter using Outlook or GoldMine, right?”
My answer: Wrong. Don’t do that.
Here are a few reasons why:
- You can’t track emails delivered, hard bounces, emails opened, links clicked or manage unsubscribes.
- The bigger risk however, is blacklisting.
- Most email providers set a limit of 50 -100 email recipients per hour and 1000 recipients per day.
- If you’re business uses its own mail server to send emails, then you need to ensure that you are using email marketing BEST PRACTICES to manage your email addresses.
- Unfortunately, not everyone uses the best email marketing practices and your company’s mail server could be blacklisted.
- Recipients may flag your email as SPAM, and your company could be targeted to pay penalties. AND it could be blacklisted.
The bottom line, there isn’t a legitimate email marketer out there that would steer you towards sending a mass email from Outlook or even GoldMine (alone). Few will tell you it’s a good idea. It is best practices to use an Email Marketing Platform to send mass emails.
What are your options:
First, let me start by saying that it’s not that you can’t send mass emails with GoldMine, you certainly can and many people do. It’s more about ensuring the proper removal of emails that hard bounce, or removing people from future sends if they unsubscribe, that is the real issue. Outlook and GoldMine have no built-in list management capabilities, its up to you to manage these. That’s where the real issue lays, most people don’t properly manage their email marketing.
Using a GoldMine Add-on such as IntelliClick, Mailchimp Connect, or Email Campaign Tracker can make email marketing with GoldMine a lot easier.
I still would recommend that you use an Email Marketing Platform such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact, etc., because these services will automatically ensure that you never send to a Hard Bounced email addresses or an email address that has been unsubscribed. DBX Mailchimp Connect, is a GoldMine add-on that allows you to upload your contact groups from GoldMine to Mailchimp, and allows you to easily remove or update your email addresses in GoldMine based on your hard bounces and unsubscribes from your Mailchimp campaigns. Lastly, GoldMine also has built-in integration with Constant Contact.
If you are doing any sort of mass email marketing from within your GoldMine CRM or Outlook, I hope you’ll understand the importance of managing your marketing lists and the best/easiest way to do that is by using one of several GoldMine Add-ons and or Email Marketing Services in conjunction with your GoldMine.
If you have any questions about how to be a better marketer with your GoldMine CRM, or if you have any questions about any of the products/solutions I have mentioned above, please contact me and I’d be more than happy to demonstrate or discuss them further with you.
