What many businesses love about GoldMine, is it’s ability to easily send mass emails to their CRM contacts, customers, prospects, etc. What many Office 365 subscribers and others are now realizing is that they are not allowed to send bulk/mass emails using their Office365 email accounts. Office 365 has limits on the number of emails you can send:
Recipient rate limit 10,000 recipients per day
Recipient limit 500 recipients per message (ie; Distribution List, CC’s, BCC’s, etc)
Message rate limit (SMTP client submission only) 30 messages per minute
GoldMine is capable of sending more than 30 messages per a minute and this is the sending limit that gets most Office365 subscribers email accounts blocked. There is no way to reduce that sending limit in GoldMine, unless you manually select 29 or fewer emails and send those every few minutes. Certainly not a desirable option and I can’t guarantee that your account still won’t get blocked even if you do that, as Microsoft is certainly going to monitor and do everything in their power to protect their infrastructure from abuse.
So what are users to do? Well the recommendation is to either use an SMTP Relay service provider that allows you to send bulk emails via GoldMine or use an online email marketing system.
SMTP RELAY SERVICES
There are lots of different SMTP Relay service providers available, and once you’ve signed up for an account with such a service provider, you’d simply setup your GoldMine to send bulk/mass emails using that account vs your normal/regular Office 365 or other email service provider accounts. First Direct Corp. can help you make a determination on an SMTP Relay service provider, assist you with configuring the account with DKIM and SPF records, setting it up in your GoldMine and advise on how to use it for sending bulk emails. Integration options are available and First Direct Corp. can discuss these with you depending on the SMTP Relay Service provider that you choose.
ONLINE EMAIL MARKETING SYSTEMS
Another option is to use an email marketing service provider such as Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, etc. There are many email marketing service providers available and they all offer great features such as unsubscribe management, bounce management and can track/determine who opened your email or clicked a link in your email campaign. This would require you to export your contact email addresses out of GoldMine and import them into the email marketing service provider of your choice. Integration options are available and First Direct Corp. can discuss these with you depending on the email marketing service provider that you choose.
INTELLICLICK
In addition, there is a GoldMine add-on product called IntelliClick that offers integration between SMTP.com and your GoldMine and allows for the sending and tracking of email campaigns in GoldMine.
Each option has its Pro’s and Con’s, and First Direct Corp. would be happy to discuss each/every option with you. but any of them is better than sending bulk emails via your Office365 email account or any other email service provider that limits your sending rates, as this is not an allowed practice with said service providers.
You may be asking, “Why can’t I send bulk emails via Office365 or other business class email service provider?” Well the answer is because these service providers must protect their mail servers from abuse by spammers. The world of email is a very technical thing, and if one of their mail servers were to become BLOCKED because one of their users decided to send SPAM emails or not properly maintain their sending reputation, it would affect many other Office365 users.
Office365 does not offer email bounce management or unsubscribe management, which is a requirement for sending bulk emails and unsubscribe management is part of the CAN-SPAM law. So it’s just not a smart/wise thing to do in general, but it’s more about Microsoft preventing their infrastructure from being compromised because a user decided to abuse their system.
Each of the other options I mentioned above, has features in place to remove hard bounce emails, so that the user can not send to those email accounts again. They also offer unsubscribe management so that an email recipient can decide to be removed from future sends. As mentioned, First Direct Corp. can offer integration options between any of those systems and your GoldMine CRM, so that when an email bounces, it is automatically removed from your GoldMine database, if a user unsubscribes we can update the record/email address in some way to prevent you from sending to it in the future. If a user clicks a link an your email campaigns, we can create an entry in the contact record so you can see and report on that information in GoldMine.
If you have any questions or are interested in learning more, please contact First Direct Corp at (845) 221-3800 or contact us on our website at www.1stdirect.com or www.goldminesuccess.com.
