I’m not afraid of technology and damn it, I’m a cheap bastard. Unfortunately, that arrogance and frugality came back to bite me this morning. I learned a hard lesson about why you need to use a professional email campaign management solution when you are managing large email campaigns.
Yesterday, I triggered an email campaign distributed to roughly 260,000 recipients. I’ve done this in the past to a slightly smaller distribution without too much difficulty. Not this time. For my list, bounce backs come into an address that I download and move to a bounce folder using an Outlook rule. I then siphon the email addresses associated with the bounces. I then run a script against that file to opt those addresses out so that they don’t receive any further email. It’s a pretty simple, cost-effective solution.
Well, I opened Outlook yesterday morning and saw I had about 65,000 messages to download! Yikes! In fact, if I had actually tried using Outlook to download them, I’d be downloading email for the next week. So, I had to set up Outlook Express to download the messages. The good thing about Outlook Express is that it is way faster than Outlook when it comes to message processing. This is especially true if you have lots of rules or add ins running.
So, back to campaign management. You can go a couple different ways here. You can either outsource your email distribution, host and run your own solution or utilize a software as a service (SaaS) provider. I’ve done all three in the past. Outsourcing is very expensive, but you don’t have to do anything. It’s nearly hands off once you are set up. Using a SaaS set up is the next logical option. It’s cheaper and you don’t have to invest in the hardware and software. Generally, you pay a fee depending on how many messages you wish to send in a given month. Obviously, with large lists, this can be pretty expensive. Next, is licensing software and running your own server. This isn’t for the faint of heart. In my case, the distribution is sent by my server. The good news is I have people a lot smarter than me managing it. Deliverability is a huge concern and you need to get the necessary relationships in place with the major ISPs or your email will get blocked. For that reason, you really don’t want to send messages, say, from your desktop to large lists. Most ISPs will raise a red flag as soon as you start sending massive amounts of email. Some of them will even suspend your Internet connection until they can figure out what the hell is going on.
Moreover, the biggest advantage of using a service or having list management software on your server is it takes all of the administrative overhead away. Things like processing opt outs and bounces can be a huge pain. The software takes care of this for you. You don’t even have to think about it.
The downside is extracting the data from a database for your distribution segments and then maintaining those segments. It’s tedious and time consuming. Plus, you are still relying on a third party to get it right or for you to configure it correctly.
What solution do you employ to manage your email campaigns? Tell me the good, bad and ugly — I’ll have a very empathetic ear.
No comments yet.