Bulk-email Marketing
M.Cat Designs, Inc., designs effective promotional emails for wide-spread distribution. At M.Cat Designs, we design your email promotion or newsletter, and help you select an external provider. We’ll also help to send the email within your external provider account once the campaign is set up. We do NOT provide or sell e-mail addresses. For businesses not familiar with email as a tool for marketing, be sure to know why we observe this process.
E-mail Marketing 101 – by: Michele Catania
It’s sometimes difficult to convince businesses that sending out promotional e-mails to a large distribution list is not so easy… at first. Some think it’s as simple as setting up an e-mail in Outlook (or another e-mail program), populating the “to” field with recipients and hitting send.
This is not be the best way to proceed. There are numerous reasons why. Here are just a few:
1. The “CAN-SPAM Act” prohibits commercial promotions to be sent without explicit permission from the recipient. You must also include a physical address or PO Box somewhere in the message, and you MUST have an easy way for recipients to “Opt-out” of your list. Visit the Bureau of Consumer Protection to find out all the laws in detail.
2. If a recipient doesn’t want to receive an e-mail from you, they could classify your message as “junk”. This process is as easy as clicking the “junk” icon within an email interface. Eventually, e-mail providers such as yahoo, gmail, aol, etc., will start identifying your email address as SPAM. This could result in your email address being blacklisted. In this case, you would not be able to send email to anyone without it being automatically sent to a SPAM folder, if delievered at all.
3. Using an external bulk-email provider, such as: Constant Contact, Info USA or our favorite, MailChimp, is the way to deliver successful bulk-email. External bulk-email providers are pros at sending out high-distribution email. They have established relationships with email providers such as yahoo, gmail, aol and more. They know all the anti-spam laws and set you up to be in full compliance with them. In addition, they provide advanced tracking tools so you can monitor your campaign success. Most providers have features to see how many recipients opened your message, clicked your website url, which messages bounced, etc.
Costs to use an external provider typically range from $0 - $300 per month, depending on how big your list is, and how often you send email. Using an external provider makes e-mail marketing a highly effective way to promote your business.