e-mail distribution systems and why you should use them

If you are just starting to do e-mail marketing, or want to send out bulk email to 100+ customers, updating them about what you have been up to in a regular basis, you should do so with a e-mail distribution system for better delivery, HTML compliance, better in-box penetration, and enable open / click-through analytics.

SPAM filtering systems uses many identifiers in an email to see if your email is SPAM. One of which is the number of people you are sending out to. If your list contains hundreds of email addresses, it is likely that many system will flag your email as SPAM. Secondly, if the content of the email contains many SPAM-like keywords such as "Free", "Click here", "Sale", it will also be classified as SPAM.

While you can overcome problems with sending out your emails in batches, e-mail distribution systems will help you cut down the time you'll have to spend sending e-mails in batches and help you design, cross-check your content against SPAM filters, and monitor the outcome of your e-mail campaign with analytic.

Email Design
e-mail distribution systems often have template layout designs that you can use to dress up your e-newsletter or special offers. These layouts are HTML based and tested on all popular e-mail clients (note my previous post about HTML email design).

SPAM filter tests
Often referred as SPAM score, it calculates how likely your e-mail is going to be flagged as SPAM. It looks at many metrics such as image / text ratio, SPAM keywords / links population, Subject line keywords, etc.

Analytic and Message Monitoring
By far the most important reason why you should consider e-mail distribution system. They offer different degrees of analytic in terms of how many e-mails were successful delivered, how many were opened, how many click-through, how many unsubscribed, how many forwarded to their friends, etc. Many of these metrics show you a deeper picture of what really happened to your e-mail and the effectiveness of your campaign.

Where to start?
There are a lot of e-mail distribution systems out there, so you really should try out several and see how it works. For beginners I would recommend systems like iContact, Constant Contact as they are very simple to use and provide good functionality. For users that has a large e-mail list or users who requires different level of analytic, look at Exact Target, Lyris HQ, or Listrak. (Once again I would like to remind readers that I'm not endorsing any of these products, this is only a short list of what I have been exposed to, if you have ones that you want to recommand, please feel free to do so in the comment area.)