Sending Bulk Mails
Many forums make use of their email database by sending out regular bulk mails. This of course helps repeat visits and encourages more posting. This is an extremely valuable method of increasing revenue that is often overlooked. You can even place adverts withing the emails. IPB's internal bulk mailer works well. However, there are a number of reasons why you should consider using a third party provider as an alternative...
- I think the most significant is the potential to land your IP or domain on a spam blacklist
- Third party providers have good working relationships with ISPs and mail services such as Gmail or Hotmail. This means your mailshot has a much better chance of reaching your member's inbox, rather than winding up in the spam trapper. We saw a significant improvement in mails actually being opened when we outsourced our bulk mail
- If you have a medium/large subscriber base, the bulk mailing from IPB could take an unacceptable amount of time to complete. A third party provider won't have such issues
- The mail service I use has really good WYSIWYG functionality. You can make really professional looking HTML emails. Furthermore, you can track how many of the emails were actually opened, and other cool stuff
- I think the most useful feature with the provider we use is the way the email database is maintained. Bounced emails are automatically checked against the database. If an email address consistently bounces mail, it is removed altogether, so you will always have a clean email list, in which all of them are working addresses, and you won't be wasting resources sending mails to inboxes that don't exist. Well maintained email lists are actually very valuable
The above are the most significant reasons to use another provider for your bulk mail. Our recommendation is YMLP