Use Your Email Noggin When Choosing Email Service Providers

These days you are barraged with commercials from a few of the largest email system providers. Unfortunately, the ones who pay for the most TV or radio ads are not always, in fact rarely, the best system. This applies to everything across the board, but it is very critical to your business that you select the right software systems and services, especially if you have a small or medium business that will rely on these systems heavily for a large portion of your traffic and leads. The MTA I use and sell has a Slow Start Ramping Algorithm that carefully "feels the waters" before it send mass quantities of email to say the YAHOO or GMail email servers. The way in which your server, or the email service providers server-MTA will affect your campaigns success rate and revenue from campaigns.

When I seek services for my businesses I do a full throttle investigation. Luckily, I am a techno-geek, so I look for things “under the hood” that many people won’t think to look for. If it is a web based system, like many of the email management systems, also called list management systems, you need to look at two major factors. How smart is the GUI, a.k.a. graphical interface, and how fast does it load in your browser. This will give you a less frustrating and more efficient time, but it is also indicative of how well coded the system is. If the front end is beating up your machine, how badly is it beating up the other email servers that you have to play nice with?

Other than the main interface, you need to ask these three BIG questions of any email system you consider using. The three you should look at are Vertical Response, Email Noggin and Bronto. Now since I know how the second was built I can tell you that it is a VERY smartly coded system. I can not comment on the code of ANY other system since I have not seen their code. The first thing to consider when investigating email systems is does it include automated bounce handling and detailed bounce information? That means if your recipients email goes bad, which happens pretty often, you get a report so you can take an action, and the email is also flagged so you do not attempt to send to that email again in the future. This is critical to your email/online reputation. This will directly affect your reputation, delivery rates, spam folder delivery AND revenue from email campaigns.

The second thing to look for is reports. You need the ability to compare delivery rates, response rates and many other metrics over time. Advanced reporting should not be an after-thought. The third big thing to take into account is the ability of the email system to import, or tap directly into, a database from multiple sources. Even well coded systems require a bit of getting use to when you do the imports, but a well coded interface will catch almost all of the common upload, database merge, errors that will crash many systems. Vertical response has a very smart import feature. Email Noggin has VERY STRONG reporting and expert-on-demand to assist with email marketing included in your pricing. Also, if your budget will allow, you should consider buying the email engine, also called MTA, or message transfer agent, and take charge of your own email and online reputation. Learn more about buying MTA’s to host your email marketing in-house.

Test Email Noggin - - Test Vertical Response - - Get Bronto Demo
Disclaimer: I do benefit when people use Email Noggin, because I own the site, BUT the reason I own it is because I chose to use the email software infrastructure that I believe to the best system-server available on the market. Also, I am a close business associate with the actual coders of this system. So, despite the fact that I have a definite vested interest in the email system-MTA, the reason I do is because I know what is under the hood. Kind of like the guy who says, "I liked it so much I bought the company."