Got about 90K leads from people who have filled out finance related forms on my sites. As part of the terms of the form they have agreed to be emailed with offers. These are not double optins. They'll be mailed reminding them about the offer that they originally filled out on the site. What do you think is the best way to mail them?
Initial ideas are:
Find a rep at GetResponse and set up mailing myself.
Find a mailer who will rev share and get them to do it.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
I am interested in hearing more as well.
Can anyone help with this at all?
have you considered getting setup on a smtp relay?
I have an account with mailjet and they've been pretty good. I got banned from elastic email and mandrill. I have an account with sendgrid but haven't gotten going with them yet.
I think my mailjet account lets me send 120k a month for $75. They have bigger plans since your list is pretty big, I have about 30k on mine.
Make sure you scale up your sending though, they watch new accounts for a little while until they prove themselves.
I hope this is some help to you.
Thanks I'll take a look at both of those. When you got banned from elastic email and mandrill was that just because of higher than expected unsubscribe rates, complaints or something else. Just want to avoid screwing up.
wozz, I got banned from elastic for high complaint %. this was my first relay so was kinda my learning account.
things I learned mainly
to avoid sending to bad addresses. you'll want to have some sort of test account to clean your list to remove items that hard bounce and add them to a suppression list. you lose points for sending hard bounces (emails that can never be delivered, bad address etc).
make sure your account is setup correctly with your spf record and dkim etc, the relays should have setup guides. you can get good troubleshooting at mail-tester.com. you send them an email and they tell you where you can improve.
make sure my email content is the least spammy it can be, although it's essentially that. there are certain words etc that filters look for. you can use this to get an idea http://www.lyris.com/us-en/contentchecker
another tip is to use an unsubscribe link right up top in your email body. if you can get them to unsub vs hitting spam your going to keep your complaints down and your rep up.
there's a lot of stuff going on with mailing but that's some of the stuff off the top of my head. hope it's not too rambly
Not rambly at all, great post!. I'll get going on all those suggestions, many thanks.
thanks, I just brain puke sometimes.
I did forget another big thing to keep in mind, you'll want to scale up like I mentioned in my first post. you can kinda gauge this by looking at soft bounces where your relay is throttling you. this tells you you're sending too many too soon. if this happens scale it back and keep going, you'll want to get a pattern of sending and stick with it, say every other day, once a week, whatever makes sense to your audience/content. maybe start with 1500 a send and go with that for a couple sends, if it's stable (no throttling, soft bounces) then up it by 1000ish. You can scale faster when you're sending larger numbers. Like you might be adding 5000 at a time when you're sending 50,000 for example.
It's also a good idea to get seed accounts with the major email providers. This is to see how your emails are inboxing. None of this means anything if your emails go in the junk folder. I use an email client similar to outlook, I use postbox for mac to check all of these but don't ever open the emails, just look to see if they hit the inbox or junk. Opening can send signals that the message is welcome which might give the message you're inboxing for a certain provider when in reality you just taught it to open your sends. I'd get several accounts for each one, gmail, yahoo, aol, etc. Seeds are just a guide though, just because your gmail seeds do/don't inbox doesn't mean the other accounts you're sending to will/won't. Kinda tells you if you're on the right track.
Thanks again. So once I've weeded out all the crap from the list, then start small with one smtp relay provider, see what the unsubscribes and complaint % are. Then once I've got a better idea, tweak it and move to someone like sendgrid and scale it up. Sound about right?
That sounds about right, you'll want to keep the cleaning account though. You'll want to run your data through the scrub account somewhat regularly. I usually keep a pattern something like send a batch, say for example 5000 a day to the cleaning account then send that same set of data to the good account the following day. This way your bounces will be minimal because you just filtered them. I've had batches go bad within a couple of weeks so I got hit with high bounce rates on that send thinking it was clean.
You can also double up your sending with additional domains too without looking fishy. Send from email@domain1.com to a batch then from email@domain2.com to the same batch and they see it as being from different senders.
It's probably a good idea to regularly run your list through a service like Hygiene Agent, they will analyze your list and give you a suppression list for spam traps, honey pots etc. They charge a little but it's cheaper than burning though relays. Sending to those can get you banned in a hurry. If you don't know, email providers will use abandoned accounts they know aren't receiving legit emails to see who's sending to them which is typically people with dirty lists.
Hey a massive 'THANKS' for all this info, you've really been helpful.
no problem man, glad I could help.