Mass emailing has proven a successful marketing strategy for small and big companies. The total cost of running an email campaign is significantly less than other marketing channels. Businesses can either set up their own email servers and then create and handle the email campaigns or use a third-party mass emailing service.

The Benefits of Using A Third Party Bulk Email Marketing Providers

Save time and resources

Many small and midsize businesses lack the time or resources to handle an email marketing campaign. A third-party service saves you the time and resources required to set up and manage an effective mass email campaign due to the many tools offered to automate the tasks.

Effectively build and manage your email database

Online mass email providers provide you with various tools to enable you to create, build and manage your email database. Initially, you must create the database manually and then import your existing email lists. After that, you can place links on your sites that allow visitors to subscribe and unsubscribe to your email updates automatically. By doing so, you can build and manage your database without much effort.

Send unlimited emails

Your ISP will usually limit the number of emails you can send daily to fight spam. In addition, most ISPs limit the number of unique email recipients per day from as few as 25 up to 1000, depending on several factors. However, using a third-party mass email service enables you to overcome such limits. Most of these online services offer different options regarding the number of email recipients and/or the number of emails that can be sent to cater to your individual needs and budget. You can either pay a monthly fee based on the size of your email list or use a pay-as-you-go pricing structure.

Organize and manage your lists and email campaigns

If you want your mass email campaigns to be successful, you need to customize your email lists to cater to different target audiences' needs and tastes. Third-party bulk email marketing services offer powerful online tools that enable you to create, segment, and organize your lists to suit specific criteria or purposes. Segmenting your database into smaller email lists helps you to run more relevant email campaigns instead of flooding your audiences with unwanted emails.

Powerful tracking capabilities

Sending your emails limits your tracking capabilities to only "read receipts." Third-party providers, on the other hand, offer robust tracking and reporting options, including:

• The number of emails received
• The number of emails that were labeled spam
• The number of recipients that opened your emails
• Click-throughs or the links that were clicked on
• The conversion rates

Using some of these reports, you can determine the market trends; learn what interests your audiences and what works or doesn't work for you. As such, you can improve on future email marketing campaigns and know where to focus your campaigns.

Conform to the latest anti-spam policies

The greatest risk of using your personal email server for bulk email marketing is that your email account could be flagged for sending spam. The consequences for this could be pretty severe; it could lead to the closure of your email account and even your website being shut down. Third-party bulk email providers have a close working relationship with ISPs. As such, they are aware of the latest spam laws and guidelines. These providers will ensure your mass email campaigns conform to the latest anti-spam policies. In addition, they use particular email protocols to enable spam filters to identify your emails as legitimate. With these online services, you can test your emails against various spam filters before going live. The tests ensure that the subject or content of your email messages doesn't bear spam characteristics.

Send Personalized email newsletters

Third-party mass email services offer a wide variety of templates and online visual editors to enable you to personalize your email newsletters. The templates and visual editor are handy if you lack the artistic and design skills to create unique HTML and text layouts for your emails. If you don't want to use the templates, you can create or buy custom ones for your business. The mass email service providers allow you to import compatible custom email templates.

The Disadvantages of Third-Party Providers

Security

As with any online service, third-party bulk email services face challenges from ever-evolving security threats, including hacking, DDOS, and many others.

Cost

Some small businesses consider these third-party services expensive despite offering different pricing packages. Such companies would instead handle their mass email campaigns on their own.