Outsourcing Your Newsletter Service

July 28th, 2007 by admin

Save On The Hassles Of SPAM Complaints

There are many mailing list solutions available. The solutions fall into the two following categories:

Your own mailing list software running on your server
Outsourcing your mailing list functionality to another company

Mailing list software is used to manage your newsletter to subscribers. There are many outsource solutions and they vary in price and in functionality.

Outsource it

This type of service involves the easy creation of newsletters, the sending of newsletters, statistics on delivery, handling of subscibes / unsubscribes and handling of SPAM complaints. Unfortunately (or fortunately) you still have to write the newsletter yourself.

The major advantage of outsourcing your newsletter management firstly lies in the time saved in managing the peripheral activities required apart from writing the newsletter. The second advantage is that when you make use of a respectable company handling you newsletter service, you can rest assured that this company will have a reputation with ISP’s as not to allow SPAM resulting in most of your subscribers receiving your newsletter.

Another benefit is that you don’t use any of your own website’s bandwidth. The company delivering your newsletter service caters for the bandwidth when sending your newsletter.

What To Look For

When considering an outsource company for delivering your newsletter, you have to consider functionality and reliablility. You do not want your newsletter to arrive scrambled at the subscriber - that is subscribers get a lot of garbage in their mail box. You don’t want to be associated with an unprofessional newsletter and create an undesirable image of your website.

The service must include an autoresponder function as part of the service - you will most definitely make use of an autoresponder - rather sooner than later.

The software must be able to send HTML newsletters ( this is getting more common - and looks more professional) and is the way of the future. Some of the services allow you to send HTML newsletters, but the knowledge required is that of a programmer - to be able to send a HTML newsletter. Make sure that the software allows for templates, and that the templates are easy to use.

Ensure that the service has a single and double opt-in feature and allows for an easy form to be put on your website, for subscriptions to your newsletter.

Look out

The negative aspect in using an outsourced newsletter service is that it is subscription based and therefor requires a monthly fee. You have to compare the monthly fee with the time and hassles saved in using the service. I found that it is worth the money over and over.

Another negative aspect is SPAM. That means that you will still have to handle SPAM complaints. Although you are not sending SPAM, some users forgot that they subscribed to your newsletter - when they receive your newsletter, they may report it as SPAM. AOL is actually encouraging this type of behaviour.

Can you overcome or reduce this problem? Yes - I think so. I see the same solution more and more on the Internet: Newsletter owners are blocking AOL users from subscribing to their newsletter. The message normally is something like: “Sorry, we do not allow subscriptions from this domain. Please use another email account”.

SPAM Complaints

Whether you are running your own newsletter software or making use of an outsourced service, you will have to deal with SPAM complaints.

This is actually fairly easy to handle if you follow the principles in preventing SPAM.

Use double opt-in subscription (That means the the person who subscribed has to confirm that he / she wants to receive your newsletter)
Always add an unsubscribe feature to the bottom of your newsletter (i.e. make it easy for somebody to unsubscribe from your newsletter)
If you receive an email of somebody askeing to be removed from your subscriber list - do it immediately.

Other techniques used are the following:

Use a reminder in the newsletter - that the user has subscribed to your newsletter with the IP address and email address.
Never be abusive in your email, even if you get an aggressive email from an irritate subscriber

Recommendation

On the condition that you do not send spammy newsletters, AWeber will handle SPAM complaints on your behalf. The only newsletter service I use and recommend is AWeber: