by Didi Zheleva, Featured Contributor
[su_dropcap style=”flat”]S[/su_dropcap]O YOU HAVE an email account (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc) and you think to yourself ‘How about I use my personal email account to send marketing messages to my customers’. After all, all emails are created equal, right? Wrong!
Sending marketing emails to your customers from Outlook, or any other personal email service provider for that matter, may seem innocent enough, but in fact, it could violate major laws, it can have some negative effects on your business, and does not offer the features your business actually needs in order to benefit from email marketing and grow.
Breaking the Law
Let’s start with the most dangerous reasons of all, why you shouldn’t be using your personal email for email marketing.
CAN-SPAM (for marketers in the US), CASL (for marketers in Canada) and the Anti-Spam Law (for marketers in the UK) are laws that have been put in place to help protect consumers from receiving unwanted and unwarranted commercial messages. Your personal email account does not give your recipients a way to opt out of your email communications, that is, there is no UNSUBSCRIBE option. This is a direct violation of the laws mentioned above. Breaching these laws will not only result in a hefty fine ( up to £5,000 in the UK) but it also puts you at risk of losing your ability to email.
If this isn’t a good enough reason to stop using your personal email account as a marketing tool, then keep reading.
Minimal Control Over Branding and Design
Marketing emails sent through a personal account lack the professionalism that an email marketing service can provide and your brand integrity can and will suffer. Outlook, Yahoo and other general email service providers do not easily provide the functionality to insert dynamic content, which means you cannot personalize your emails with customer information such as first name and last name, or even their company’s name.
Customers are more likely to perceive your emails as junk and delete them faster than you can say SPAM.
With an email marketing service on the other hand, you’ll have access to a vast library of professionally-designed email templates that make it easy to create great looking emails. They will be unique to you and your business, they will resonate with your customers and will ultimately, deliver better results. Email marketing app providers are built to make it easy to create beautiful emails that drive real business results.
List Management
Managing your email list will become a pain in the backside if you have decided to blast marketing messages via your personal account. For one, there is no dynamic way for people to sign up for your content and be automatically added to your email list. Secondly, there is no automated way of your contacts being segmented based on their preferences. These features simply don’t exist on any of the personal email providers.
Moreover, many email accounts and most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) nowadays have placed a limit on number of emails that you can send at one time. What this means to you is that as your email list grows, you could run into more and more problems with getting your emails delivered.
Specialized email marketing platforms (such as InTouch) on the other hand take care of all this automatically. No need for manual input of data, your contacts can be segmented and your emails can be personalized without all the hassle of doing it yourself.
Lack of Reporting
Reporting is an essential part of the email marketing process since it allows you to see what’s working (in terms of both content and design) and identify opportunities to make improvements, or identify potential issues that could put your business at risk.
Unfortunately for those using their personal emails for marketing purposes, these features are inexistent in Gmail, Yahoo Outlook and all the other email providers.
Why that matters? Well, measuring the results of your email campaigns is necessary to know what messages are (or are not) working well with your audience. General email account providers offer no reporting, so you can’t monitor your campaign results and make appropriate changes and alterations. The lack of reporting makes it difficult to judge how effective your email marketing efforts are.
Using a professional email marketing service gives you access to in-depth reporting to see key metrics like emails sent, open rates (who opened the email), click through rates (who clicked on a link and which links they clicked on). You’re also able to see important details like spam reports, bounces, and opt-outs.
In short, personal email service providers, such as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail, are simply tools for general emailing purposes. Your personal email is a great way to contact one or two customers at a time, just to keep in touch with them and send them a personal message. However these are not designed to be a marketing tool and, subsequently, they are missing key features that you need in order to effectively and successfully market your business through email communications.
So don’t wait to make the switch!
