Hiccups In Sending Bulk Email Marketing Mails

By Author: Nicole Sanger
Total Articles: 10
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When sending bulk emails, you get to experience several challenges. This happens when infrastructure at your disposal falls short of the capability to handle the level of emails you are sending. Most problems that crop up are related to the SMTP relay server.

Email marketing is an efficient way to keep users informed of your products/services. Moreover, it also serves as a continued dialog with the customers to keep them engaged. Indirectly, it generates the customers’ trust in you. When need be, they are likely to come back to you even if you don’t make an immediate sale.

An email marketing mail is usually a combination of offers, information and a mild sales pitch. Though the object is sales, the tone should be subdued as an aggressive pitch would make the customer wary of you. The content should interest the customers and engage them. If it does, you are likely to succeed in the sales overtime.

When doing email marketing, you get to experience some of the challenges of sending bulk emails, particularly to the addresses that belong to large ISPs like Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL. It is at this point of time ...
... that you realize that the infrastructure at your disposal is inadequate to handle the level of emails you are sending.

Your emails may get stuck in queues for hours and some may not be delivered at all. In that case, you may require an upgrade to a new level of commercially available email software.

SMTP server is a major component of such an email marketing system. Role of SMTP server or MTA (mail transfer agent) is important as it is the sending engine of your bulk email mechanism. It receives the emails generated from your email marketing application, determines the email domains to deliver it to, and arranges the transport and delivery of the messages. Take out the SMTP server and your emails won't make it, just like a pile of undelivered letters that lie on the desk as there was no post office to sort and deliver them.

When volume of emails was lower in the early days of email marketing, people either used freely available SMTP servers like Microsoft IIS SMTP server, Sendmail or Postfix, or internal email servers like Exchange.

However, as the quantity of emails increased, there were two developments. First, in-house email systems began to break down as these were built for personal email communications and not to handle large volumes of bulk email. Second, freely available SMTP servers failed to adequately address the delivery challenges. There were ancillary problems as well like processing email bounce; support for email authentication standards like DKIM, DomainKeys, SenderID and SPF; and throttling email to the specific domains.

A major reason of email-deliver related problems is that SMTP relay server simply cannot handle the load of parsing the email message and the DNS lookups. Another reason of long delivery times is that the ISP the emails are being delivered to, is deferring the mails. It could be done for two major reasons – 1) The rate of sending email by the SMTP server is beyond the threshold of the ISP; and 2) the combination of your To, From, and IP address is unfamiliar resulting in it temporarily deferring the emails.

To handle the email delivery related problems efficiently, you need to get informed of all relevant. You may find more at websites of bulk email service providers.

Author of this article is associated with Elastic Email that provides you with a robust software system for sending bulk emails to customers.