Question

Topic: Strategy

*need New Autoresponder & Better Deliverability*

Posted by michaelbyoungii on 6/14/2017 at 1:26 AM ET 25 Points
Hello all and thank you for your help,

Long story short, I'm pretty new to marketing, but I'm taking on some new roles as the company I work for goes through a transition.

As I understand it, the company's primary source of leads for the last 2-3 years has been from paid email lists. We have about 20,000 prospects in our database, of which about 75% are from paid lists.

Recently, the autoresponder we were using (Sharpspring) changed it's policy, making it so any email list that contains a certain percentage of its members from a paid list would not be deliverable.

My question is, how do we get through this in the short term?


Long term, I believe the solution would be to turn more toward social media marketing, which my company has been resistant to because of our target demographic, seeing as we are a wealth management firm. That being said, we have recently launched an app that an be used for investing, which obviously changes our target demographic. Also, I think it would be important to transition to an opt-in campaign for the sake of our email deliverability.

Short term, I have explored a few different option. My employer is pretty dead-set on using Clickfunnels for an autoresponder. Personally, I don't think that is our best option. I think he is interested in the other features as well, but it just doesn't have the comprehensiveness we need in an email designer and an autoresponder as a whole. I've looked into Mailchimp, which seems like a good solution, but we run into the same issues with email deliverability. The one thing I do appreciate about click Clickfunnels is that it seems that it will not block emails from a paid list, although it does require using a third-party software for its SMTP integration (which I still don't honestly fully understand). Another option is to send the emails straight from Outlook, but I would be concerned sending an email to our 20,000 people without any sort of tracking of deliverability or engagement would be irresponsible.

Please let me know what your thoughts or suggestions are. I would appreciate it.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 6/14/2017 at 11:25 AM Accepted
    Short term, I would approach Sharpspring about the issue and see what they will do, as they are at risk of losing you as a customer.

    Longer term, I agree that moving away from paid lists could be good. The reason the companies avoid them as they often get flagged as spam, preventing them from being delivered (and over time, causing the companies to be marked as spammers, which makes it even harder for them to get their emails through). You switching services or just using Outlook will have these same issues, hence the reason to move away from paid lists.
  • Posted by michaelbyoungii on 6/14/2017 at 1:32 PM Author
    Thanks, Peter. We have actually already tried to negotiate with Sharpspring and it does not look promising. I'm looking into other ESPs, but I'm rubbing into the same issues, even after trying to clean up the lists using Neverbounce.

    Do you have anything else you would recommend?
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 6/19/2017 at 6:13 PM Accepted
    Option 1: Constant Contact or Active Campaign, both of which are excellent.

    Option 2: speak with your web hosting company regarding self hosted e-mail. That way you control everything. Some say "Don't do it!". Others say "Why the heck not?" Learn more here: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to-run-your-own-...

    But whatever you do, do NOT touch option 3, which is to send bulk messages from Outlook.
  • Posted by Shelley Ryan on 7/5/2017 at 6:01 PM Moderator
    Hi Everyone,

    I am closing this question since there hasn't been much recent activity.

    Thanks for participating!

    Shelley
    MarketingProfs
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