If you are sending marketing emails, it might seem appropriate to do so with the email platform you already use, such as Gmail or Outlook. There are some immediate advantages to sending emails this way, including that you’re already familiar with the platform, and it’s free.
But these platforms are not made for bulk email marketing, and doing so can sabotage your marketing efforts. Here’s a look at the major problems with using Outlook or Gmail for your email marketing.
Email Send Limits
Outlook and Gmail are not set up to distribute bulk emails, and in fact actively work against allowing their users to do so – because they don’t want their platforms being used for spammy purposes.
Both Gmail and Outlook set a maximum number of emails you can send in a single hour or day. The limits vary depending on certain things—such as the type of account you have, whether you have established relationships with the addresses you’re sending to, and other factors.
No Performance Statistics
If email marketing is important to your business, it will become essential for you to measure the results of your campaigns. While there are plenty of dedicated email marketing platforms that provide statistics, you won’t get that with Outlook or Gmail.
When you use a platform that wasn’t designed for email marketing, you have no ability to track your open rates, delivery rates, bounce rates, click-through rates for in-email links, and other crucial data.
That means you can’t track whether your emails are successful or not, you can’t A/B test headlines and other components, and you can’t adjust to improve performance. You’re basically flying blind.
No Ability to Customize or Target
Another drawback of using Gmail or Outlook is that you can’t customize your email messages. Studies show that a personalized subject line alone can boost open rates by as much as 26%.
Dedicated email marketing platforms allow you to personalize many different components of a message automatically, as well as set up targeted email campaigns for different customer demographics. These can all measurably improve your email campaign performance.
You Could Get Blacklisted
Sending bulk emails through Gmail or Outlook can affect your IP reputation. Here’s how it works.
If you send out a bulk email, some of your recipients may flag the message as spam so your future emails will get filtered into their junk folder. If enough people filter your emails to spam, your email IP address could be blacklisted. That means any emails you send through that IP address could be rejected.
This negatively affects your domain reputation and disrupts your company’s ability to send any emails. You may also be inadvertently violating anti-spam regulations and could be required to pay a penalty.
A professional email marketing platform provides a world of benefits, including high delivery rates, IP reputation management, anti-spam compliance, valuable marketing statistics, unlimited sending, and more. If you’ve been sending emails through Gmail or Outlook, it’s easy to switch – and the benefits are worth it.
Sources and further reading
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