Why You Can’t Just Use Your Regular Email For Email Marketing

Hello! Welcome to module 2 of our course on email marketing. After watching this module, you’ll have everything ready to send in bulk. You’ll learn about the 2 main ingredients of efficient bulk sending: an email domain and an email marketing platform — and how to set them up.

But first, let’s see why you can’t just use a regular free email for marketing campaigns.

At first glance, it might seem like a regular free email — like Gmail or Outlook — is enough. You can use it to send out and receive messages. Just spend a couple of minutes registering a cute address for your business and you’re good to go, right?

Well, not quite. Sending bulk email from a free account will most likely turn out bad. Here’s how it usually goes.

First, the number of emails you can send is limited. For example, with Gmail you’ll only be able to send 500 emails per day.

Worse yet, you will have to add each recipient and put in their names manually. While it might be feasible with ten or twenty emails, it’s going to be not so simple with a hundred.

Then, bulk emails sent out from a regular Gmail account are very likely to end up in the spam folder. VERY, VERY likely. For example, Google rejects 99.9% of spam email. And for Google, any bulk emails sent from a free account definitely look like spam. You do the math 😉 .

Free webmail providers like Gmail or Yahoo are designed for PERSONAL use. So when a mass email is sent from one, the sender is flagged as suspicious.

As a result, even if you send out messages to 500 people, very few are likely to see it.

Even worse: you’ll never know who got your message or read it — free email services don’t provide any statistics.

And finally, there’s a high risk that you end up leaking people’s email addresses in mass emails. It’s not the best situation to be in. After all, you’re disclosing people’s email addresses to third parties without their consent. It’s not exactly legal in most countries. Besides, it makes the people whose emails you leaked less likely to trust you.

Luckily, you can avoid all these troubles just by using both

• your own domain and
• an email marketing platform.

With just these two things, life becomes a WHOLE lot easier! Sending is automated. Every email looks nice and professional. Emails land in people’s inboxes, not in the spam folder.

As a consequence, you get better results, such as higher sales figures or more website traffic.

What are the benefits of good email marketing platform?

Now, let’s take a closer look at the benefits of using an email marketing platform like Selzy.

Selzy is designed specifically to send bulk emails. It works to make your email marketing more efficient.

Benefit #1: Huge variety of tools

Almost any email marketing platform can automatically include people’s names in emails, send out emails after a trigger, e.g. after subscribing, segment your list for targeted deals — all in mere seconds.

As a result, you get to save time and spend it on something much more interesting.

Benefit #2: Email design

There’s only so much you can do in a free email service to change how your email looks. You can format the text, add an image and a link — and that’s mostly it.

While all those cool emails you get from businesses — with beautiful layouts, images, and animation — are created with email marketing platforms.

And the best part is, you can create such eye-catching designs easily! Email marketing platforms come with numerous professional templates. For example, in Selzy we have 100+ goal-oriented templates, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when you send an email for a standard occasion.

With these templates, your emails will look more professional and appealing. Even better, you will not have to put in much effort. It’s just a matter of adjusting the template.

Benefit #3: Tracking results

Would you like to know how many people opened your emails, clicked the links, or unsubscribed? Email marketing platforms can do that.

While it might not seem like that big of a deal at first, it’s going to be crucial to evaluating and testing the effectiveness of your campaigns in the long run.

Once you see that, for instance, a certain style of writing subject lines results in higher open rates, you can use that knowledge to improve your email marketing campaigns, become more efficient, and, ultimately, sell more. Doing such things is simply not possible with a basic email account.

Benefit #4: Deliverability

With email marketing software, you can be sure that your emails will land in people’s inboxes. They will look professional. They will get sent out at just the right time. They will be personalized. In other words, they will be optimized for maximum deliverability and conversion. For instance, Selzy has an average deliverability of 99.8%!

All in all, using an email marketing platform comes with plenty of benefits. There are many platforms on the market. You’ve probably heard of some of them: Mailchimp, Sendinblue, Selzy 😉 If you’re not sure which one to choose, stay tuned for the Lesson 2 of this module, where we’ll discuss the features of different platforms.

Now to the second ingredient of your email marketing success — your own domain.

Reason #1: Building trust

A marketing email from a random Gmail account just looks suspicious. After all, people are used to the fact that serious businesses have domains of their own.

So a personalized domain will create a better brand image for your business — which ultimately means more loyalty and more sales.

Reason #2: Capacity

As we’ve said, Gmail and other free emails allow you to send out a very limited number of emails, usually like 500 per day.

With a domain of your own, you can increase those numbers up to … unlimited! You will be able to send out emails to your entire mailing list, no matter how big it is.

Reason #3: Security

Imagine your customer receives an email from you asking to pay an invoice. They do that — but the email was actually sent by spammers. Now the customer lost the money — while you didn’t receive the money and have a reputation scandal to deal with.

Such a scheme is called spoofing. But you can protect your email against it when you have your own domain but setting up authentication. Basically, it is an instruction to servers on what to do with suspicious emails that seem like they were spoofed. We talk about it and other protection measures in lesson 3 of this module.

Reason #4: Again, deliverability

Here’s how it works. Spam filters analyze many features to decide if an email is spam or not, and the domain name is one of them. Free domains like Gmail are a red flag for bulk emails and such messages will likely end up in spam.

But a personal domain is a green flag. It’s like showing an ID. As long as your domain reputation is good, your emails will pass the filters and land in people’s inboxes. Which ultimately means more people will see them and act on them.

To sum up, a regular email account is simply not enough to handle your email marketing needs.

• It can’t send out hundreds of personalized emails.

• It can’t sort through and segment your mailing list.

• It doesn’t have any templates available.

• It can’t track the efficiency of your emails.

• It also doesn’t look trustworthy and is likely to get caught up in spam filters.

With that in mind, it’s in your best interest to start using your own domain and invest in a reliable email marketing platform.

So, how do you set up your own email domain? We’re going to learn that in the next lesson. See you there!