NEWS

Email Campaign Management service - built in

Published on: 05/10/2022

XPOR has always had the ability to send and record emails. But this is not enough for effective email campaigning.  Why do we care?  Because we don’t want XPOR users to have to use third party / costly / risky Email Service Providers.  Instead, you can do it ALL in XPOR.

And, as with everything else XPOR, we use the XPOR email campaign manager for our own purposes.  So it has to work!

And here is what we have learnt;

  1. Email Marketing Platforms (EMPs) consider an email to be a campaign. So if you want to send out a series of emails – they have to be sent as multiple campaigns.!
  2. If you use a third party Email Marketing Platform (EMP) you will have to give / upload your valuable email data source.
  3. Their systems will report “Sent” but not “Delivered” – don’t be confused!
  4. They cannot report on Inbox / Spam trap rates
  5. Their email might not even get into the recipients account AT ALL – not even spam – even though it claims “Sent”.
  6. Integrating email campaign feedback into your website management system can be virtually impossible (for the ordinary person)
  7. The GDPR risks are escalated – who sees the personal data included in the email?

Sending to Gmail

The way that Email Service Providers (like Gmail) are attempting to manage the flow and knowledge they gain from their users is to only let through emails / content they think the User will be interested in!  Additionally they are attempting to control “spam” by understanding the email senders “reputation”.  Consequently (and you’ll see countless references to this on email forums) “legitimate” email senders can really struggle to get emails to their Gmail users.

For example, member organisations can find it impossible to use Gmail to communicate with their legitimate / signed / paid up members.  The #1 advice is to get your recipients to “whitelist” your emails.  Not easy to do when the only way of contacting them is via their Gmail account!

This is a serious matter!  We hear reports of organisations who have over 50% of membership using Gmail!  And, even though their ESP states 95% Sent, in reality 100% of their emails went into the Spam folder and actually NO communication happened at all.

In fact there is little that an Email Marketing Platform (EMP), like Mailchimp. Dotmailer, Zoho etc. can do for you in this respect.  They can only do their best with YOUR “sender domain reputation”.  So you can’t simply expect emails to arrive just because you are using a reputable EMP.  Your domain must be;

  1. Correctly authorised (SPF, DKIM and Dmarc)
  2. Have a good “reputation” – something each ESP will judge for themselves!
  3. NOT be on “blacklists” (this includes the sending IP address!)

Even then, your email might just be directed straight into spam.  So you need to TEST.

XPOR includes the ability to link a campaign to one or more spam test accounts – accounts you create on the ESP concerned and then send regular test email to check that they are NOT going into spam.  If they DO go into spam, XPOR will STOP the campaign and email your administrator account to inform you.  So at least you have a chance of sorting it out before all of your mailing list is chucked in the bin!