pendleton-ga:
20,000 friends is a lot of friends! As you undoubtedly know, most ISPs
have instituted limits on both outgoing and incoming mail volumes in
an attempt to restrict the spread of spam; therefore, when a person
wants to send out e-mail to several thousand people, they pretty much
have to turn to an e-mail marketing firm for help.
There are several e-mail marketing firms that are actually reputable,
dealing in opt-in e-mail services. One that is used by some of my
favorite e-mail newsletters is Lyris.net:
http://www.lyris.com/index.html?s=hdr
Their service is not cheap, but if you have a legitimate marketing
need to send out 20,000+ e-mails without incurring the wrath of your
ISP, then it can be money well spent:
Price Calculator
http://www.lyris.com/products/listhosting/price_calculator.html?s=sdbr
As an example, I priced out sending 20 e-mails each month to 20,000
subscribers, with each message being no more than 20 kb in size. The
monthly cost would be US$2,000, or $0.005/e-mail.
You can compare this cost with another provider, JangoMail:
http://www.jangomail.com/pricing.asp
Essentially the pricing is similar, about $0.005/e-mail in the volume
mentioned above. If you are sending less each month, then your cost
will be less. For example, the JangoMail price list shows that 80,000
e-mails per month would cost $800, or $0.01/e-mail.
Depending on the nature of your e-mails, this may or may not be price
practical; however, if you want to send regular or semi-regular e-mail
messages to 20,000 recipients, then this is pretty much the only
"proper" way (ie. not using illegal or unethical means such as
spamming tools that exploit open mail relays around the world, or
other people's PCs that have been transformed into 'zombies' by
trojans and/or viruses).
Hope this helps!
aht-ga
Google Answers Researcher |
Clarification of Answer by
aht-ga
on
03 Jul 2004 23:48 PDT
pendleton-ga:
With regards to how a customer of one of these services would be able
to verify that the e-mails are actually being transmitted,
unfortunately the way that e-mail works through the Internet makes it
so that you pretty much have to rely on the credibility of the
marketing firm and their audit records. There is really no way of
knowing whether or not any particular e-mail makes it through to the
intended recipient; any number of reasons, including spam filters,
improperly configured e-mail servers at the recipient ISP, or even
transmission errors over the Internet, can result in an email not
arriving at the intended recipient's e-mail account. For marketing
campaigns, it is often a good idea to include some form of enticement
for the recipients to respond to the e-mail or visit a website so that
you get some indication of the actual open/read rate. Be aware,
though, that even the most successful e-mail marketing campaigns
typically only get response rates below 20%. Many large service
companies that send out regular e-newsletters to their customer base,
will often see verified read rates below 10%. The rest either never
made it to the recipient, or were never opened, or were opened but the
feedback mechanism (either a requested response or a visit to a
website) failed to properly record the fact.
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