How to Choose the Best SMTP Service and Email Marketing Service for Bulk Emailing

ByBrad Slavin

Email marketing is very much an essential tool for businesses as it helps them connect with their customers directly and announce new product launches and products/offers quickly. This direct connection extends the reach of enterprises and brings them more sales. Email marketing also allows enterprises to build new prospects and leads. It is estimated that 3 billion people around the globe use email, and hence businesses consider email marketing as a potent tool.

While email marketing is vital for businesses, choosing the best SMTP server suited to an organization’s needs can also make or break its email campaign. This fact is because using the best SMTP server service can help in making sure every email you send gets delivered to your customer’s inbox without any issues. Selecting a lousy SMTP server will result in getting your domain blocked and blacklisted, resulting in a bad reputation for your brand. Thus, it is essential to select the best SMTP service and email marketing service for bulk emailing.

How to Choose the Best SMTP service?

When it comes to choosing an SMTP service, businesses need to consider the factors listed below:

Ease of Use

To ensure that you get the best SMTP server for your business, you should determine the features you need and how complex it is to install and setup the server. Some SMTP servers on the market today have a very straightforward way of setting up as they come with a wizard-like interface, and you only need to enter the details asked. It is better to use a simple but efficient server with limited and basic functionalities because if it is loaded with lots of features, the server will slow down to a considerable extent. Checking to ensure that the SMTP server comes with a detailed manual to install the SMTP service will make your work easier.

Customer Support

If you have a massive number of customers and require a fully-loaded SMTP server with all the related bells and whistles, then the complexity of installation increases significantly. In this scenario, you may need the help of technical experts in case anything goes wrong or if you misconfigure something. Many third-party SMTP services provide 24×7 support to assist you with all your problems and technical queries immediately.

Pricing

When it comes to choosing an outbound SMTP service, one of the most significant factors to consider is pricing. Let’s look at the various options available before you in terms of SMTP services:

  1.   Free and open-source SMTP services
  2.   SMTP Services From Your ISP (Internet Service Provider)
  3.   Hosting SMTP Services
  4.   Dedicated or VPS Servers
  5.   Commercial SMTP servers

Free and open-source SMTP services

Even though there are many free and open-source SMTP services available, they are not always highly reliable or suited for bulk emailing. However, if your business is limited to sending 100 to 200 emails per day, then you can make use of free SMTP services.

Some of the disadvantages of using Free SMTP services are:

  • Lack of Surety – You cannot expect 100% deliverability of your emails as there is no guarantee that your email messages will reach the intended recipient’s inboxes.
  • Lack of Immediate Delivery – Your email messages will not get delivered instantly as free SMPT servers queue up all emails until they reach a specific number.
  • Domain Bans – Another disadvantage with Free SMTP servers is that they can block your domain or ban if they see that you were going over the threshold limit.
  • Email Being Sent to Spam Folders – Even if somehow your email reaches the recipient’s SMTP server, there is every possibility that it will land in the junk folder or treated as spam by the recipient SMTP servers.

Hence, if you are serious about your email marketing campaigns, then it is better to go with commercial SMTP services that charge a nominal price and guarantee 100% deliverability.

SMTP Server Service From Your ISP (Internet Service Provider)

The SMTP services provided by your ISP are often enough if you have a small clientele to send emails. The main reason ISPs put a restriction on the number of emails being sent is that they don’t want to have their email servers clogged by users sending too many emails. Moreover, they serve many clients and want to ensure that everyone can send emails through their system. Limitation on the number of emails sent also enables them to take control of their email server.

Hence, if your sending limit is well within limits set by the ISPs, then you can use their SMTP server instead of going for a free or commercial SMPT server service. It is essential first to go through the ISPs Terms of Service (ToS) and Acceptable Use Policy before using it for your email marketing campaigns.

Hosting SMTP services

Every organization that owns a website has it hosted with some hosting provider. Most of the hosting providers offer enterprises the use of their SMTP service to send a limited amount of marketing emails per day.

Dedicated / VPS SMTP Servers

If your business is large and needs to cater to a vast number of customers, then the best solution is to go for a dedicated SMTP server. With free SMTP servers, you can send only a limited number of emails- mostly around 100-200- per day. However, if you need to send thousands of marketing emails, then the best solution is a dedicated outbound SMTP server.

With a high-performance and reliable dedicated mail server at your disposal, bulk emailing will not be an issue anymore. You can also take complete control of your email marketing campaigns and never need to worry about your domain getting blacklisted or reputation getting spoilt amongst your customers.

Dedicated SMTP servers come with its own set of benefits including:

  • Advanced features like spam filtering
  • Ability to send large attachments
  • Complete control over your email marketing campaigns
  • Backup Emails
  • Higher security
  • Create unlimited email accounts for your business

Commercial SMTP services

If you are not willing to run dedicated SMTP servers or allocate a separate department for SMTP services, then you can very well opt for commercial SMTP servers with third-party SMTP services, you can choose a plan based on your business requirements. A successful email marketing campaign can bring in new customers to your business and can assist in boosting sales to a great extent. Whether or not any email marketing campaign is successful depends to a large extent on the kind of outbound SMTP service you choose as the SMTP server is an essential part of the marketing puzzle.