Gsuite Vs SMTP for email campaigns?

[tyealia]

About 8 years back I used to do email campaigns and had great results with a software that connected to my hosting smtp server i think it was something like "bulk mailer" it was a desktop software. Now I see services charging upwards of $50 a month for you to connect to your gmail/gsuite and send emails.

I guess my question is why has gsuite connection become more popular for mass mailing than using your own hosts smtp server, are there higher open rates?

Any help clarifying to this email dinasaur is appreciated

 

[Cash Builder]

Im no email expert, but I think the reason gsuite is so popular is that it uses Google’s servers to send emails, which may reduce bounce rate. I recently done an email campaign using gsuite/gmass, and for every 300 emails sent I had about 5 bounces. I have nothing to compare it too so not sure if that’s good or bad.

Of course, whether you want the contents of your emails to be accessible by Google employees is a different matter and something to be considered.

 

[Supermulti]

If you use Gsuite with something like cold outreach platforms like Mailshake, Woodpecker, etc you use Googles servers so you're immediately more trusted which is meant to lead to higher open rates.

You should buy a domain that closely resembles your main one and use it as the domain of choice for sending emails so you don't damage the reputation of your main one.

Once you buy a new domain, take it slow for a while sending emails until you warm it up in Google's eyes (if using Gsuite). When I used Mailshake and Gsuite I don't think I let the domain warm up enough.

Having said that, I've had some decent results using a dedicated SMTP, open rates of around 20%. That was completely cold outreach (for my day job), we use SMTP2GO - other smtp providers are available. Also must add that the domain was old and mostly likely very trusted by the point of outreach which had an effect on open rates.

You can always remove the bounced addresses after you send your first batch and therefore reduce your overall bounce rate for follow up emails which presumably increases trust on the domain further. Obviously you want to keep it as low as possible but on the SMTP2GO dashboard it says not to have a bounce rate over 12% so you have some wiggle room.

Think that's all of my knowledge.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Google will get you a much higher delivery than your own server.

Using your own server has a chance of getting your own IP address blacklisted, which is a disaster.

What I would do is install Sendy.co (yeah, that's a BuSo affiliate link, BuSo would get $12 if you decide to buy). This is what I personally use and helped set up for BuSo too. It's $59, one-and-done.

What it does is make it unbelievably simple to sign up with, set-up, and get approved with Amazon SES (simple email service). Getting set up without it is a nightmare, which I've done and don't recommend. What you get out of SES (which is an IaaS: infrastructure as a service) is you can send 10k emails for less than a dollar, and you get to do it from Amazon's servers which have the best delivery available, period. Like insider backdoor shadow deal good.

Sendy is the platform that makes this simple. You can set up clients and campaigns, import lists, auto-list clean up as you go, full analytics. That's what I'd suggest. Sending any type of marketing email from your own server (or domain for that matter) is a really bad idea.

 

[SmokeTree]

If you're doing mass emails, it's almost always better to go with something like Sendy. Big email services make "deals" with the major postmasters (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc) to allow email to go through without being marked as spam or the domains of their MTA(s) ending up on a blacklist. They also have the advantage of "trust" and popularity. Even if you set up your own email server and cover all the bases such as DKIM, SPF and DMARC, unless you're very careful and/or only sending small amounts of emails at a time, it's real easy to end up on a blacklist and not so easy to get removed from them.

As far as running your own desktop mailer? Don't even think about that idea unless you're connecting to an actual MTA set up on the Internet for one of your domains like Postfix, Exim, Sendmail or Exchange (not a fan of exchange). Your ISP is most likely not going to be happy with you using their SMTP servers for anything more than casual business email and they also would have processes running on the back-end to detect mass mailings.

Source: I've been setting up business email servers (and still do) for clients as well as my workplace at the time since around 2003 and have also designed systems that have sent around 10M emails a month to email lists that were double opt-in. I have personally witnessed the type of "deals" that are made with different postmasters to allow emails through their MTAs. Back "in the day" Yahoo was notorious for Greylisting emails, which is a method of deferring delivery by returning a "451" error (soft bounce) and passing the email back to the originating MTA (your email server) to try again. Many spammers use "script kiddie" methods of sending email and the scripts have no way of dealing with those types of bounces but our MTA (Postfix) was set up correctly and still getting the "451" after multiple retries. My client, a well known marketing company at the time, made a couple of phone calls to Yahoo's postmasters and within an hour all emails were going though with no issues or bounces.

 

[bytemoo]

Google will get you a much higher delivery than your own server.

Using your own server has a chance of getting your own IP address blacklisted, which is a disaster.

What I would do is install Sendy.co (yeah, that's a BuSo affiliate link, BuSo would get $12 if you decide to buy). This is what I personally use and helped set up for BuSo too. It's $59, one-and-done.

What it does is make it unbelievably simple to sign up with, set-up, and get approved with Amazon SES (simple email service). Getting set up without it is a nightmare, which I've done and don't recommend. What you get out of SES (which is an IaaS: infrastructure as a service) is you can send 10k emails for less than a dollar, and you get to do it from Amazon's servers which have the best delivery available, period. Like insider backdoor shadow deal good.

Sendy is the platform that makes this simple. You can set up clients and campaigns, import lists, auto-list clean up as you go, full analytics. That's what I'd suggest. Sending any type of marketing email from your own server (or domain for that matter) is a really bad idea.

hey @Ryuzaki almost 2 years old thread, sorry for bumping in.. I will be signing up with the link on sendy to help Buso after signup with amazon SES.

You suggested to use another website that is close to my domain on the other post (same topic), so that my score would not be touched. Now I'm using knownhost for my hosting on my own website..

Do I need to purchase another hosting package for this new domain? Can i use shared hosting? or the hosting is not needed anymore for this setup?

Thanks, A little noob on this topic.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@bytemoo, If you're using Sendy, you'll be using Amazon's IP addresses. As long as you're not blasting out spam and not sending to some list you bought that didn't actually sign up, you'll end up warming and strengthening your domain as a sender.

Let me point out that I'm talking about the domain name and not your hosting IP address. Both can have separate reputations. With Amazon SES IP's you don't need to worry about the IP address side of things. If you aren't spamming emails, you won't need to worry about delivery on your own domain or ruining it's reputation.

I think you'll be completely fine to use Sendy with Amazon SES IP's and your own domain (again, assuming you aren't spamming bought lists, etc.) It's what I do and have had zero issues.

You can get IP's and domains un-blacklisted too, which can happen if your server gets hacked and is used to send spam emails. That's unrelated to this topic other than me trying to point out that there's no "final, burn it to the ground, the domain can never deliver an email again" scenario.

 

[bytemoo]

Hey @Ryuzaki hope you are doing well. And thank you for the help as always

We are selling Advertising Services, we get the Local Shop owners their clients/customers first before we charge. So basically saying, we'll get you money before you pay us. We have tried doing cold calls and after 30 days, 6-8 hours a day. We ended up with 0 Sales. The usual problem is that the receptionist always blocks the calls directed to the owner and since they are only taking in Order or scheduling calls, we get rejected most of the time... Out of lets say 1500+ calls made, we got 5-10 owners to talk to us.. But no sales out of that 5-10..

We are not stopping the cold calling and will surely not give up, but I am thinking of upgrading the process.. If we email them first before we call them, that might improve the scripting, or we only call those who replies in the email. Depends on the reply rates. We get the leads on Yelp.. So these emails did not subscribe and signed up to us, unsolicited...

The target is to send 100-200 emails a day manually, like verify the Website and the place first. We can only sell to a certain niche right now cause of the Data availability. Should I get a new domain? If I get a new domain, most of the cases it will be blacklisted for an entire month since its new right?

Also can I schedule Sendy to send an email out every 5 minutes instead of one blast?

Thanks again Ryuzaki. (damn man your still active all these years )

 

[Ryuzaki]

@bytemoo, I've not seen the capability in Sendy to drip out campaigns. The only limits are your "per minute" and total allowed amounts as set by Amazon SES (you can request raises).

In your case, Amazon SES and Sendy don't sound like the best option. Amazon measures your bounce rate and "junk mail" rates and will kick you off the platform.

You'll definitely be getting email addresses and IPs blacklisted. You may want to look into something like this: https://www.warmupinbox.com

It'll "warm your inbox" by having all of your various email addresses email and respond to each other as well as tons of email addresses they have spun up for this reason. I've never done anything like you're describing but I'm imagining you're going to burn through email addresses and need a way to either create them or buy them, and this is going to probably not fare well with open rates either.

Spam is spam and everyone hates it, from email companies to the people you're emailing. The only people I know doing well with it are Nigerian Princes and Russian Pharmacists sending like 10 million emails a day, and the Russian guys pay like 5 figures a day to rent the capabilities to do the blasts.

I worry that what you're doing isn't really worth your time when there's stuff like PPC ads, retargeting, Facebook ads, etc. Probably better ways to target your demographic who are actively looking for what your clients are offering.

 

[bytemoo]

Thanks for this. We still dont have the budget for FB ads at this point of time. We get 1-2 customers, those income goes straight to FB ads. Probs with this is that we need to do split testing to get a Good set of Pixels and then do lookalike. We still dont have a budget for this at this point but we will get there.

Your Probably right about the spam.. I dont want spam, so I wont probably do Spam.. Before, we call them and they inform us to send them an email instead, we have permission here so even if Unsolicited, we have their permission to email via phone..

I think Im going to find another way to get this sales running aside from emailing first. Probably do more calls or get better leads.. not sure though, need to think it through. Thanks for your inputs @Ryuzaki