Well, in my last post I talked about the dangers of DIY (Do It Yourself) Emails. That showed that there is a clear cost, or potential cost that isn’t measured in dollars to doing it yourself.

 

I’m going to spend a few minutes here talking more about the factors that go into the decision of whether to do it yourself or hire someone. Some are obvious. Some are not.

 

Did you know that there are two kinds of SPAM? There is the legal definition of sending “unSolicited Pornograhy And Marketing,” but that isn’t the kind that trips most companies up. It’s reputational SPAM. That means you could be sending out a legitimate email that IS wanted; in fact someone requested it from you, but it may share some tiny, subtle characteristics of real SPAM and either a formula or filter that it runs through on the server on the receiving end, or the receiving user himself simply PERCEIVES it as SPAM.

 

And it doesn’t take a lot. For some ISPs like (AOL, Yahoo, etc.) it may be as low as a half of a percent of the mail it receives from your IP address. So, if you emailed to 1,000 good customers that asked you to email them, and only 5 of them clicked the “Report Spam” button because they were flying through their email and didn’t recognize it as something they requested, that is enough to prevent the delivery of your email, and potentially damage the deliverability of your non-marketing email. It happens more than you know.

 

So where are the rules for this other type of SPAM? Therein lies the rub. There are none. There are “experiences” and “best practices,” but no hard and fast rules. In fact, what makes email deliverability so complex is the fact that it is so dynamic. SPAM filters are always changing and not every company, software, or Internet Service Provider handles it the same way.

 

Now in terms of deciding whether you should do it yourself or hire someone, the first thing to consider is whether or not you are looking for distinct, measurable results. Do you expect your marketing email to generate a specific action, create leads, or create sales? If your answer is “no,” then you probably don’t need to hire someone. If you’re not measuring the results, giant lapses in the deliverability are not going to bother you.

 

If the answer is “yes,” then you start having a different conversation. Instead of talking about “sending email,” you start talking about “getting results from email” and that is when hiring someone to do it will benefit you. Sending email is the simple part.

 

Getting it delivered, creating a message that elicits an action, testing different variables, and measuring the final results are the hard part. There is a new challenge every day. If your prospects are business people, how many of them are reading their email on mobile devices? Do you know how that affects the design of the email? Every day brings a new challenge for an email marketer.

 

You see, your potential sales growth is not in sending email. It is in the receipt of, and response to an email. That means that you should be testing your email on seed lists to see how it looks on various email clients, testing subject lines and from lines, testing delivery dates and times and carefully tracking the results from one mailing to the next.  When you start looking at the decision to hire someone to do your email marketing from that perspective, rather than just sending email, the decision becomes much clearer.

 

You can lower your eyebrows now….