Bulk E-mail Programs

We have been recently tasked by one of our customers to help manage an E-Mail campaign to send out flyers to customers they have had previous dealings with to keep them abreast of new items available as well as sale items. We would like to add this as a service for future use by our customers when we find a satisfactory service.

We have really had mixed results and found that this business is as difficult to deal with as Spam is. We have tried buying and hosting a program on our servers (Email Marketing Bundle from www.email-unlimited.com) to a mailing service (http://www.icontact.com). So far our results have been less than a satisfying easy to use experience.

We will continue to look for an answer to this service until we find one that is satisfactory in results and customer experience. We found both of these listed above to be unresponsive to in many respects.

The Email Marketing Bundle from Email-Unlimited looked like a great program. But we slowed it down to only send one e-mail at a time through our e-mail servers so as to not exceed the number of connections to large customer based ISP's like Road Runner, Adelphia, and Comcast. In doing so, we found that the program created a queue larger than our servers memory capacity and started moving the queue in virtual memory (disk space) rather than physical memory.

When the program did this, it's send log indicated a memory error when the e-mail server allowed it to enter the text of the message, then the following line was the quit command to indicate the end of the message. Over 4000 people got an e-mail that said "quit".

When we reported this to the vendor (by email support, which was the only kind available) and he responded that meant that you got a memory error and a reboot of the system would fix that. Well our support staff reviewed those comments and shrugged them off, but gave the vendor a reboot, only to have the problem continue. Our evaluation is that the program will either send to many to fast getting your e-mail server on the blocked spammer lists, or so slow that the out going queue will outstrip  your systems physical memory and start requiring Virtual memory (disk space) which in our case caused it to fail to send the content of our html e-mail.

An when we asked for a refund, the vendor became unresponsive and their credit card processing e-commerce company became involved in obtaining a refund from them.

iContact is a service with a great deal of automation in their process. Their success rate is very good at getting deliveries to the mail boxes you provide e-mail addresses for. They have apparently reached agreements to bypass some filtering at major ISP's. Buy they seem overly fearful of AOL. They are difficult to deal with in the respect that people who make decisions in their company, do not talk to customers. We had some issues with one of our customers e-mail lists based on 110 unsubscribe requests of which 50 were complaints about spamming from our initial mailing of about 5400 e-mails. My assumption was that this is why we have a very prevalent UNSUBSCRIBE statement in the e-mail. But they chose to freeze the account and stopped our ability to send because of that. They appear to be very fearful of offending AOL. So they asked to move the 860 AOL e-mail addresses to an unconfirmed list, which we agreed to. Just the AOL, nobody else. The unconfirmed list requires that you send out an e-mail allowing those in the list, the ability to opt in. If they don't opt in, they are never sent mail.

It took 10 days of e-mails back and forth as high as a VP of deliverability to get  to this point. This is one of our concerns regarding this company and the service they provide. Their deliverability department will not take phone calls. They do this under the pretext that they must have written records of the agreements. But when many of our employees who worked for a list of companies from the Fortune 500 top 50 list were in those companies, especially doing government sales and service, we also worked under those constraints.  But we would generally work with a customer on the phone and over the period of about 15 minutes come to an agreement and then 20 minutes to send a confirming e-mail as to the agreement reached. So it took 10 days to accomplish what should have taken less than 10 minutes. This company shows through these actions that they do not use their staff resources efficiently and although they are a high tech company with a generally great product, they do not understand how to do customer support and customer relations. And they are very reluctant to transfer the call to the next person up the line. And their CEO is apparently under 25. A technical and Business giant among his peers, I am sure, but apparently lacks the maturity required to handle customer relations. I must assume this since the CEO should be setting the tone for his company and how they do business. If the ship runs aground, the captain may not have been on the bridge and in control, but he was certainly held responsible because he determined that the person who he left in charge in his absence was qualified by him, and therefore ultimately the captain remains responsible. Thus the captain of this ship hired his managers and VP's and is ultimately responsible for the actions they pursue in his absences under the guidance and leadership he provides. Either he is providing the wrong example or is not strong enough to enforce the example he wants conveyed.

The next revelation I had about our status was that some of the 860 people moved to the unconfirmed list were people who are AOL e-mail addresses, but so were some of the people who opened our e-mail and so were some of the people who clicked through the links in the e-mail message. So why would we want to eliminate them from our current list? So our original list has been culled of Non deliverable mail addresses including dead domains (140), unsubscribe requests (including complaints suggesting spam). But over 2000 people just did not open the mail. So to protect ourselves and iContact we requested that they move the 860 people in the AOL unconfirmed list back into the main list. Then we would do a mass delete from that inclusive main list to of all those who responded to our first mailing, thus leaving a list of those who were unresponsive from the first e-mail, which included a lot more than the 860 AOL e-mail addresses. This would also allow us to also remove the AOL e-mail addresses from the unconfirmed list who were responsive to our first mailing. This would be a much better and more accurate list of who we could count as customers and generate less complaints and put more into the unconfirmed list that needs to get the opt in e-mail

Well in keeping with the spirit of trying to do the right thing for both companies and the customer base, we thought that this was the right thing to do. Then the next mailing would only go to those who opt-in out of the much larger unconfirmed list and the 1366 e-mail addresses that have already shown interest in our mailings. When we suggested that this  is what we wanted to do, we were told that we could not do that from their customer controls on the web site and that it would require the assistance of deliverability (who only communicates by e-mail and in most cases, unless you upset them, only respond once or twice a day) to do this. So we frustratingly outlined our plan to make our list better in a detailed e-mail which explained each step and what we expected to accomplish. The response was that we gave them consent to move the 860 AOL users to the unconfirmed list. We suggested that they re-read our request. At which time they started quoting their corporate doctrine. Our company president with a blood pressure of 80/60 and is generally a laid back individual,  found them difficult to deal with and we thought he was going to have a coronary when he was done talking to them. All because we wanted to make the list better and add more people to the unconfirmed list requiring an opt-in. Our last response was that we need to pay for an account manager to do this for us because deliverability and support were not tasked with doing this. We suggested they were the ones who move the AOL users to a list that was not accessible from the customer menu, so apparent they are involved in doing that. Our President was rebuffed and asked to speak to the persons boss, When asked what their bosses name was the response was "Boss". That employee should not be a manager of a support organization.

Technically, their program is great and user friendly, but using a large list as we did for the first time, would appear to break every taboo they have. This company is rumored to be considering internally going public in the near future. If they do, we would not be putting them on our buy list. Although they have a technically good product with easy to use interfaces, their customer relations and service is not conducive to growth. As a small company they can do as they will and remain stable. But stock holders are looking for growth, and this companies philosophy toward customer service is not conducive to that growth. They think they are in the bulk e-mail and advertising business. They do not realize that they manufacture nothing. They create nothing! They are in the service business! And if they do not provide excellent service they will fall by the wayside to other businesses who may not even have a superior product, but only superior customer service.

iContact's response to this article was to cancel our account without even an e-mail or phone call as can be seen by a screen shot of our welcome page shown upon login.

We did however have the courtesy to respond and ask that they cancel our account immediately and provide us with a full refund since we were unable to send anything since we resigned with them the second time. Once again, this shows their lack of concern about their customers. Rather than send an email, or heaven forbid, actually have a manger call a dissatisfied customer to try to resolve the situation, they just post a note on your account welcome page saying your account is cancelled. Very un-business like.

Well on to our next mailer:

We will try to keep our customers up to date as to what we find in the bulk mailing arena as we fight our way through it.