Yeah, I get this a lot. Many marketers gather email addresses during their business activities. Email is a very efficient way to communicate with your clients or leads, and its clear that you want to monetize your email list.
The best solution really depends the following factors:
- Where is your list from? How did you build it? Did you purchase it? Have you built it organically?
If you have purchased lists, you need to clean them first. Why? Read more about list cleaning, honeypots and spamtraps.
If you have organically built list, than you have good chance to have good results, but it also depends on how recent your lists are. - How old is your list? Is it recent customers? Is it customers from the past 10 years?
The older your list is, the higher your bounce rate will be. Some third party email endpoints frown upon high bounce rates, so if you have an old list, you need to either clean them or slowly process through them. Read more about organic list cleaning here. - How much have you utilized your list in the past and how often do you plan on send to it?
This question comes up very often. How often should you send mail? Sometimes you can send every day to a list of 50k subscribers and they won’t complain about it. Sometimes you find out that the best ROI you’ll get if you send once a month. Its important to know, that most email marketing solutions will charge you based on the number of contacts you have. If you work with many contacts (more than 20k), than a self hosted solution will work out better for you. - What is your planned ROI on an email? Do you want to have a roboust solution, or lets start small and see where it is going?
If you already have email marketing plan ready, and you are committed to fulfill it or you have past experience with sending large amount of emails, than I suggest you go for an email endpoint with your hosted email marketing software. See my always-up-to-date email endpoint comparison.
If you send huge amounts of emails to large lists and you look for the most cost efficient way sending it, get your own IPs, warm them up. You will need your own SMTP server or rent an SMTP server with your own IP. With your own IP you’ll have bigger responsibility. Read more about IP warmup.
It can happen, that your email content is legal, but some larger providers thing otherwise. Your own IP could be the solution for you as well.
