Web hosting companies are not good at email.
The argument is very simple. Your web host is setup to host websites. Hopefully, you are using a premium WordPress hosting service to deliver some quality WordPress hosting services. That still does not make them good at email.
The average, no, every big web hosting service I have ever come across has the same basic systems. A bunch of cheapish email servers connected up with Sendmail or something similar. They may well offer you a premium email service with some Microsoft Exchange servers but there is still the elephant in the room.
For you to use email successfully, you need deliverability. This is why large email marketing companies spend thousands every year in making sure they have high deliverability rates. If you already subscribe to one of these services then you understand the need for high email opt-in and open rates.
What about your own email account? The one you talk to clients with? Is it still with that hosting provider? if it is, then are you telling me you are more concerned that emails to prospects arrive on time than those to your customers?
The elephant is here to remind you that if you use a big hosting company’s default email servers, then your email is coming from a server hosting hundred, if not thousands of email addresses. Within that, it is a statistical certainty that some spammers are there also. It takes just one spammer to annoy a server which reports to the to email blacklists and that server will be rejected by all the email providers that subscribe to the blacklists. Because they hate to tip off the spammers, the fact the server is blacklisted will not be noticed till somebody checks the lists. An action rarely was done. You can not even do it yourself easily because these hosting companies have multiple email servers working and it is very hard to get a list of who they are – yes I have tried.
So, to ensure good email deliverability, I used to run my own virtual email service on a dedicated IP address which I could monitor and therefore know that both mine and my customers were using a quality email sender with no reasons for the emails to be rejected. We have now dropped all our hosting services to give more time and focus on software development and training. So how do I ensure a quality email service now?
My email partner is sendgrid. They send my emails and provide a great platform for email marketing with delivery reports and all those stats the newsletter marketing companies offer.
- I can also use the same sendgrid account to send out the emails I personally send.
- I am using a newsletter subscription WordPress Plugin called mailster and this also directs out through sendgrid. I do not recommend using a WordPress plugin to send out thousands of emails. It is not designed for it. However, sending a few hundred should not cause a problem, and using a system like sendgrid reduces the load further.
- I have a WordPress plugin to ensure all other WordPress generated emails go through sendgrid.
Whats more, you can start with sendgrid for Free and only start paying once you are delivering a decent volume of emails.
Photo by Morgan Sessions on Unsplash
