When email marketing first started, we did it the hard way, by hand. Pretty soon, it became clear that sending emails one by one was not very scalable, so the first primitive mass mailers were developed. These machines ran on the desktop and sent messages via your ISPs mail servers.
At first, there was no problem. Back then, people were happy to get spam, as they rarely received email (if you recall, receiving an email was so special that AOL used a recorded voice to announce it!) It did not take long for people to change their minds about spam!
ISPs started getting millions of complaints, demanding that they stop the spam. Their first move was to block any account that sent too many messages too quickly.
So software producers created a mass mailer that sent emails slowly. But by this point, it was clear that the end of the desktop mass mailer was nigh. Email filters were becoming more sophisticated, and spammers were becoming more sophisticated too.
It was an arms race, and legitimate businesses were suffering.
Today, sending bulk emails (and actually having them arrive) is so complex that it’s outside the reach of most small and medium businesses.
This is why we have email service providers. If you plan to use email marketing at all, you’ll need to use the services of an ESP. Otherwise, your emails will probably be filtered out as soon as you send them. They probably won’t even make it into the spam folder!
So, which email service provider should you use? Getresponse is one of the “old school” service providers which has been around since the late nineties. It’s played a role in shaping the face of email marketing. So it’s only natural that many old-timers recommend it.
But times change. If they didn’t we’d all be using Outlook Express (or the Pegasus Mail app from a DOS terminal). New challenges and opportunities favor the companies and technologies that adapt the fastest and offer the best value.
One of the most disruptive changes to have occurred is cloud computing. For the past several years, we’ve all had to listen to that term thousands of times. It sounds fluffy and abstract, so I’ll excuse you if you’re rolling your eyes right now. I promise, in this case it’s relevant.
ESPs need lots of servers to provide their services. In the past, the only way to meet these demands was to build a huge data center, or “server farm.” Of course, it’s very expensive to do this. First, you need a lot of floor space. Servers are pretty bulky pieces of kit, so we’re essentially talking about entire floors of an office building.
Of course, all these machines must be looked after. They need constant maintenance, which means you have to hire a lot of IT guys in white lab coats with clipboards and plenty of pens. Again, that’s expensive.
Powering all this equipment is expensive, too. And it’s not enough to plug all these machines into the mains and hope there are no blackouts. No, you need a backup generator.
Now add the cost of a high-speed internet connection for the entire data center (not DSL!) and you’re beginning to get the picture. But it gets worse. You see, most of the time, for each of these servers, only 10% of the resources (memory, CPU and disk) are being used efficiently. It doesn’t matter if you’re using the servers or not, you still have to pay all these expenses.
Cloud computing fixes all these problems by allowing you to use someone else’s hardware and data center. They’ve done all the things I mentioned above, and they rent these machines out to people and companies all over the world. The customers only have to pay for the resources they actually use.
This means that even a small company can get started providing a traffic heavy network service (like an email service). And as they expand, they just increase the number of servers they are using.
The result is that a lot of new companies have entered the ESP market. And they have lower operating costs than the “old timers” who have built their own data centers! And this is what I meant when I said that cloud computing is disruptive – it has completely overturned the traditional model of large scale SAAS providers, including ESPs.
This means that they can afford to offer the same level of service at a lower price. What’s more, the cloud computing model lends itself to rapid development cycles. This means that bugs get fixed faster, and new features get added quicker. There’s a name for this type of SAAS company with low overheads – agile. They are called agile because they can adapt to changes faster. They adapt faster because they aren’t carrying so much technological “baggage.”
EasySendy Pro is a new ESP that offers a mix of powerful features with a simple interface. It’s easy to use, and it offers you sophisticated list and campaign management tools. In short, it’s a fully featured service capable of standing up to the toughest competitors.
The best thing about EasySendy Pro is the price structure. As I mentioned before, agile companies can offer services at a much lower cost, as their operating costs are lower. For instance, Articmail’s cheapest account costs only $15 per month and allows you to send mailings to up to 10,000 people. Getresponse charges $65 per month for lists of 10,000.
Getresponse charges $450 per month to manage a list of 100,000 subscribers. With EasySendy Pro, you can manage a list of 100,000 for $69.
With more options to import email lists plus mysql database also supported, EasySendy Pro clearly steals the thunder from Getresponse.
EasySendy Pro further has an Extra Email Addon facility for those who want more emails to be sent to their subscribers.
Not stopping even here EasySendy Pro is also available at 20% more affordable pricing for volume emails, and additional support email marketing for large volume email subscribers.
The world of Internet Marketing changes constantly and quickly. New technologies come and go, and new strategies emerge to take advantage of them. While email is a technology that dates back to the 1970s, we have seen a lot of changes to email marketing in just the last few years.
Nobody knows for sure what the future holds. One thing is sure: if companies such as Getresponse want to survive well into the future, they need to adapt to the modern marketplace, adopt agile principles, and restructure their pricing in order to compete. But as they say – no one waits nobody, take advantage of the current best in the industry to climb your success ladder. Say cheers to EasySendy Pro.
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