I found this site looking for info on bulk email providers. While I didn't end up finding what I was looking for here, my reading in the forums has lead me to ask the right kind of questions to the right people and find a system that works.
What drove me to BHW was the constant struggle we were going through with the 'above board' email companies out there. And I guess I should clarify, I'm managing email campaigns for an online business that actually produces the products that they sell (well, most of them at least).
When I started working for this company, they were balancing a Constant Contact acct with a few thousand subscribers, and Mail Chimp acct with around 25K subscribers, and dabbling in monthly fax broadcasts to their niche.
The trouble started when we got our final '2% complaint' warning from MailChimp. They closed our acct without further review for repeated 2% (or more) compaints. We had a week to get our data out of their system, but as far as sending though MC, we were burnt.
We immediately tried to migrate our bounce free list from MC over to our Constant Contact acct, which triggered their acct review, and in turn, their 'probation period' where they send a few thousand messages of your campaign and monitor the results before sending the rest. They immediately canned our first attempt to import our bounce free list from MC (which surprisingly enough, had quite a few more bounces than we expected in their test segment) We told them that we had included some trade-show entries and older customers, that we'd revise the list to customers within the last year and reupload for their approval.
We ended up going through a few 'review rounds' with them and wound up with around 8K of our 25K MC transferee's. Ouch.
We recognized that this wasn't going to cut it as our main form of driving traffic to the site on a weekly basis.
We then bought a list in our niche. Around 300K contacts from our target demo, obviously we couldn't upload a purchased list to Constant Contact, so we started exploring alternatives.
Everywhere we looked (Aweber, vertical response, get response & a few others) there were stringent safeguards in place to keep people like us from doing what we were trying to do. We ended up getting hooked up with a hungry sales guy from Pinpointe, who assured us that he could get our data through their checks, as he would have it cleaned for us as it was imported. We signed up for the 500K messages/mo plan with high hopes of launching a niche targeted product just in time for it's intended holiday. After we got through their 'cleaning' service they cut our 300K list down to less that 75K (so much for that 99% accuracy from the list vendor eh?) and then the bad news- they wanted to monitor our first few campaigns to this list to make sure that their IP's weren't getting trashed. They throttled our acct to around 10K daily messages so that they could monitor the results.
Long story short, they strung us along for a while telling us they were almost done reviewing our results and ready to release our acct into full blown email blasting glory. They ended up releasing our acct for us, but they put us on their worst block of IP's so our open rates took a nose dive (less than 3%). We again, packed up our data and started looking around again.
Then I got in touch with our current ESP- they set up a VPS with a windows based 'database emailer' program with an interface that left a lot to be desired. No open tracking, no click tracking- but virtually unlimited sending. We immediately saw a HUGE increase in our traffic/sales. Even without the open/click tracking- we knew it was working.
They contacted us last night to let us know that our account was being transferred to their new web based platform- much to my delight, they've got what they call Interspire on Steroids. They've added a 'multi-thread' plugin to increase the sending rate, IP/SMTP rotation and full spintax support. The only gripes I had about their sending platform have been resolved, and I can't wait to see what kind of results we start getting now
Waiting for our new package to go live, and I'll post back here with my results. Also want to thank the members here who've reached out to me about new data in our niche. You've all been a huge help
Hope this helps someone looking for the same info I came here for- I'll post back here with results after we're back sending again
What drove me to BHW was the constant struggle we were going through with the 'above board' email companies out there. And I guess I should clarify, I'm managing email campaigns for an online business that actually produces the products that they sell (well, most of them at least).
When I started working for this company, they were balancing a Constant Contact acct with a few thousand subscribers, and Mail Chimp acct with around 25K subscribers, and dabbling in monthly fax broadcasts to their niche.
The trouble started when we got our final '2% complaint' warning from MailChimp. They closed our acct without further review for repeated 2% (or more) compaints. We had a week to get our data out of their system, but as far as sending though MC, we were burnt.
We immediately tried to migrate our bounce free list from MC over to our Constant Contact acct, which triggered their acct review, and in turn, their 'probation period' where they send a few thousand messages of your campaign and monitor the results before sending the rest. They immediately canned our first attempt to import our bounce free list from MC (which surprisingly enough, had quite a few more bounces than we expected in their test segment) We told them that we had included some trade-show entries and older customers, that we'd revise the list to customers within the last year and reupload for their approval.
We ended up going through a few 'review rounds' with them and wound up with around 8K of our 25K MC transferee's. Ouch.
We recognized that this wasn't going to cut it as our main form of driving traffic to the site on a weekly basis.
We then bought a list in our niche. Around 300K contacts from our target demo, obviously we couldn't upload a purchased list to Constant Contact, so we started exploring alternatives.
Everywhere we looked (Aweber, vertical response, get response & a few others) there were stringent safeguards in place to keep people like us from doing what we were trying to do. We ended up getting hooked up with a hungry sales guy from Pinpointe, who assured us that he could get our data through their checks, as he would have it cleaned for us as it was imported. We signed up for the 500K messages/mo plan with high hopes of launching a niche targeted product just in time for it's intended holiday. After we got through their 'cleaning' service they cut our 300K list down to less that 75K (so much for that 99% accuracy from the list vendor eh?) and then the bad news- they wanted to monitor our first few campaigns to this list to make sure that their IP's weren't getting trashed. They throttled our acct to around 10K daily messages so that they could monitor the results.
Long story short, they strung us along for a while telling us they were almost done reviewing our results and ready to release our acct into full blown email blasting glory. They ended up releasing our acct for us, but they put us on their worst block of IP's so our open rates took a nose dive (less than 3%). We again, packed up our data and started looking around again.
Then I got in touch with our current ESP- they set up a VPS with a windows based 'database emailer' program with an interface that left a lot to be desired. No open tracking, no click tracking- but virtually unlimited sending. We immediately saw a HUGE increase in our traffic/sales. Even without the open/click tracking- we knew it was working.
They contacted us last night to let us know that our account was being transferred to their new web based platform- much to my delight, they've got what they call Interspire on Steroids. They've added a 'multi-thread' plugin to increase the sending rate, IP/SMTP rotation and full spintax support. The only gripes I had about their sending platform have been resolved, and I can't wait to see what kind of results we start getting now
Waiting for our new package to go live, and I'll post back here with my results. Also want to thank the members here who've reached out to me about new data in our niche. You've all been a huge help
Hope this helps someone looking for the same info I came here for- I'll post back here with results after we're back sending again
