A couple of weeks ago, I did a lot of shopping around for a new newsletter service. I'd been having a few problems with my newsletter service, especially in the areas of newsletter deliverability, their billing model and lack of customer service.
I'm not going to name the newsletter service here because I don't really want to talk badly about them. But, here's what I was experiencing so you can look out for these problems.
On deliverability: I had 2500 subscribers, and only about 400 of those were getting opened. I expect some people to be too busy to read, but that seemed like a pretty high proportion of emails to be deleted. Especially since my list is opt-in only, which means that I only send the newsletter to people who have asked to receive it.
Upon further investigation, it seems that my newsletter service didn't have the greatest reputation and that several email companies had them flagged as spammers. Which certainly didn't help matters.
So, look into your statistics on your newsletter – many services offer some sort of reporting feature. And, look up the reputation of your newsletter service online.I did this by just Googling a few things like:
the service's name + spam
the service's name + deliverability
And the results were very interesting. I also checked out my service on http://www.senderscore.org/ .
I'll talk about the billing model and customer service issues in later posts.
Oh, but I wish you would share their name! I don’t think sharing your bad experience is the same as “talking bad.” It’s valuable information.
I dumped Constant Contact in 2006 because they are blacklisted at the server level for GoDaddy email service. I couldn’t even get my own newsletters! Their reporting about delivery rates is inaccurate.
I’ve been using FeedBlitz since then, because I like the RSS to email feature. But I’m suspecting that the delivery metrics are off-base.
Do tell! Also, are you going to switch?