Getting Your Mass Marketing Email to the Inbox: Effective Email Techniques

Getting Marketing Email Directly to the Inbox

Why inbox delivery now costs money

Today, I am going to show you how to deliver all your marketing messages directly to the mail inbox. Email marketing used to be free and easy, but now you will have to pay a few bucks due to the significant improvements in spam detection techniques, which are now very strict on blocking mass emails, regardless of their legitimacy. Before I delve into the current method, allow me to share my experience with the old method that worked for me from 2001 to 2009.

Old Classic Method

Using Visual Basic, I developed a custom multi-email sender application that loaded a specific list of email addresses for the recipients of my marketing messages. The application cleverly selected the sender from the same list, so each user would send an email to another user. Although this method was smart, it was unethical, so I advise against using it. Occasionally, I had to make the user send the email to themselves to ensure delivery.

The VB application relied on a local SMTP application called QK SMTP, which then forwarded the emails to the desired addresses. It also allowed for setting up remote SMTP details in case local delivery failed. I chose this application because of its excellent multi-threading capabilities, ensuring that no matter how many emails were in the queue, they would be processed and delivered efficiently.

Feel free to try the VB application, though I believe QK SMTP has been discontinued.

Download the VB application with full source from here.

Modern Method

Technology has evolved, and now we have mailing list management services built for inbox delivery, such as Mailchimp and AWeber. However, these services can be expensive, especially if your list exceeds 300,000 contacts, as is the case for me. As a cost-effective alternative, I manage my list via WordPress using K-News Pro and pay a lower fee for the SMTP service provided by Mandrill.

Here’s how you can set this up:

1. Import Your List: Import your email list into K-News.
2. Create Your Message: Use K-News’ built-in templates to create your message.
3. SMTP Setup: Configure K-News to use Mandrill as the SMTP server. Obtain your API key from Mandrill and set up DKIM and SPF options for better deliverability.
4. Bounce Management: While K-News has a bouncing management feature, not all bounced messages will be delivered to the specified mailbox. To work around this, use the Mandrill Outbound page to identify bounced and rejected messages. Export these messages and import them back into K-News, setting them as bounced with the overwrite option enabled.

This approach helps you clean up your mailing list, ensuring that you only send emails to valid addresses. In the long run, this method is more cost-effective, as it reduces the number of undeliverable emails and optimizes your email marketing efforts.

Cleaning your mailing list

You may need to clean up your lists before you start sending emails to avoid account termination. Here are some methods I use:

I use Linux to clean up a list by reading a file line by line, checking if the email is valid, and outputting the results to a text file.

while read line; do sendmail -bv "$line"; done < emails.txt |grep failed > invalidemails.txt

Now you can grep all email addresses from a text file using regular expressions:

grep -E -o "\b[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\b" invalidemails.txt > invalidemails2.txt

In Windows, I use eMail Extractor to extract emails from files and eMail Verifier to verify them.

Mail Storage

Managing large volumes of email can be challenging. I used to store my 29 GB of email messages, totaling 3.5 million emails, using MS Outlook. Dealing with PST files was tough, and I had no choice but to manage it. I also tried Mozilla Thunderbird, but the size was still too large for it to handle effectively.

Recently, I discovered a very powerful free email archiving tool that significantly improved my email management. This tool reduced my storage size from 29 GB to 11 GB, removed all duplicate entries, and made searching much easier. It allows for easy archiving from any email format, as well as live retrieval from online email accounts such as Gmail and Outlook.com (then Windows Live). Additionally, it provides the ability to export emails into well-known formats such as EML and PST.

If you’re facing issues with managing a huge number of emails, don’t miss out on this tool. The tool is called MailStore Home, and you can get it here.