‘Admail Services’ Articles

*It appears that Trend Micro has cleared up the issue at this time.*

It has recently come to our attention that some of our clients are having issues with the Web of Trust and Micro Trend services. While we are addressing this issue directly with both of these companies, it is impossible to tell exactly when the issue will be resolved. In the meantime, we have some temporary solutions of our clients who are having trouble with their email campaigns.

The problems created by WOT and Micro Trend only occur when a link in an email is re-routed through our domains. We re-route links so that we can accurately track click-through information for Admail users. Therefore, one way to eliminate this issue temporarily is to turn off click-through tracking on your account. You can either do this for everyone you mail to, or, if you know which clients are having problems because of Micro Trend and WOT, you can put them into a separate interest group and turn off link tracking for their mailing specifically.

We hope that these issues are permanently resolved soon. The blocks that are coming from these services are completely unwarranted. Thank you for your understanding and patience as we deal with this problem.

A lot of potential customers ask us how our service compares to Constant Contact or our other competitors. While we do essentially the same thing, our pricing structure is much different. We charge based on how many emails you actually want to send a month, not on your list size. Constant Contact charges you based on your list size and gives you unlimited mailing. We understand how it can be tempting, but most people don’t need unlimited mailing.

Consider the very common situations as I will outline below.

Situation 1:
List Size – 15,000 members
The user would like to send to this list four times a month.
Cost:
Constant Contact – $1,800.00 per year
Admail.net – $975.00 per year

Situation 2:
List Size – 6,000 members
The user would like to send four times a month.
Cost:
Constant Contact – $900.00 per year
Admail.net – $545.00 per year

Situation 3:
List Size – 30,000 members
The user would like to send to this list three times a month.
Cost:
Constant Contact – $1,800.00+ per year (Price not listed. Would be greater than $1,800 based on their model.)
Admail.net – $1275.00 per year

Situation 4:
List Size – 5,500
The user would like to send to this list twice a month.
Cost:
Constant Contact – $900.00 per year
Admail.net – Less than $300.00 per year!

In all of these cases Admail.net saves the customer a great deal of money. It is worth your time to do the work and figure out how many emails you will be sending a month. Simply find your total list size and consider how many times you’d like to send a month. In most cases, Admail.net will be the better deal for you.

Email marketing is not an easy form of marketing. It requires a unique knowledge set and a gread deal of hard work in order to achieve success.

The most common method of creating a marketing email today is to have a designer, who is familiar with HTML, create an email from scratch. Designers with a large HTML skill set and vast knowledge of the email marketing world can create beautiful and functional designs. Of course, this method can be costly and difficult for small companies or for those who just want to test the waters of email marketing. That’s why at Admail.net we provide our customers with several ways to create their email.

If you would like to have a designer create your email using HTML, that is still possible. We allow for the direct input of HTML code into our system. Beware however, HTML for email is not the same as HTML for the web. HTML for email is limited in many ways by the email clients that receive it. You’ll want to be intimately aware of the differences between HTML in a browser and HTML in email. Email clients simply aren’t designed to be as efficient and up-to-date translators of HTML as browsers are. Knowing the limitations, along with testing of your email before sending it out, is crucial.

For our many clients who aren’t going to be using HTML code to create their emails, we have created our Email Builder 2.0 system. It is designed to give our users most of the benefits of creating an email using HTML without the drawback of having to learn the complicated language. Once an email is created in Email Builder, it is also much easier to edit and can be updated, for the most part, by anyone with basic word processor experience. As with anything, there are always trade offs. No HTML editor is 100% perfect and in some instances you won’t be able to do as many complicated things as you could if you wrote HTML from scratch.

Being aware of the limitations of email marketing is a necessity. If you ever have any questions about your campaigns, please call us and we will be happy to guide you. In our 15+ years we’ve seen and dealt with pretty much everything under the sun. We’re here to help you get the most out of your email marketing.

In email marketing, a large part of your success will rely on the quality of your list and the relationship that you build with your list members. Using the sign up form is the easiest way to add new members directly to your Admail.net list. The Sign Up Form is easy to set up and can be distributed as a link either on your site or anywhere else, such as at the point of sales or in print advertising, you’d like to put it. With our recent addition of QR Codes, you can now use a QR Code to make your sign up form easily accessible to anyone with a mobile phone.

The Sign Up Form will add new email members to your list directly and securely. You can also gather other information through the form. You decide how few or how many fields you’d like to include and all the information will be stored in your Admail.net database. The sign up form can utilize interest groups to organize your members by interests as well.

We recommend that when you direct people to your sign up form that you make it very clear to them what they are signing up for and how often they will receive email from you. The more transparent you are in your sign up process, the less risk of complaints you’ll have. There is very little value in having a list member who isn’t interested in your mailing. Sending to them is a waste of email credits. Nothing is more important than trust between you and your members.

You can find detailed instructions on how to set-up your Sign Up Form on the Sign Up Form page under the List Builder tab.

You can learn more about the Sign Up Form by watching the video user guide here.

The way that Admail.net handles campaign replies is somewhat unique. All reply emails have to be handled directly by the Admail.net system to provide the best results to our customers.

One of the major reasons for this is to prevent our customers from having to manually maintain their email database. By internally handling each and every reply that is returned by a campaign, we are able to automatically manage your bounces, unsubscribe requests, and maintain our feedback loops. Having the replies come to us and then be forwarded on to you also allows us to report statistics to our users accurately and in a timely manor.

Without having replies pass through our hands, you’d have to manage all of these issues on your own, which would be nearly impossible to do with the high volume of mail that we see many of our customers send.

We recently sent out a message to our LinkedIn followers using another Social Engines invite system, unaware that it was using our Apple Mail server and reply address and the results we’re.. unfortunate. We sent out to only 368 people, but as you can see in the proceeding image, managing the results was a mess.

The image below represents only a sample of the returned messages we got from the mailing. Everything from mail delivery errors to automatic replies flooded our inbox.

Our solution is to collect all replies internally and filter them ourselves. In the vast majority of cases this is to the benefit of our users. We are then able to report all of the information to them through Accu Trak, automatically manage their database through List Builder, and get all of their legitimate replies into their inbox. Another benefit to the method that we use is the fact that it protects your personal email address. No customer will ever see your email address when replying so your address can not be stolen and put on lists or spammed.

Our goal is to make the process of email marketing as easy for you as possible. If you have any problems or questions with replies, or with any aspect of the Admail system. Please contact us. Our customers are always our number one priority!