What are the risks ?
As a communications or marketing manager, you're bound to come across mass e-mailing sooner or later. E-commerce sites, in particular, are very fond of this approach, and many website managers manage their own e-mail campaigns. However, how this is done is crucial, because things can go wrong.To the question "Is it risky to send mass e-mailings?", the answer is "no" when done well, but "yes" when the sender lacks adequate knowledge. In reality, this can have disastrous consequences for the company.
In this presentation, we will focus solely on the technical aspects of this practice, rather than on the purely marketing aspects which are also essential to a successful campaign.
What are the consequences ?
The consequences of not mastering the technical aspects can be serious and long-lasting. After a mass e-mailing campaign, most of your daily e-mails to customers and prospects may be classified as spam. Worse still, they may be blocked upstream by their ISPs' spam filters.What does this have to do with my e-mailing ?
Quite simply. If you send e-mails in the wrong way, your recipients' ISPs may consider the sender's domain or server to be a spam sender.Orange, for example, may flag up all e-mails sent by ...@monentreprise.fr as potentially spam. What's more, large corporations use highly selective spam filters based on a worldwide database. Once your e-mails have been classified as "spam" by these filters, they simply won't reach their destination.
Getting off these spam lists is possible by submitting complaints, but it can be complicated, especially when ISPs are involved.
Sending e-mails "in the wrong way" ?
So, what does "sending e-mails in a non-compliant manner" mean? It can include sending mass e-mailings directly from your own site, without using a dedicated platform. It can also mean sending mass e-mails yourself, using software, without precise knowledge of all the rules and parameters required for a large-scale mailing. In both cases, the risk of problems is high.Indeed, it's suspicious for an ISP, for example, to see more than 400 e-mails (in a 10-minute period) emanating from a single traditional e-mail address.