Raise your mailing service or use ready-made solutions? What I learned for 5 years of work in UniSender

When I came to UniSender, it was not at all clear to me what the clients were paying money for. It seemed that everyone could raise his mailer and send letters from him. But understanding came to me very quickly. Let's try to figure out what I was wrong 5 years ago

I came to the company as a leading administrator. Now I manage the Infrastructure & DevOps department. The mailing system is one of my areas of responsibility.

What did you think before

All my carry with me is normal. You can independently configure mail and SPF with DKIM (yeah, I even knew such smart abbreviations). Pay for it is not necessary. What turned out: yes, you can configure mail. But this system is suitable only with a small volume of shipments.
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You can "play" and get experience. What turned out: you need to play a lot, but this experience does not sell very well

For 5 years of work in email marketing, I completely changed my opinion (and not only because I get paid for it!). I will try to explain why my service for sending letters is not always a good idea.

What you need to raise your mailing service

I'll start with the technical side. Raising your mailing service is difficult - this is just a short list of what needs to be done:

• Raise the database to store information about subscribers.
• To raise an SMTP server that can not only send, but also receive letters. Many mailers use sender verification, and for each message they will try to send an email to your server in reply.
• Write software for spam blocking. In UniSender it is samopisny.
• Connect IP addresses.
• Configure physical servers and communication channels to transfer data.
• Hire a designer and coder who will make beautiful templates for letters.
• Check how these templates look in real mailers. Believe me, if you ever bring up this topic with our designers, then learn a lot of unfamiliar swear words.
• Write a simple software that will send the created letter to contacts.
• If you need tracking or custom fields in the letters - then the software from the previous paragraph (no longer simple) should be able to work with templates and modify all found links.
• Raise a web server that can handle modified links from emails.
• And then everything should be monitored, monitored, monitored ...

A team of 10-15 people will be able to raise such a service in 8-10 months. But this is on condition that everyone understands everything and the work is constantly being done.

The price of such a decision depends on the number of people in the team, their professionalism and the volume of the necessary features. For example, 10 people with a rate of an average of $ 2,500 will cost $ 25,000 per month. For 10 months, only the salary of the team will take $ 250,000.

Yes, with this option you can easily adjust the service to fit your needs. But is it worth it? Often it is much more profitable to use ready-made solutions, and to cut one’s own only when there are not enough of these tools.

Why is a ready-made mailing service better?

There are tools for working with mailings

Simply, emails are of no interest to anyone; email marketers need tools for creating templates, mailing statistics, letter chains, ready-made integrations and the possibility of personalization. For example, here are some tools that can be found in most mailing services:

• Block editors of letters.
• Newsletter templates.
• Convenient interface for working with the database of subscribers.
• Integration with third-party services without an API.
• Ability to send a series of letters in response to the actions of subscribers on the site.
• Custom field for substitutions in the letters.
• Additional channels: Viber, chat bots, SMS.
• And much more: subscription form designers, split tests, account sharing.

Previously, these functions were considered advanced, but now without them it is hard to imagine a mailing service. To realize all this on your own, you have to spend a lot of time and money.

Less chance of getting into spam

There is little information on the Internet about how the mailer works with major providers.
Yes, the SMTP protocol is described along and across. But nowhere is the instruction "how to get into the inbox". Many services offer advice on this topic, but they often focus on Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. Some of their recommendations only worsen the delivery in Mail.Ru and Yandex.Mail.

And more letters can get into spam for no apparent reason.

How to say. There are reasons, many of them are familiar to us, but sometimes we also don’t understand why everything was delivered to Gmail, and on Yandex it’s all in spam. In this case, you need to contact the support of the postal service and find out the reason. They usually answer for a long time, and sometimes they do not answer at all.

In the mailing service they will tell you what can be improved in the mailing list so that the letters do not fall into spam. In addition, we analyze the statistics on the service in fact realtime, and promptly react if the deliverability falls somewhere.

We have established regular contact with most of the providers - we can quickly and effectively solve the problem if the mailing list has already gotten into spam.

Easier to solve the problem with getting into blacklist

Anyone from your subscribers can complain (often - even for no reason), and then the ipishka can get into the blacklist .

You need to contact the blacklist administration to be excluded from the list. Usually this process takes from an hour to 1-2 weeks. And all this time you will not send letters.

A specialized service usually has a lot of ip-files that are constantly monitored for inclusion in blacklist. We can safely disable problematic IP addresses from work until we clarify the circumstances and solve the problem.

They will help you with the first newsletter.

Many users do not know where to start mailing. It is not clear how to work with the database, what domain and mail settings are needed, why letters get in spam. For many customers who turn to UniSender, we see problems with the base: non-existent addresses, spam traps , contacts-duplicates. Most often, the very first mailing on such a database is blocked.

The mailing service will help you figure out where to start mailing. For any question, you can write to tech support, for many requests there is already a ready answer in the Knowledge Base or blog.

Even in the mailing service it is convenient to check the database before the first shipment. For example, UniSender gives information about invalid contacts in the database. If you delete them, the mailing is less likely to get in spam.

When you still need your mailing service

I know only one situation when launching my mailing service is justified - if the company has high requirements for storing user personal data. These can be banks, financial institutions or government agencies. If the rules prohibit the transfer of personal data to third parties, it will not be possible to use a ready-made mailing service.

If the company does not need tracking, substitutions and beautiful HTML letters, then it will be really easier to raise your decision.

Hybrid solutions

There are also hybrid options when the SMTP server and IP addresses provide the service, and the user interface is formed on the company side. Typically, this functionality is implemented in the transport services mailings. UniSender also has one, called UniOne . In short, how does UniOne differ from UniSender:




It is also cheaper to send through transport services than through full-fledged mailing services.

UniOne was developed as a service for sending transactional letters, but through it you can send regular mailings. It all depends on the capabilities of the user interface that developers create.

When you need UniOne and how it works

What you need to do to configure this interface:

• Choose a ready letter editor or at least an html editor. In the second case, you will have to accept that the letters will be displayed differently on different devices.
• Write the code and make the visual part to work with the contact database.
• To make integration with the transport service - namely, send there and receive delivery results from there.
• If you need to collect statistics on mailings, then this information will also need to be stored somewhere.

To create a user interface for a transport service, usually there is enough team of 5 people and 2-3 months of time. But provided that this is a full cycle command.

findings

1. Raising your mailing service is hard, long and expensive. In most cases, it is easier to use a ready-made solution.
2. Your mailing service is needed by companies with strict personal data policies. If the contacts can not be transferred to outsiders, you need to think about your own decision.
3. In some cases it is more convenient to use transport services to send letters. The entire infrastructure is already implemented, we only need to connect to it via API.