It’s been a while since we took a detour from the way we were marketing our e-commerce products. We were relying on Search Engine Marketing to sell the products but now shifted to Real-time Email Marketing campaigns, starting with around 1000 emails each day and slowly scaling our systems to make the number almost 1 million email marketing campaigns each day. Although the numbers look huge, the entire process demanded a lot of hard work from all of us. From collecting data to filtering them and sending the emails to relevant groups- every bit of it was a backbreaking work at our end.

When we started off, we had lengthy discussions on the best and reliable way to reach out the mass via email campaigns. The talks would go on round the clock as we kept on exploring new options. We expanded our research to every possible horizon- from Google Feedburner automated emails, Mailchimp, Sendgrid and then extended our research to Transnational email service providers like Mandrill, Sendgrid, Mailgun and much more.

We were also actively searching for a one stop solution and thus searched for “Best Email Marketing Companies in India”, “Email Marketing Companies in Bangalore”. To get better results we refined our search and came to know about SMTP Servers. Eager to find out more, we started learning more on SMTP servers and finally landed on websites, left contacts and now, here we are- their sales representatives are still following us religiously!

Start with Google Feedburner Automated Emails Updates:

No doubt the acquired product of Google serves quite well for newbies when it comes to sending regular updates to the newsletter subscribers. For this, you just need to verify and configure Google Feedburner correctly followed by putting a simple subscription box on a website. Next, everything is taken care by Feedburner itself, from Double Opt-in email list verification to sending updates to the subscribers as soon as the blog is updated with a new post.

However, in our case we tried to tweak this email campaign to the next level by applying various themes to our WordPress RSS setup. Our aim here was to get the desired look and feel in the emails. After trying many options, we finally succeeded in doing so. It continued for next few months- we kept on iterating with our themes. However, we started to realize the need of new requirements like easy email opt-in process for website users. With this need in hand, Google Feedburner was not enough as we were unable to add our list of subscribers to Google Feedburner Email List. Thus, we moved ahead to find a better solution.

Lack of Ease to add new subscribers to an email list and Limited Control over Email Updates made us look for a new solution.

Cost: Free

Using Mailchimp to Send Email Campaigns:

Poised with the need of adding our subscriber list manually in email campaigns, we turned to Mailchimp- an easy to use Email Marketing solution. We configured Mailchimp according to our needs to use it on a regular basis.

Very soon we crossed the limit of the minimum number of free subscribers at Mailchimp and hence, shifted to a paid account. Having a paid account opened up various new features that we started applying in our email campaigns. Starting from using separate mail campaigns for the different list of subscribers, MailChimp also gave easy to use Email Campaign Editor, which I feel is the best in class for the marketers.

Growing need for Sending Email Campaigns to the new list of Subscribers made us search for new email marketing tools.

As days passed, our list of email subscribers kept on increasing by leaps and bounds, thereby increasing the number of emails being sent out. Consequently, Mailchimp was becoming costly for us. Moreover, our marketing team started to feel restrictions with editors. At last, we put our foot down and decided to look for a new solution that will be feasible in every way.

Cost: $297 for 30,000 Subscribers a Month

Using Mailerlite to Cut Down Cost of Email Marketing Campaigns:

As we were on the hunt for the best workable solution, we chanced upon Mailerlite ( detail review of MailerLite ) , which came around to be 12 times cheaper Mailchimp alternative. Not just that, it had similar Email Editor for creating effective email marketing campaigns. For two months we used its paid subscription, but due to its limited point-based subscription, we had to stop using this email marketing solution.

Limitation on adding New Subscribers and removing old one, made us search for in-house email marketing setup.

Cost: $297 for 30,000 Subscribers a Year.

An Experience with Interspire Email Marketer Software:

Interspire is the last email marketing tool which we tried on a shared SMTP server through a local reseller. Although everything was fine, after few campaigns we found, that all the Gmail emails are landing in spam. On further analysis, we concluded that this was an issue with email reseller. On further research on the internet, we got the same response from everywhere, pointing to the reseller and the IP address.

Interspire Email Marketer Suite is a complete solution for Email Marketer if you can afford to set up and maintain own SMTP Server.

After going through this bad experience, we thought of buying the Interspire Email Marketer suite and deploy it on our SMTP server. This made us understand many in-depth facts regarding setting up our SMTP server. We needed to afford a VPS Sever along with IP addresses and installation of PowerMTA, with DMARC, ADSP, EHLO to send about 1,500,000 emails per month. New terms also popped into our analysis, like IP rotation and IP warm up.

Cost: $45 for 100,000 emails.

Experience with Sendy over Amazon SES – Simple Email Service:

It’s been almost four months now we are using Amazon SES, and we didn’t face the need of making a shift. This made me sit down and write about our experiences in the last eight months. To be honest, this email marketing solution that we are using at present is an ideal solution, and frankly, I knew about it all along the past one and half year. Yes, I am talking about the PHP software Sendy, which can be configured with Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) to send out emails in bulk.

Although I knew about this software, I never actually gave it a try. The reason for this was, I always had a perception that Amazon SES emails will straight land in the spam folder. I had read somewhere- Since Amazon SES is not pricey at all, a lot of spammers are using it for sending spam email campaigns. I am sure by now you have figured out what kind of emails I am talking about here!!

Two months back, I decide to take the plunge bought Sendy License from their website, installed it on my favorite DigitalOcean SSD Cloud Server in about 20 minutes’ time.

Followed by successful installation of Sendy on $10 Cloud Server, I followed Sendy Get Started Guide to setup, SPF and DKIM records for the domain name. Here I faced an issue with DigitalOcean DNS service; I was not able to verify DKIM, that’s why I shifted the DNS Service to Cloudflare.

Installation of Sendy is quite easy.

After completing DKIM verification of domain name, I went ahead to set up, bounce and complaint handling setup with Amazon SNS, followed by configuring the Sendy PHP files in Amazon SES Domain Notification Settings.

• Order your copy of Sendy from this link. [ Affiliate link ]
• Get an SSD Server at Digital Ocean from here at the cheapest price. [ Affiliate link ]

Cost: $10 for 100,000 E-mails and $10 for Server per month.

You can find step by step Sendy Setup information on DigitalOcean here. Once you order Sendy Online you will receive a license and Official Get Started Guide in the email.

Finally, we were allowed to send 140 emails per second, and we were successful in sending a Million mail in about 8-9 Hours.

Cost: $100 for 1,000,000 E-mails and $20 for Server per month.

Cons: Need very high technical setup knowledge.

Update: Yes, we worked a lot in technology to upgrade them to send emails at such high speed. Now after 3 months we have shifted our setup to our EasySendy, which provides Sendy Installation and Hosting. What we liked most about EasySendy is that it helped us to setup Sendy with a single click and then afterward their support team took care of everything.

Sending More than 1 Million Marketing Emails with High Speed:

When we started using Sendy with Amazon SES, we were given production access and then a daily limit of 25,000 emails per day. Now with increasing need of sending email campaigns to a big list of email subscribers, we requested AWS to increase the daily limits along with increasing limit on emails sent per second, which was initially ten emails per second.

This New Year and Christmas festive season we got a request to send mass mail to a list of more than 1 Million subscribers. We accepted the challenge and took changes required accordingly. First, we got confirmation from Amazon SES team that they have increased our daily quota, followed by upgrading our account from Sendy Hosting to our EasySendy Pro application which supports Amazon SES integration and higher email sending speed with large email subscriber list holding capacity.

EasySendy Pro also gave us ability to connect with more SMTP relays apart from Amazon SES, which includes Mandrill, SendGrid, SparkPost, Leadersend, Dyn, Elasticemail, MailGun, SendinBlue, MailJet, TipiMail and MailerQ. With multiple SMTP relay support we got an ability to split test email deliveries across the relay servers and check reports, track email clicks, opens of each email campaign. Pro also has a smart autoresponder and advanced email list segmentation based on subscriber interactions with email campaign.

Delivering email through multiple SMTP relay server improved our email inbox delivery and enhanced email open rate, which finally resulted in improved ROI on email marketing. Other features which we also used:

• Web forms for email capture
• Custom subscriber pages
• Email template editor
• Custom fields, tags, and filters
• Tracking domain setup
• Auto bounce and complaint handling setup
• RSS/JSON feed emails
• API, Google Analytics, and WordPress integration

During setup with EasySendy Pro we did a proper setup of SPF, DKIM and DMARC records on our sending domain name. Apart from this we also added our sending domain name to Google Postmasters, having all these setups correctly along with valid tracking domain name setup, our email open rate further improved.

Cost: $100 for 1,000,000 E-mails through Amazon SES and $299 for 1,000,000 subscribers on EasySendy Pro per month with unlimited emails at 30 emails per month.

Pro: Now the whole email marketing setup is as smooth as Mailchimp at 10X Lower Price!

Safe Email Marketing Tips:

Until now our experience with Amazon SES is excellent and one thing I must mention is that Amazon is very serious about the use of Simple Email Service. During the first week, our account was put on probation, and we needed to clarify everything like the business, why our customers have opted for email and how we are handling the subscription and un-subscription of emails. Every bit was specified and laid down clearly. Finally, they cooperated with us to give us complete access again.

Here are some points you should always keep in mind while using Amazon SES Service:

• Always keep watch on Bounce Rate.
• Don’t try to send any e-mail advertisements.
• Getting Email Marked as Spam, is quite dangerous, keep watch.
• Configure proper SPF, DKIM, DMARC records to your sending domain name.
• Add your Sending domain name to Google Postmasters and Microsoft SNDS.
• Add your own tracking domain name that will appear on links in the email template.
• To increase the deliverability of email don’t use spam sensitive words and/or lot of symbols.
• Always maintain text to image and text to link ratio.
• Avoid using external links in the e-mail campaign.

I will discuss more on how to avoid emails marked as spam and increase the deliverability of emails in the mailbox, in coming posts.

If you need help on installation or have any question feel free to leave the feedback below.

Update: Until now we have received 47% Open Rate and is increasing slowly with time.