Which is Best for My Needs and Circumstances - Email Marketing Software or an Email Marketing Service?

Deciding whether to purchase specialist email marketing software and prepare the material yourself, or employ a professional email marketing service to produce and handle the material on your behalf, is never easy - but we're here to help you decide. 

Having a list of recipients and knowing what you want to send them is the starting point for your email marketing campaign. You now need to decide whether to purchase specialist email marketing software and prepare the material yourself; or employ a professional email marketing service to produce and handle the material on your behalf.

Email marketing software

Whether onto a local/personal computer or a network/web-server; if you decide to purchase email marketing software to use yourself it will, of course, need installing and configuring correctly. Having installed the software package you can not only produce fantastic email marketing materials but manage recipients, create and edit accompanying email messages and then send the email communication itself.

Dependant on the features in the software package you'll also be able to track your recipient's feedback - like who opened the email, which URL's were clicked on etc. These and similar statistical features will require a connection between the recipient and a web server that collects the actions recorded.
You should be aware that most of the PC software packages don't have these statistical features, because it means that the PC would have to act as a web server - which potentially could create problems, concerning: Security, an unstable Internet connection and low connection speeds.
However, some of the PC software packages do have statistical reporting features. This is organised by using a web server that collects the information being tracked - like our own "inwise Desktop".
You should find that most email marketing software designed for a web server has this feature built in.

Another Internet related point regarding email marketing software packages is the component and settings used to send the email itself, known as SMTP.
Whilst there is an option to use your ISP (Internet Service Provider) SMTP, not all of the software packages will allow it.
The alternative is to use an internal SMTP within the software package; but - some ISP's will block this option.
Either way configuring your SMTP could cause problems dependant on the ISP you use. Obviously the ultimate speed at which the sending process can be accomplished will depend on your Internet connection bandwidth and, more specifically, it's uploading rate.

You should also be aware of potential problems in sending the email marketing materials regarding its deliverability or, in simple words, - what is the probability that your email will be 'caught as spam' and not even reach to the recipients inbox? In short, you must adhere to some basic rules when using email marketing software to avoid that problem arising.

Email marketing services

An email marketing service will let you start using email marketing without the need to install software and deal with all the associated technical issues. Apart from having many templates to choose from, an ESP (Email Marketing Service Provider) will offer services like: recipient management, content editing, email sending and, of course, the tracking of any reports and statistics. Most of them will operate their delivery services at very high speeds and produce very high quality reports for their customer; removing the need for you to worry about SMTP, ISP relations, white listed servers, data gathering etc.
ESP's are easily accessed via your web browser and payment is usually based on the amount of the outgoing email - or the recipient list stored on the ESP's server.