Email Marketing And Your Smtp Mail Server

By Author: devis eliot
Total Articles: 37
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Email marketing is an important part of marketing. Sending bulk emails to the users and prospective clients is the oldest method of generating traffic to a website. Along with the marketing part of an email marketing campaign, you should also consider the technical part of it - that is the SMTP server.

This server is very important and it often influences the success of an email marketing campaign. SMTP server transfers the mails from your end to the recipient's end. Hence, if it is not functioning properly or it has any configuration problem, the entire campaign will go in vain.

How SMTP Server works when you send bulk emails

This is a piece of hardware that works as the mail transfer agent. It receives the formatted emails from the bulk email marketing solution; it then determines the domains where the emails should be delivered and then work accordingly. Without a properly configured SMTP server, you cannot send bulk emails or the emails will not get out of your server as this is the sending engine of your web server.

Earlier free SMTP servers were used to send bulk emails ...
... as the volumes were low. A dedicated SMTP mail server is required when you need to send high volume of bulk emails at a single go. Some of the commonly used free SMTP servers are Microsoft IIS SMTP Server, Postfix, Sendmail etc.

Warning signs that your SMTP email server is not working properly

Elongated email delivery time:

When you send bulk emails, you put huge load on the SMTP server. First, the server has to parse or read or interpret all the emails that it receives from the email marketing software. Then it has to do a DNS lookup, which means, it has to check the domains of the recipients to determine where to deliver the emails. When you send few thousands of emails, you put huge load on the server which may not be manageable for the server.

There is another reason for which the delivery of emails may be delayed. The recipient's ISP may defer the emails you are sending. This happens when there is a protocol mismatch or the rate at which your SMTP is sending emails is not acceptable by the receiving ISP. You need to configure your SMTP server to make things work.

Selective emails are declined:

If the ISP of a recipient flags your IP address, all the emails sent to that ISP will be rejected. The ISP treats these emails as spam and will not let them pass through. This is a serious problem. If your SMTP email contains many addresses that do not exist, the ISP may consider all the emails as bad emails. Also, if a lot of recipient blacklist your emails or complain about it, the ISP may blacklist the entire system and block all the emails sent from the SMTP.

You need to clean up the SMTP email list frequently and remove the email addresses that do not exist anymore. Also, running spam email campaigns is not a good idea - if you want your SMTP server to work properly avoid spam email marketing campaigns.