Later this week, I’m officially moving away from sending my own in-house email (with my own email marketing software) to an email service provider.

Understand this… I’m a cheapskate. And I hated the idea of paying an email hosting service when I could instead push a few buttons on my own email marketing software and do virtually the same for free.

Or so I thought. Boy was I wrong. And I’ve been wrong for a long long time (13 years to be exact).

The reality is in-house email is FAR from free. Sending out my own emails has easily cost me tens of thousands of dollars in profit because my emails have a hard time getting delivered. And it’s getting worse week by week.

The good news is having the pros do it all for you might be cheaper than doing all of the work of sending bulk email out yourself.

Here are my top 5 reasons for switching from in-house email to sending business email via a bulk email service provider:

Higher delivery rates –

When you send out your own business emails, you have 0% chance of getting all of your emails delivered. In fact, you have almost 0% chance of having just half of your emails delivered. That’s how bad it is nowadays.

Why?

The big reason is spam. Your recipients are setup to be super aggressive in their spam-fighting efforts… making it hard for legitimate business emails to get delivered.

But some bulk email service providers have entire teams who’s only job is to “negotiate” with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to get your emails delivered. It’s like having a team of full-time “mediators” working for you (silently behind the scenes) for less than the price of a small coffee. You just can’t beat it.

I’ve seen this first hand… I help several internet marketers. And I get to peek over their shoulder and see their email reports. And many of these IMers see near 100% open rates when using a quality email service provider.

This benefit alone is worth switching to a professional email hosting service… but there are many more advantages:

Higher response – I’m a big fan of testing.

And my new email service provider gives me the fast and easy option to split different email messages and report back to me which one generated higher response.

I KNOW I’ve missed out on higher response because I wasn’t split testing my email messages in the past. Never again.

With split testing, I can test two different subject lines and see which one gets higher response.

Even better, my new email service provider offers me AMAZING reports that tell me in a glance which emails are most responsive (and most important, which ones are not). Armed with this information,

In a glance, I see which tested email put more money in my pocket. Armed with this data, I take the winning email design and put it into my followup autoresponder for the highest response – it’s the ultimate “set it and forget it” tactic.

And take a look at this report:

This report is GOLD… because in just a glance, I can see when most of subscribers open their emails… and with my new bulk email service, I can schedule followup emails to be sent at the best day and time of the week.

My new ESP has dozens and dozens of reports just like this… ultimately helping me tweak my bulk emails to make more money.

Your web hosting company HATES spam – 

There’s nothing worse than getting an email from your web hosting provider with this bad news…

“You’re about to have your website shut down because of spam complaints.”

That happened to me. And I don’t spam. (In fact I hate spam more than anyone.)

Here’s the issue. I send out emails to thousands of passionate marketing junkies each and every week. These same marketing junkies doubled opted into registering for my FREE weekly marketing updates and alerts. And these emails are right to the point – often just a few sentences in length pointing to a new blog post…

… But every so often, one of these subscribers clicks on the wrong button and tags my email as spam (instead of unsubscribing). And just one single spam complaint (no matter how many emails are sent out) freak out our hosting providers. And when hosting providers freak out, they turn off our entire website (often without notice).

Even if you spend hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars per month on web hosting, web-hosting techies have been trained to “shoot first and ask questions later” in order to thwart spammers. They know a click on a “this is spam” link doesn’t necessarily mean your email is spam.

But the truth is your web hosting company would prefer you outsource your business emails. That’s the real truth. Dealing with spam issues is a huge thorn in the side for web hosting providers.

Hand’s-free email cleaning –

 If you want to get your bulk emails delivered, you MUST keep on top of bad email addresses. If you fail to maintain a clean email list, you’ll ultimately pay the price…

… When you send emails that do not get delivered, these “bounce” and return back to you undelivered.

There are a variety of reasons for a bounce… everything from a misspelled email address to a subscriber who changed their email address (and didn’t alert you about it). It’s just like snail mail, except when you continually send bounced emails, you actually run the risk of being having your email account tagged (and put on a worldwide blacklist).

Handling bounced email is a HUGE chore. It’s worse than root canal. I just spent the last two days removing 250 bounced email addresses from my email system by hand… one by one. I’ll NEVER do this again.

Good email service providers automatically keep your emails up to date and bounce free. And a clean list helps helps get a high percentage of your emails delivered.

Filter out tire kickers –

 Now that I’m sending bulk email though a paid email service provider (and being a self-confessed cheapskate), I want to eliminate those who don’t read my email.

Sure, it’s great to boast that I’ve got a big list. This is great for the ego. But the reality is over 90% of these subscribers won’t ever buy my stuff. Even worse, most of these tire kickers won’t even open my emails.

But get this… my new email hosting service gives me the option to delete subscribers who never look at my emails. This is an AMAZING cost-cutting advantage that takes seconds to pull off. In just three mouseclicks, I’m able to eliminate anyone on my email list who doesn’t open my emails… there’s no reason for me to pay to have my “pearls of wisdom” delivered to la la land.

The bottom line is I’m actually excited to pay to have my emails delivered for the first time since I ventured online in 1997.  For about a penny per subscriber per month, I’m able to email just like the pros do… boosting my response… seeing higher delivery rates… and not having to manually handle bounced emails.