First, I guess I should address the question: “Why do I need an email engine?”  Good question.  Ever try to send out 100 emails at once?  Most email providers have a rate limit.  Even if you are sending mail through Outlook, your ISP controls port 25, the email port through which you send out email.  They often limit to 25 or 50 at best.  The reason they do this is that if you were to violate any SPAM regulations, they don’t want to be implicated.  That makes sense.

Also, for you to be in compliance as the sender, you are required to provide an opt-out mechanism and maintain that list.  You can do that yourself, but why would you want that responsibility when an email engine can do it for you?  It’s just like payroll.  Even though you could run your payroll in-house, it makes sense to outsource your payroll so that they take care of the payroll taxes, which keep you in compliance with the government.

Then there’s the tools the engine provides for you to easily create and send an HTML email.  Most also provide tracking statistics for open rates, and click rates, which is invaluable for you to optimize your email program and make it more effective.

So which engine is the best?  How do you pick the right one?

I have to admit that I am quite biased.  I prefer Emma over the plethora of technologies available.  I can’t say that I have tested all of them, but I have worked with quite a few.  In the early days we were all about Constant Contact.  They were one of the first, and the best at that time.  Their competition was limited to adjuncts of web content management systems, and they lowered the cost of entry for small businesses to start using this technology.  We probably put 100+ clients in the capable hands of Constant Contact back in the day.

But the low flat rates based on number of records, plus a 30-day free trial, attracted some problems for Constant Contact.  SPAM-ers and uneducated business owners love “free” and “cheap.”  These folks jumped on board with Constant Contact, sending to people they didn’t know, blasting promotional material daily to unwilling recipients.  Our clients would send out a blast one day and find that all the Bellsouth or Earthlink addresses in their database didn’t receive the email.   We would call Constant Contact, wait on hold, and ask them to look into it.  In a few days, they would have negotiated with the providers to “unblock” their technology.  Constant Contact had to do something to get a handle on this, so they started looking at vertical markets and asking “who is SPAM-ing?” 

Constant Contact black-listed new customers from certain industry groups.  One of those groups was mortgage lenders. We had a big mortgage company coming on board with us, so we had to find another solution, evaluated other technologies with a better model.

We ended up with Emma, and here’s why we love Emma . . .

Emma adopted a model to work with more sophisticated businesses like YMCA, Life Is Good, Gibson, major universities, the United Way and others.   They created a program to attract small businesses who were working with savvy marketing agencies.  This enabled Emma to maintain good standing with the ISPs since the quality of their senders was much higher.