Last year our email broadcaster advised that we would no longer be able to use their service to send newsletters. When we asked why we were told that a scan had flagged List Factory as a “mailing list” business (duh) and they were implementing a global policy of not supporting these businesses.

We pointed out that we were sending less than 10,000 emails a year, so blocking our business was a big overreaction to any concerns that they have about spammers. However, no amount of phone calls or emails could get them to deviate from the global policy so we exported our contacts and unsubscribes and closed the account. Setting up with a new provider was time-consuming but not too difficult – mostly annoying because we had to recreate everything.

Email newsletters are only a small part of List Factory’s marketing strategy but I imagined the impact of being suddenly banned by your service provider would be far more serious for a company that relies on email to drive business from customers and prospects.

This experience also reminded me of an issue that I had as a recipient of an email newsletter. The newsletter was “The Marketing – Analytics Intersect” by Avinash Kaushik, which I highly recommend.

After a few months, I noticed that some of the weekly newsletters had not arrived in my Inbox (which was easy to spot as each edition was numbered) and were also not in my Junk folder. I added the email address and domain to my “Safe Sender” list. This did not solve the problem, so I also subscribed with my personal email address. Over the following months I noticed that some newsletters were missing from my work email, some from my personal email and occasionally they were missing from both inboxes.

The point of the above is that most of us know very little about what happens to our emails after we press the Send button. A series of “black box” algorithms will determine whether your email is delivered, flagged as Junk, or just disappears. It’s hard to know when your email will fall on the wrong side and not be delivered or flagged as Spam. Therefore, it makes sense to maintain mail and telemarketing as part of your customer and prospecting program marketing mix.

Of course, List Factory would be very pleased to help supply a mail or telemarketing list for your next B2C or B2B campaign.