Mailer Module FAQs

How many contacts can I store in the CRM module?

You can store an unlimited amount of contacts up to the amount that can be stored within the limitations of your account disk limits.  If you run out of space, we can easily upgrade your account to accommodate more contacts.

How many times a month can I send to my list?

As many times as you want, we don't charge by your list size, but by how many emails you send per month.  We feel it is much fairer to everyone to only charge for what you actually send.  In reality, if you send to your list more than two times a month, your unsubscribes will increase dramatically because you would start to annoy the members on your mailing list.

Can I import my email list for a one-off mailings?

Yes!  We are one of the only services that allow you to import emails from your internal systems to our system for a one off mailing. 

Can I purchase an email list and send to that list using your system?

NO!  A purchased list is a list of users that did not subscribe to receive emails from you, this is spam.  We are very very strict about anyone that sends spam and we will not hesitate to terminate an account without notice if we determine you are sending to a purchased or harvested list.  Contact your sales representative to get more information about sending to purchased or harvested lists.

Why does it take so long to get the mailing started?

After a mailing is activated to be sent, the system needs to set up the queue of when to send which emails so they can be sent systematically with some time-gaps to avoid us being put into a spam list. This process takes a while to be completed depending on how many recipients are there in a mailing. It can take upto 30 minutes for a mailing that has about 80,000 recipients. If your mailing still hasn't started to send after 2 hours, please let us know.

I have an old or mismanaged list that we haven't sent to in six months, can I send to this list?

If your list has not been sent for over six months or you have not been actively removing bounces and or unsubscribes, then you should subscribe to one of our dedicated SMTP servers.  These SMTP servers are temporary, disposable servers, that we expect to get a lot of complaints to because your list is old or mismanaged.  After sending 3-4 times on a dedicated server your list should be pretty clean and can then be moved to use our SMTP cluster for the fastest and the most reliable delivery rates.   An alternative is that you can subscribe to our BYOS (Bring your own SMTP) and you can send via your own SMTP server(s).  DO NOT try sending to an old or mismanaged list using the main system to see if your list is clean or not.  If you do and we get too many complaints, we may ban your site from ever sending mail on our system again.   If you are not sure, contact your sales representative.

Can I personalize my emails?

Yes!  Each email record has the following fields of data.  Email, First Name, Last Name and then 10 custom fields.  When importing from CRM, the first name and last name are automatically imported if they exist in the CRM module.  When importing a custom list for a single mailing, you can import up to 10 custom fields in addition to the first and last names.   The emails support dynamic if statements, so you can easily perform a function like:

 "If the first name exists, print Dear [First Name], otherwise print Hello,

This is the code that accomplishes the above condition:

${firstname?${lastname}}

Which email address is chosen when you import recipients from CRM?

The system uses the primary email address. If there is an email address in the address or in the login settings, it does not get imported.

Why does it take so long to send out a mailing of around 150,000 recipients?

The reason for the slowness is due to how mail-servers work and to avoid being labelled as spammers.

There are up to 7 days' timeouts for some mail servers, so depending on the server, the mailing module can take even 7 days to send some emails that have been bounced or where the mail server was down for some reason. By speeding up the mailing, we might be put in the spam list, so we tend to increase the timeouts between the emails sent to each server as the mailer tries to resend emails that were previously refused or bounced.

Can I send mailings with .gif files?

Yes. GIF files are the best alternative to videos in an email blast.