5 Problems with Sending e-Cards from your own PC!
It's increasingly common for businesses to send Christmas cards and greetings cards electronically, not least because of the cost-savings one makes compared with sending traditional paper cards.
However, sending your e-cards directly from your own PC rather than via an e-marketing system such as iceMailer can result in problems!
Hiding People's Email Addresses
If you include all recipients' email addresses in the To: field, you will inadvertently reveal everyone's email address details, which is unlikely to win you any Brownie points with contacts!
BCC Isn't Always Good
To get around the problem of revealing email addresses included in the To: field, many people use the BCC: field to "blind carbon copy" recipients into a mass email.
While this prevents recipients seeing each other's email addresses, it can cause the email to be blocked by spam filtering software, which regards emails that include numerous recipients in the BCC: field as probable spam.
The result may be that your e-card never makes it to your customer's inbox because it gets blocked by their spam filtering software en route!
Falling Foul of your ISP
Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) provides you with broadband access, not an email marketing service. If you send emails from your PC to many recipients at once, your ISP may deem that you are abusing their mail server. Expect a warning from your ISP or, worse still, that your email address gets blacklisted, meaning that you are unable to send emails at all!
If you send an e-card via iceMailer, your personal email address is not used as the sending address, which means that your own email address is never put at risk by your e-marketing activity.
Impersonal Greetings
Sending one generic email from your PC to many recipients provides you with no means of personalising the message. If you have gone to the trouble of wishing Merry Christmas to a customer, surely it would be better to address them in person? (i.e. "Merry Christmas, Fred!")
Housekeeping
Given that many e-cards go out at a time when people are away from work on holiday, sending your e-cards directly from your own PC will generate a number of "out of office" responses from your recipients, which can clutter up your inbox. An e-marketing system such as iceMailer would take care of this housekeeping for you.
So, although you can send your Christmas / Easter e-card to your mailing list from your own PC, you may decide that iceMailer's more sophisticated approach offers you benefits that are worth the extra cost.
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