Is Your ESP Suppressing Your Efforts to Market to Your Teacher Email Lists?

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Is Your ESP Suppressing Your Efforts to Market to Your Teacher Email Lists?

I think one of the things non experienced marketers do is to jump into an education email list campaign without understanding how important choosing the correct ESP (email deployment provider) can be. Over the past two decades in this k-12 email list market where companies that sell into the US k-12 education space, many changes have taken place. These changes make it far more difficult to just plug and play your principal email list marketing and teacher email list marketing. Here are a few takeaways from our experience working with businesses, organizations, and institutions.

Choosing the right ESP. The easy choice is probably the most prolific companies like the Chimp or C Contact (no plugs from me). If mainstream, join the masses in messaging, is your groove then these two tower above most all other ESPs combined. They make it incredibly easy to get you on board with snappy graphics, templates, and sick pie charts. Their tiered pricing models are simple to follow and you can probably save some green by slapping down your credit card to opt into reoccurring payments. On a side note, I have been thinking a lot about my glutenous line up of subscriptions recently after seeing an advertisement from “Rocket Money”. These guys claim to help you get a handle on stuff you probably didn’t even know you were being debited for. Maybe I will subscribe to their service (insert irony). https://www.rocketmoney.com/

Now that you have chosen the leaders in email marketing here’s what you might be in for. First off you are likely going to share an IP address with another company or companies. Kasperski does a great job of explaining:  https://usa.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/what-is-an-ip-address. Your IP address could have been in use in the past pushing out emails before your inception. It takes quite a while to build a good reputation on an IP address to get through people’s spam box and the thought of sharing one while trying to market your specific products is counterintuitive. You want to get a dedicated IP address. 

The next issue you will likely face is not getting your all of your contacts sent or imported. This is a big one. Back in 2013 one of our customers loaded a few thousand principal email list contacts into C Contact and hit the deploy button. Their results were not great. What happened was that the district and schools within had blocked all emails originating from CC. So regardless of what product or service was being offered the emails would be blocked. This is not uncommon. People can opt out of both your emails and the emails of the company sending your emails. Similarly, these ESPs also have an extremely large list of opt-outs that they have compiled over the years, probably 10s of millions of US email addresses that will never see the market when being sent out from these giants. So when you load your snazzy K12 Data teacher email list of 3k education email contacts into their platform and 1k don’t make the cut, this is the reason. One third of your qualified and highly cleaned k-12 email list never sees the light of day under the Monkey’s supervision.

3^rd party email lists. The next issue is your list never gets imported in the first place. The Monkey gets angry. I’m not sure what the number is but my educated guess would say that 95% of all email deployment companies do not accept purchased lists. Why? Well, this is because there is so much garbage data being sold online that they don’t want to risk their (shared) IP addresses. So they lay down the speed bumps to curtail this practice. Many of you have received the cursory, auto-generated email from the Monkey telling you your account is in trouble, frozen,… You can thank companies like K12 Prospects, EmailListUS, dot-ru companies, and other less desirable players for this. They are trashing this long standing, fabulous form of marketing for the rest of us.

In summary. Find a lesser used ESP and get your school email lists delivered. Here’s one that we send customers to:  https://k12-data.com/email_deployment

Charlie Isham

K12 Data.

Build A List today:  https://k12-data.com/custom_databases