Project Email Part 1

If you use email at all then I expect you’ll find this useful.Β  πŸ˜‰

This series of blog posts, videos and emails will eventually become part of a saleable product so pay attention if you want to see how I go about creating a learning product. Then you can use this methodology as a guide for your own product creation.

Start the video then change quality to 720p and go full screen.

Gradually over time there have arisen some situations related to email that I think need to change. I’m certain that the changes I’m going to discuss in this series of blog posts and emails will prove to be a substantial improvement of your business situation.

This will arise from both different methods of handling email that you may not be doing at the moment, and also with your email marketing – autoresponders.

So let’s get started with a discussion about email clients and then we’ll move onto autoresponders.

I’ve noticed over the last 6 months or so that an increasing number of small business are using free email services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail.

I don’t think this is a good idea for two reasons.

#1 – It looks unprofessional to your customers to be receiving a business email from fredbloggs @ yahoo.com, or studly111111 @ gmail.com etc.Β  πŸ˜‰

#2 – You don’t own the email account, the free email provider does. And they can close you down any time they like.

Ask yourself what it would do to your business if a spam complaint resulted in your free email account being closed.

Nightmare?

Consider Gmail.

Yes we all have Gmail accounts but only because we have to if we want to use any of the Google services such as YouTube, GDrive or Gdocs.

But… Google have a history of closing without warning any service they lose interest in.

They did it with a really useful online graphics editor a couple of years ago, and more recently they closed their RSS reader service too, annoying a whole load of techies out there.

Email could be next if new legislation requires a tax on email addresses, or makes free email addresses illegal to prevent the increasing amount of spam. I don’t think that last one would be a bad thing, and sooner or later a politician is going to have that idea too.

To the public it wouldn’t be a big deal. They’d use their ISP email addresses instead.

But as a business owner, you should *really* be taking charge of your own email and not trust it to chance.

I’d also like you to consider that many free email providers don’t care if the email gets to you or your clients and customers or not. It simply isn’t critical to them. What do they care if they filter 2 million emails out of their network today and yours happens to be one of them?

As far as they’re concerned they’re providing free not business email services, and you can’t afford to rely on them as part of your business.

So learning point number 1 is:-

You shouldn’t rely on free email services as part of your business.

All make sense so far?

In a couple of days or so I’ll show you how *easy* it is to set up an email account within cPanel, and also set what are called DKIM and SPF records – very important!

Now then. To make this whole exercise doubly useful, I’ve created a first video – an overview that explains how I’m going about creating the learning product and what it’s going to be about and where it’s leading to. And iot also explains a lot of things not covered in this email.

If you watch the video and like it, then feel free to give me some love back by sharing and even embedding it on your own site. And of course let me know what you think by leaving me a comment on the post.

IF you’re thinking of leaving a comment on this post with your thoughts, then all I’ll say is that’s a good idea and it’s DEFINITELY in your interest to do so as I’d like to later reward all contributors for their input and views.Β  πŸ˜‰

-Frank Haywood

 

http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/project-email/ <== Click this for a list of all Project Email posts.

Posted by Frank Haywood

11 comments

Thank you, Frank. A bit of a long rant…but I couldn’t agree with you more! I look forward to watching this new product come together with future posts on the topic.

David

Frank Haywood

Hi David,

Yeah sorry. I meant to say a few words about product creation and the product, but as you saw I ended up saying more than I intended. πŸ™„

This has been building up for a while as I’ve seen autoresponder service costs rising while the service being provided isn’t that great. In essence they provide an email pump, everything else is fluff and filler. Costs should be getting *cheaper* not more expensive, but we’ve seen the opposite. Yes they say they provide reputation services too, but that’s just a whole big can of worms right there and I’ll cover that as well.

-Frank

I think you’re onto something very useful, practical, and essential for online marketers, here, Frank . . . as are most of your innovations. My interest is piqued !

Frank Haywood

Hi Wes,

It’s some small changes on how we think is the big issue. We tend to do what other people do, but often there’s much better ways of approaching things. πŸ˜‰

Client side email is one half of it and email marketing is the other. Together they make for big changes in how you run your business and hopefully make you more productive while saving you money too.

And that’s what we all want. πŸ™‚

-Frank

Hamant Keval

Hi Frank

This is something that I certainly would be interested in
Although I have and use my own domain emails setup through My Cpanel – I am not quite sure on how to configure all the more intricate details like DKIM and SPF records
that you mention ( I don’t even know what they mean and do :)) Although probably could google it and sift through all the info and the crap !
I did recently buy the wp plugin that allowed us to use our own domain for newsletters and autoresponders but it was quite intricate in setting up.
I know this is not what you are talking about specifically but sure would like to get away from the free emails I have used for a long time ( just makes it so convenient ) .

Thanks and look forward
Ps This would also go a long way in terms of getting clients ( offline) set up with their own domain emails set up properly

Hamant

Frank Haywood

Hi Hamant,

It’s ever so easy to set up SPF and DKIM records – cPanel does it all for you with a few clicks, so you don’t even have to understand what you’re doing at any level of complexity. You just do it and it’s done.

The autoresponder / broadcast side of it is always going to be harder, with a few hoops to jump through, but once it’s done and set up you don’t have to worry about it any more. You can then get on with the email writing bit.

And yes, thanks for that PS because you’re quite right. Setting up clients with their own broadcast email capability is a real pain for them and for you if you or them are using a service. What I’m proposing is to get them all kitted up with their own set up that they can just log in and send their own emails. And if they don’t want to do it then it’s an extra service you can sell them on top of the setting up. πŸ™‚

-Frank

Hi Frank,
Awesome Info. Yet again a subject I need to understand more fully. Its funny you mention about businesses using Gmail, it is so unprofessional and unsecure. I have scraping programs that I can use too that in the wrong hands can cause trouble.

Looking foreword to the next Vid session.
DC

Frank Haywood

Hi DC,

Thanks for that. I’ve only scratched the surface so far, but you can now see where I’m going with this. πŸ™‚

-Frank

Tom Brownsword

It can be difficult to strike a balance between outsourcing services you need for your business and keeping things in-house. You made a good point with not using a service like Gmail and I should take my own advice sometimes! (But I love Gmail…)

Computer security and business protection is my specialty and it can be difficult to determine when to trust and when to keep things under close control. In the Internet Marketing area, we have people who launch ambitious projects to provide exceptional services, only to discover a couple of months later that their business model was flawed so they close up shop — or they forgot to budget for customer support and ticket go unanswered for weeks — or something happens to the product production schedule and stuff doesn’t get delivered on time…

I could go on and on! But what do you do when you make a major business move, only to discover that the key component you outsourced just disappeared and the owner isn’t answering emails?

It’s important to choose carefully. It’s best to go with established businesses that have a track record of providing excellent, dependable service. You’ll usually pay more, but better to be out a few extra dollars (or pounds) a month than try to recover from a crucial service that disappeared.

A great example of this is your web site. Almost everybody hosts their web sites with a third party service, so in a way, even your email accounts on your own domain are somewhat out of your control. Most of us who have been around for a while have found a good hosting provider and stick with them. I’ve been with mine for over 8 years and have tried to move a few times, only to come crawling back, begging forgiveness…

So choose wisely, both in terms of what to outsource and to whom you outsource.

Take care,
Tom

Great info, Frank!
I’ve wanted to send emails from my domain, but have been unsure how to do so and yet have good deliverability. I look forward to discovering all the in’s & out’s.

Thanks for the training!
Karen

David Manning

Hello Frank,

Yes, I couldn’t agree with you more!

Back when I started out I opened an account with GR and a little later with Aweber, but shut both down fairly quickly once I discovered a website autoresponder script.

My thinking was that the more money you have to shell-out to run your business then the more money you need to make before you start to see any profits (obvious really) and in my opinion the e-mail management services were charging huge prices for old rope.

Admittedly we all love free stuff and I have to admit there’s some cracking free software available on the web (WordPress for instance) but when it comes to free services, as you mentioned they are a completely different ball game entirely (and best to steer clear where ever possible)

Nice to see someone is like minded, I always feel when I bang on about not using free services and keeping as much as possible β€œin-house” that people will think I’m just being a control freak (although I probably am a bit) but when you think about it, we all want to be the one in charge of own own business were we have the final say on how it’s run but when you use free services it’s like your business is suddenly run by a committee.

Anyway that my two cents (as out American cousins put it)
keep up the good work

Regards
David.