If you take an interest in online marketing you may have read over the weekend that American email marketing giant MailChimp found itself temporarily blocked by Australia’s largest wholesale hosting provider, TPP Wholesale.
What this meant for Australian businesses using MailChimp was that their marketing emails were being rejected by a large portion of .au domains and thus not making it into many inboxes.
Before we go on, let’s be clear that this is in no way a stab at the monkey. MailChimp is a fantastic entry level platform and there are plenty of good reasons why it’s the most widely used email marketing solution in the world.
In fact it’s a testament to the efficiency of the MailChimp team that the issue was resolved so quickly. With more than three million users sending up to six billion emails a month, the job of keeping all 280 servers off blacklists must literally be non-stop.
And thus arrives the point of this article. Why did the TPP blockage happen in the first place?
According to TPP, they were merely reflecting MailChimp’s blacklisted status with CASA CBL, one of the world’s biggest independent blacklists which pulls its data from major spamtraps.
Netregistry CEO Larry Bloch summed it up well. “MailChimp sends out a lot of emails, but will occasionally, knowingly or unknowingly, have users who are sending spam through their system.”
The lesson for Australian businesses here is simple – If you’re serious about email deliverability (i.e. making it into inboxes), you need to be looking at platforms with more manageable volumes.
MailChimp states publicly on its website that the company has around three million clients and 200 staff. It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that’s roughly 15,000 clients per staff member.
Monitoring every sender is understandably an impossible task for MailChimp, which is precisely why spammers continue to get away with using the otherwise trusted and respected platform.
In comparison, Sign-Up.to currently has around 3,000 clients and just over 30 staff – that’s less than 100 clients per staff member. Slightly more manageable when it comes to maintaining outstanding delivery rates, wouldn’t you say?
This reflects the key difference between Sign-Up.to and the more ‘mass market’ solutions out there (of which there are many).
When we welcome a new client here at Sign-Up.to, we’re not just providing an amazing product. We’re also promising an exceptional level of customer service that keeps our platform free of spammers and our delivery rates as high as they can possibly be.
We do this quite simply by assessing and then manually approving/rejecting every new account before sending privileges are given. In other words, we close the door on spammers before they have the opportunity to use our system.
On top of this is our delivery team, who constantly monitor our servers on the hunt for any lower-than-normal delivery rates. Anything out of the ordinary is thoroughly investigated to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen again.
So if you’re using one of these huge American platforms and aren’t happy with your stats – perhaps now you know a little more as to why they’re so low. If however you’re reading this article as a current user of Sign-Up.to… Congratulations – you’re in safe hands.