Desktop or an Online Based Software Solution? - Top Email Marketing Software Comparison

Choosing the best email marketing software: desktop vs online

Before you choose the best email marketing software for your needs, I think that first you need to resolve whether you should purchase a desktop based software or a remotely hosted software solution.

Desktop Based software – Issues

For a desktop based software (like SendBlaster), you will pay a one time fee and download the product and then use your own email server to send emails. The software will help you manage sending a lot of emails but you still have to figure out which company will let you use their servers to send bulk emails. A lot of ISPs will not allow you to send bulk emails through their servers and similar is the case with a lot of ESPs (Email Service Providers).

Not Enough Features

Even if you are able to find a company that lets you send a lot of emails and you are able to use a desktop based software, you may eventually run into problems and sometimes you won’t even know that a problem exists. For example, most of your emails may end up going to the spam folders or may even bounce back. Also, you will not be able to find several features that are offered by an online hosted solution, for example: responsive templates, inbox preview, time travel, stock images, online email archives etc.

Let the Experts Handle the Homework

If you are serious about email marketing, we recommend that you go for a company that offers remotely hosted email marketing software solution, for example Benchmark Email, Aweber, Getresponse etc. Such companies actually specialize in sending bulk emails and they do a lot of work behind the scenes to ensure that your emails get delivered. Here are some of the things that they do, which you will find hard to do with a desktop based software:

  • Using static IP addresses
  • Building reputation of the IP addresses and their domain names
  • Ensuring their IPs and domain names do not become part of “blacklists”
  • Keeping an eye on the delivery rates and troubleshooting deliverability issues
  • Participating in feedback loop programs offered by most of the Email Service Providers
  • Automatically handling bounce-backs
  • Automatically handling subscriptions and un-subscriptions

 Is It Really Worth Your Time?

These are just some of the major things that they do, which you may have a hard time doing yourself. Even if you are tech-savvy and can handle a lot of stuff yourself, you may end up spending a lot of time using a desktop based software. And it is quite possible that 50% of your emails may not even reach the inboxes of your subscribers, resulting in a loss of efforts, time and revenue. We will discuss each of these features more in our upcoming articles.

Conclusion

We think that a serious email marketer should let the experts do the email deliveries and take advantage of the companies that specialize in email marketing. We have done a comprehensive comparison of the major online email marketing software companies that you can refer to, and choose the best email marketing software for you need.