When you send emails to your target audience, your goal is to land in their inbox, get them to click, and engage them with your content. You know how to launch a successful email campaign, but how do you make sure these campaigns reach the recipient?
The bottom line is there is no recipe that would guarantee that 100 percent of your emails will be delivered, but using a custom domain email address and transactional email service can maximize your chances.
Are you skeptical about using transactional email services instead of your inbox service? It’s always a good idea to use a transactional email service for mass emails. Here’s why:
Transactional email services – such as SendGrid, Elastic Email and MailGun – work around the limitations of a standard inbox and DMARC authentication protocol, allowing you to escape the complexity of maintaining your own email server. These providers not only specialize in sending bulk newsletters, but they also increase your deliverability rate, avoid the spam folder, offer commercial-grade security and let you send thousands of emails per month. Learn more about in our Why Bulk Email Service is Better Than Your Inbox for Broadcast and Notifications blog post.
A huge perk of these services is that you can connect SendGrid, Elastic Email and MailGun directly to your clinic management system – Universal Office. Go to our Universal Office Help Centre to find out everything you need to know about getting started. If you’re not sure whether to go with SMTP or API setup, check our blog about Email Integration Methods: SMTP vs. API.
All three transactional email services mentioned here offer free, as well as premium, packages. Let’s take a look at free monthly plans first.
Free Plans: Know Your Limits
- After a 30-day free trial, 100 emails/day forever
- Up to 2,000 contacts
- 3 days of email activity history
- Ability to send attachments
- Delivered, click, open, and unsubscribe tracking
- Bounce rate, spam, and blocked reporting
- Global 24×7 customer support team
- 5,000 emails/day with 150,000 emails/month limit
- Email attachments are not included
- Detailed campaign statistics
- Detailed delivery tracking and statistics
- 24/7 free global support
- 300 emails/day with up to 10,000 emails/month
- Ability to send attachments to 5 authorized recipients
- Free validation for the first 100 emails – verifies if an email address actually exists
- 5 days of email activity history
- Free contact storage
- Bounce, spam and unsubscribe reporting
TIP: Adding a credit card removes a daily email limit and allows attachments to be sent. The plan will remain free as long as you don’t go over 10,000 emails/month.
If your practice has outgrown what free plans have to offer, here are some paid plans/add-ons to choose from:
Paid Plans and Add-Ons: Explore Your Options
- 40,000 emails/month for $9.95/month
- No daily email limit
- Up to 2,000 contacts
- 3 days of email activity history
- Ability to send attachments
- Delivered, click, open, and unsubscribe tracking
- Bounce rate, spam, and blocked reporting
- Global 24×7 customer support team
- Add-on: Up to 10,000 contacts for $10/month
- Add-on: 30 days of email activity history for $5/month
- Take a look at the Pricing Plan Comparison Chart for more details
- 9 cents per 1,000 emails if 150,000 monthly email limit is reached
- Email attachments are $1/GB
- Litmus Testing at $9/test
- Up to 20,000 emails/month for $5/month
- No daily email limit on any account that has a credit card on it
- Email validation from $1 for every 100 emails – verifies if an email address actually exists. This helps to protect your IP/domain reputation and to improve your deliverability by maintaining a clean list of email addresses.
Important: When sending email marketing campaigns, keep in mind that attachments increase the chances of your emails being sent to spam. Due to the risk of viruses, email filters are more likely to prevent an email with attachments from being delivered to your recipients. A better alternative to attaching files to your message is placing file content on a page of your website, and then providing a link to that web page in the body of your message. Also remember that placing content on your website (on your company blog) will derive you much greater benefits.
As you may know, with the latest Universal Office update we have introduced a new feature – emailing invoices straight from the clinic management system. Since those invoices are being sent as attachments, make sure you are subscribed to a transactional email service plan that allows you to do so.
We are confident this information will help you decide on the transactional service provider and the features for your email marketing needs. After all, your patients not receiving email notifications and missing out on special offers due to your practice reaching its daily email limit will cost more than monthly subscription fees.
Go to our blog for SMS + Email Marketing Template Ideas.
Happy emailing!
