Have you tried using your inbox service – such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Outlook – to send bulk emails? If so, chances are you’ve experienced issues when it comes to sending notifications and broadcasts. Here’s why:
The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) access provided by these services intended to be used with the local app on your desktop or mobile device to send messages. However, these services are not built for bulk emails or broadcast messages – and the providers don’t like it when you use them for that purpose. Therefore, they’ve placed additional restrictions and limits on the frequency of outgoing emails, thus preventing third-party applications such as Universal’s eBroadcast to send bulk emails.
For example, while Gmail allows 500 outgoing emails per day, they allow only 20 emails to be sent per hour (find a more comprehensive list of inbox email providers and their sending limits on MailPoet).
Because working around the limitations of standard inbox services will prove to be time-consuming and inefficient, we strongly recommend using providers such as ElasticEmail and SendGrid as your email notification service. These SMTP providers not only specialize in sending bulk newsletters, but they also increase your deliverability rate, avoid the spam folder and let you send thousands of emails per month without limitations. They also offer commercial-grade security that your inbox doesn’t feature, such as disaster recovery, AppSec data encryption and physical security protection through use of data centers.
Broadcasts like newsletters are more than just bulk emails, they’re the voice of your business and they keep you top of mind with customers – which is why streamlining your send process is an important piece of your practice. In an effort to build professional image, the next step is to improve your email reputation.
For more reasons your practice should regularly connect with patients, see Plan to Engage Your New Patients with Follow-up Emails and How to Improve Attendance and Minimize No-Shows. And remember, the Universal Office Help Centre is always a click away to help you configure your mail server for email notifications and email marketing campaigns or answer any other questions you may have.
