Welcome to our new weekly podcast segment with Gene Marks. In the first episode of this series, Gene talks about what business owners should do in case of a government shutdown.
Hey everybody. This is Gene Marks and welcome to The Hartford, Small Biz Ahead podcast this week. Guys I want to talk about email marketing. Email marketing was once declared dead and now it is really more popular than ever. And I wanted to share my thoughts with you based on some email marketing experts that I've recently been talking to about sort of the best practices for doing email. First of all, just to make sure that we are clear in 2020, according to one research firm called Statistica, there was about 306 billion emails sent and received every day around the world. And that number is projected to increase to 376 billion within the next few years. I mean, it really comes as little surprise to most anyone running a business. I mean, when I look at different research and marketing firms and analyze this stuff, you know, they say that many, many small businesses rely on email as their main way of communicating.
I mean, there used to be a time where people were thinking like Facebook messenger and text messaging and WhatsApp would be like the primary means of communication. And although those are powerful ways to communicate, it's really email. An email marketing service said that two thirds of small businesses use email marketing to reach their customers. So listen, it's a really critical marketing tool and let's let's face it. There's still a lot of confusion about using it. So, you know, it's 2021 now and maybe you're listening to this in 2022. So, you know, it's pretty recent. Let me, let me share with you just some, some of my thoughts on email as to make the best use of it. Okay. So for one, you don't want to send hundreds or thousands of emails from your company's email server or your rate over your, you know, from your company's email platform like outlook or Gmail, cause that's a quick way to get canceled by a Microsoft or Google or get your internet service provider really angry.
So if you are sending out hundreds of thousands of emails, you really want to be making use of a bulk email service, and I'm sure you're familiar with some of the popular ones, constant contact MailChimp, Emma, I also like one called a Weber as well. There's a bunch of them that are out there. Those guys, those platforms they're their primary job is to make sure that your email gets delivered to the people that you were trying to get it in their, in their inbox. And, you know, they provide templates and other assistance for sending out email campaigns. They provide help with making sure your emails aren't going to wind up in somebody's spam folder, but really the, you know, their job is to get them out there and listen, the best ones of these, they will test you. They will ask you about your opt in rules and how you're maintaining your data.
The most popular ones like Constant Vontact, they don't allow you to send emails out on their service to like an info ad or a sales ad address. They want to make sure that your emails going out are legit and they will shut you down. If they think that there is any problem or you are even remotely thought of sending out spam now, not only does that keep you honest, but it has another really big impact. It allows their emails to get through the major email services out there. The, the Hotmails, the Gmails, the, you know, the other services like it, they know that the servers that are owned by these well-known email campaigns, software, bulk email services, like Constant Contact or MailChimp, they know that they put their users through some due diligence. And so they let the emails to those servers generally go through.
So they're less inclined to block messages. So the bottom line is this pick a good, legitimate,
