The Email Wars

David Baker from Agency.com dropped and email that just hit me like a throw from right field to home plate ahead of the runner. (That is a good thing to me).

Many times we have encounters companies that say things like, ” I can just find a PHP email program or I am going to roll my own.” We have often told that CIO, “Go for it… how long do you want before I ccan check in with you to see how it is going?” It eventually never works right, gets the IP blacklisted, can only mail at night in small batches, does not track right, etc, etc etc. Or never gets built at all.

Read David’s words of wisdom:

LET ME PAINT YOU A picture. You have just seen a demo of a cool e-mail system, and now you dream of being able to manage campaigns, lists, bounces, replies, dynamic content and reporting in a brand-new way. You pitch the cool system to your internal technology team, and inevitably someone asks, “Why do we need to spend money on this system? Our internal system costs us nothing.”

Sound familiar? Just recently I had a client who asked me, “Why don’t we build our own?” I had flashbacks of 1999 when I was helping to launch an e-mail software company and recalled all the things we’d say to combat this question. Then I fast- forward to 2006, and this is what I come up with for an answer: e-mail is not free.

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