Forced to Leave Zoho Campaigns for MailChimp, Constant Contact or another solution...

Forced to Leave Zoho Campaigns for MailChimp, Constant Contact or another solution...

After much research and years of struggle, with no dedicated support from Zoho to fix this problem, I am proposing today to my boss that we leave Zoho Campaigns. Here is my the letter to my boss...




Dear Mr. XXX,

I believe we need to explore a new solution for our email marketing, as Zoho Campaigns does not seem to align with our objectives. We've struggled over the years and I think it would be wise for us to explore a new solution. 

We have tested the following:

- HTML vs. Text Base Emails (sent via zoho zcsend.net server)
- Subject Lines (sent via zoho zcsend.net server)
- Email Content (sent via zoho zcsend.net server)
- Images vs. No Images (sent via zoho zcsend.net serves)
- Links vs. No Links (sent via zoho zcsend.net server)
- Variable Domains (sent via zoho zcsend.net server)
- DKIM / SPF Domain Codes (sent via zoho zcsend.net server)
- Allowed Zoho Support access to our domain to have their team update the DKIM & SPG records

How does Zoho send our emails?

In short, we host our database on their server and their server then sends emails on our behalf, which appears as being "mailed-by" ourcompanydomain, while "signed-by" zcsend.net. The record looks like this...

from: Bob Smith <bobsmith@ourcompanydomain.com>
to: Jonathan Doe <johndoe@gmail.com>
date: Thu, Oct 13, 2016
subject: Do you agree that it is time for a change?
mailed-by: ourcompanydomain.com
signed-by: zcsend.net

Zoho has hundreds of subdomains on zcsend.net which they add regularly. They generate this subdomain and automatically assign it to user accounts. As a result, we have no insight what subdomain we send from, which means we can't check if this subdomain is blacklisted before we send our campaigns. Our last email came from "senderb46.zcsend.net"

After researching, using several blacklist check websites, a leading spam filter site, SORBS, has marked the subdomain they assigned is spam. According to Wikipedia, if Sorbs flags you as spam... majority of free accounts (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, corporate email on gmail servers, and other major ISP's) will flag all emails from that domain as spam. 

Here is one of the tools used to check this subdomain - results are attached in the photo below.

After reading several blogs and forum posts, I see that many Zoho users complain about their subdomain being blacklisted, which Zoho denies, however, the proof in my research shows otherwise. Only after several complaints does Zoho resolve the issue. Zoho seems to be unable to keep up with generating new subdomains fast enough to stay off the lists, and is not doing their part to keep those subdomains off of blacklists and thus we experiencing poor results. 

I am there for proposing we test the following solutions for the next 30 days to see if we experience results that better align with our company goals. See attached recommendations.

Sincerely,

Justin










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