As a marketer, there's nothing more frustrating than seeing your emails reach the spam folder of your contacts' mailbox. While there are many factors that lead to the spam debacle, your marketing email loses its very essence when you use your personal email account to send them out. 

 

Here's the list of reasons why you should refrain from doing so: 

 

 1. You're compromising your credibility 

 

Nowadays, a whole host of spammers chance their luck through emails. They take to free email platforms like Gmail, Yahoo, etc., and do what they do. If they're not getting the desired results, they waste no time in creating another account. Therefore, the level of scrutiny for emails sent from a free email address has increased. With this being the case, you're putting your credibility on the line by sending marketing emails using your business email account without any proper measures. 

 

2. You can't add any unsubscribe link

 

According to the email spam laws (CAN-SPAM ACT, Canadian Anti-Spam Law, Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, and GDPR), it's necessary for one to add an unsubscribe link in every promotional email. Respecting your contacts' preferences is as important as engaging them, and you should always give them the option to unsubscribe. If not, there are high chances that the disinterested contacts may mark your email as spam. Needless to say, it's not possible to add an unsubscribe button and automatically manage the unsubscribed contacts without a mailing list management system. 

 

Some contacts, however, might go a step further and raise abuse complaints about not being able to spot any unsubscribe link. These complaints are handled by your ISPs, and they might even block your email if there are too many of them. 

 

3. You can't handle bounces 

 

Email bounces that happen due to invalid receiver address and other temporary delivery failures should be handled properly. If not, it may lead to severe consequences. For instance, ISPs blocking your email domain. To keep this problem at bay, the fundamental step you should follow is to study the performance of your email campaign and do the necessary changes to your mailing list. For that, however, you would need a performance tracking mechanism. And chances are you won't find that facility in your personal email platform. 

 

4. You can't segment your audience 

 

Let's say you have 1,000 email contacts and the target audience for your next email campaign is 200. Manually handpicking the 200 contacts, and CCing/BCCing them is highly time-consuming. This is where an email marketing software can come in handy. You could segment your contacts with ease based on different information like the job title, company name, city, state, country, and more. What's more, you can also choose your recipients based on their past behaviour (open, link clicks, etc..).

 

5. You can't make your emails mobile-friendly 

 

Assuming you design a template and use it as a part of your email content, you won't be able to optimize it for the mobile readers as you would like. Whereas, with an email marketing software, you get customizable pre-designed templates that are very much mobile-focused. Not just that, you can also preview how your content would look across different platforms and do fine-tuning. 

 

6. You can't track the behaviour of your audience 

 

What's the point of sending marketing emails if you can't see what worked and what didn't? Tracking the behaviour metrics is crucial for your future campaigns, and we're afraid that you won't be able to find that facility in your business email account. Luckily, email marketing platforms allow you to do that even under free plans. You could cover most of the fundamental bases with the free version itself. And the upgrade (normally done when the requirement grows) doesn't cost too much as well.