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CRM with blocked email...

BillH

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Dec 17, 2009
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Bill
I'm using one of the major players in automotive CRMs. They are spam blocked for the second time in under 3 months. With our budget CRM that we replaced, this didn't happen. It doesn't happen for Constant Contact and such. Is it just me or should this not be happening? It's been over a week and our emails don't go out to a good portion of our leads and customers.

I'm interested to know if others have this experience.

Thanks!
Bill
 
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@BillH are you referring to your individual one to one email communications to a customer or is it your Bulk email campaigns only being blocked? OR Both?

Most of the CRM companies in our industry partner up with a dedicated email hosting provider and utilize their API. I respect your decision to not share the name of your CRM provider that's having these issues, but at the same time that's what the dealer forums are for. Maybe we can work through this without giving up the name.

There's a good chance that your "budget CRM" was utilizing your own domain and hosting provider for managing and sending your emails which is why you were getting good performance (until it gets abused.)

You mentioned Constant Contact. Any chance you were using your budget CRM for one to one emails and using CC for bulk email campaigns?
 
Hi Jeff, :) this isn't a budget CRM. It's one of the largest, if not the largest out there. It's system wide and they are blocked as a company. As a result, both bulk drops and 1 to 1 emails are getting blocked. I literally cannot send an email to my own work email for an end user quick look. (I use Litmus for template testing).

I'm not naming them as I don't know the etiquette on this forum for that. I am amazed at the perceived reputation vs. my experience, but having an email blockage for over a week seems unacceptable for any CRM.

This is the second time it's happened in a few months.

They are not using my domain. Their own domain(s) are the ones getting spam blocked.

Surely there has to be a better way for them to operate.

Ideas? (Besides switching vendors)

Thanks
Bill
 
Most large CRM vendors utilize multiple IP addresses and/or servers to get around the fact that car dealers are considered one of the top 10 largest spamming* businesses by the email industry. If they've built things well then they know when one of their IPs is having issues. All it really takes is to check to see if some of the larger email services are sending messages back. Some will even tell you why they're blocking your messages. This part does take manual checking though. Ask them if they've done this yet. Also ask how many IP addresses they're using for your store and how many other dealers are tied to those too.

Whether you use your own domain or not is more a matter of convenience for the newer CRM systems out there. Newer CRM systems can mask your domain over their own, but that can sometimes look shady. Some of the older ones (especially ones originally built in the 90s) may actually use one of your own servers instead of their own and then you have to do the negotiating with the email services when (not if) you get blocked.

I don't know which CRM you're on, but CRMs originally coded prior to the Internet being a full blown fact of automotive retail typically do not have email in their core code. For example, there's a CRM @Jeff Kershner was on, during his MileOne days, that required somewhere north of 10 clicks to add an attachment :yikes:

Unfortunately there isn't a single CRM of any decent client-base-size that was built in this decade. There was one at one time...

*When we were building Dealer.com's CRM we put roughly 20 RFPs out to various email providers like Constant Contact and MailChimp. All of them basically gave us the left-handed turn down by giving us 5 billion hoops to jump through and some horrendous quotes. When we pressed them as to why prices were so high they told us that there are enough rotten-egg car dealers spamming to make the industry one they like to avoid in the kind of mass we represented. We were going to be bringing them around 20 million emails per month at that time, so they had to look at us as one big damaging bulk for them. I totally understand and appreciate their stance after we built a fresh email system to handle our own loads.
 
Jeff, sorry, I misread previously. My budget CRM did in fact use our domain name, but we didn't send nearly as much out. I have tried to take advantage of the "big time" features of the fancy new CRM I signed up for. Now, I can't be sure that all of my leads get a response. Sad.

Thanks @Alex Snyder , @Jeff Kershner , @sryan for the replies. I appreciate the time to feed back. My dilemma is how to resolve this and other disappointments from this vendor. I suppose the only solution is to dump them and go elsewhere, but it's only been 9 (ugly) months and I'm weary to think of another disruption to the business to change again. Maybe that's the only option. I'm working to step up my processes and digital efforts and it's hampered by these guys. This CRM company's product is like a Ferrari, except it's missing a front wheel.
 
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I suppose the only solution is to dump them and go elsewhere

Nah. Ask them the questions I posed in my previous post and see what happens. It will at least show them you know a thing or two ;) ....that helps a lot of the time.

And I do know which CRM you're on. With the recent changes in the CRM space more dealers have flocked to them than nearly any CRM vendor could possibly handle. They've got a lot going on and I'm sure they'll sort it out.