Adult Niche Email Marketing: YNOTmail Review

If you are promoting an adult niche, one of the hardest parts is to develop an email marketing strategy. The majority of email service providers prohibits sexually explicit contents. While the problem with most of the very few that allow such contents out there is that, their rules are so relaxed and also allow "any other" contents... You wouldn't want to be seen as running a shady business, would you? Another option is to self-host your mail server, but that would only seem to be worth it if you already had several demands by your existing audience.

YNOTmail (or often spelt YNOT Mail) allows you everything that most of other email marketing services allow you to do. It's secure, and the terms of service include a strict anti-spam policy, hence trustworthy. The only difference is that YNOT Mail allows adult contents. It's definitely an alternative for you to consider.

What Is YNOTmail?

YNOTmail is reputedly the only email marketing service that is specially made for those who promote adult/porn materials.

It's equipped with a web form template to generate and store leads, 175+ email templates as well as a built-in HTML editor to create and send email campaigns, autoresponders and surveys. It also allows users to split-test emails and analyze results.

The price starts at $25 per month, allowing up to 5,000 relays per month.

What Is Good About YNOT Mail?

There may be a few other email services that allow you to promote adult niche out there, but their terms of services are too relaxed that often abused by spammers and fraudsters. Whereas YNOTmail is renowned to promote ethical business practices, so it's as trustworthy as any other major email marketing services. Its terms and conditions strictly prohibit certain niches that are often associated with scams, making sure to deliver emails safely to end-users and to protect the members and the company itself from being blacklisted.

Who Owns YNOT Mail?

YNOT Mail is owned by YNOT Group LLC, who offers a variety of B2B services for adult entertainment businesses. Its flagship website ynot.com is the longest-running online resource for adult industry professionals, since 1996.

The Features

To be perfectly honest, YNOTmail may not have the most modern and attractive-looking dashboard. But all the necessary features that an email marketer needs are there, and they're all fully functional. In fact, all the menu items are laid out clear & straightforward, if you've ever used a popular email software such as Mailchimp and AWeber, you'll find YNOTmail easy to use, in my opinion.

Here are the key features;

Contact Lists

• View, add and edit your list of contacts (leads) - You can create as many contact lists as you wish.
• Custom fields - Add custom fields to your opt-in form, edit it, make a field mandatory/non-mandatory.
• Process bounced emails - Find and remove invalid email addresses from your lists.
• Create segmented lists of your leads.

Contacts

• Manage contacts - Search, add, remove.
• Import/export contacts
• Manage suppression list - Add email addresses or domains that you don't want to opt-in.

Email Campaigns

• Create email campaigns (newsletters), edit your existing campaigns.
• Image Manager - Upload images from your computer to use when creating content for your emails.
• Split tests - Send different versions of your email to see which performs better.
• Dynamic Content Tags - Create tags to personalize the content in and email-based on custom fields.
• View scheduled email queue - See which email campaigns are scheduled to send and when.

Surveys

• Create and view surveys, see who responded to your survey and which answers they selected.
• Browse each response or export responses to a CSV file for further analysis.

Autoresponders

• Create follow-up emails (automatically sent after a specific time), view and edit the existing emails.
• Create a trigger based on a (1) contact's date field, (2) a specific date, (3) link being clicked, or (4) email being opened.
• Trigger actions - When triggered, (1) send an email campaign, (2) add the contact to an additional contact list, or (3) remove the contact from the contact list that they're in.

Statistics

• Email campaign statistics - View reports for each email campaign you've sent.
• Split test statistics - See how your split tests performed, including open and click rates.
• Autoresponder Statistics - See statistics for autoresponder emails you've set up.
• Trigger statistics - View statistics for triggers that you have set up
• Contact List Statistics - See how your contact lists are growing over time.
• User Account Statistics - A complete overview of every user in the system, including emails sent.

Built-In Email Templates

Creating an email campaign (newsletter) or a series of follow-up emails (autoresponder) couldn't be easier with a YNOTmail's template. There are 175 of them in a variety of styles to choose from, and each template is customizable, so you can change the font, color, layout, insert different images and so on. I find it super-easy.

Of course if you want to create a simple text email with hyperlinks to your site or affiliate site, you can create it from scratch using your HTML editor, just like you use any other word processing document. 

Once you've done a draft, you can preview it in various ESP views (AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook) to make sure your subscribers will see what you want them to see. The only drawback is that it doesn't give you a mobile or table view options. So if you intend to use one of the templates but don't have your own tablet device to test-send it to, it's best to choose a one-column template and not to customize the layout drastically.

Opt-in Form

You can create 4 x types of form and embed it on your website. Subscription, Unsubscribe, Modify details, of Send to Friend form. You can choose single or double opt-in email confirmation, and whether to send the new subscriber a thank you email or not.

Apart from the email address that's obviously required, pretty much all the field options are available - name, phone number, city, country, address, DOB, title and so on. 

There are form design/color options to choose from, but the pre-made form design is pretty basic. You might prefer to copy the code and embed it onto your own (third-party) lead generation form, which will also work perfectly.

Deliverability

Deliverability rate is the single most important factor as far as email marketing is concerned, but unfortunately not something that service providers can easily improve. They all thrive to avoid receiving complaints to keep their servers whitelisted. YNOTmail is no exception, its anti-spam policy is strictly set out, and it does everything it can. 

As a user, you need to avoid spam-triggered keywords (YNOTmail has a tool to check your email before you send it). Yet, your emails might still end up in the recipient's spam folder. It may be a good idea to tell your leads to whitelist your email address before they sign up with you. You can also contact the support - Richard Buss - for further advice.

Pricing Plans

The Starter plan starts at $25 per month and the Pro plan starts at $40 per month. They both allow you to send up to 5,000 relays per month. Means for example, if the number of your subscribers is 1,000, you are allowed to send up to 5 emails per day for $25/$40 per month respectively. Extra charges will start to apply if this monthly email send cap is exceeded. Alternatively, the VIP plan will allow you to have more capacity and have a dedicated IP address, which you can contact them and ask for a quote.

What YNOTmail Does "NOT" Allow

Like any other legitimate email marketing services, YNOT Mail's T&C prohibit;

In addition, YNOTmail prohibits you from promoting the following niches;

You can view the full terms of service here.

Cancellation Policy

You can terminate your account at any time by requesting it to YNOT by email. But the policy states that there are no refunds for any fees that you've already paid. You can contact the support and request to access the demo account, so you're strongly advised to do that before you decide to use the YNOmail service.