Criteria for evaluating the ESPs.

Now that we have our ESP selected we need to create a way to fairly evaluate the ESPs against one another. We have chosen five areas of Email Marketing to evaluate:

Features:

Which features are critical to your marketing team will vary from the list we have here but many of them will match:

• Automated mailings- Email campaigns that run automatically based on a query string that updates the mailing list automatically. Usually run on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
• ISP / server relationship management- Ho closely does the ESP work with the major ISPs to spot problems and intercede on your behalf if a campaign gets flagged as spam. Find out if they have a dedicated ISP management team and then find out who is on the team.
• Personalization- If i get an email that says “Hello Lary,” I am so much more likely to continue reading then if it says “Hello patron” Even if I know that it is an automated system it just feels like the sender cared more. Read more…

Email Marketing Deliveribility, Dynamic Content, Email list, Email Marketing, Email Service Providers, Triggered Events

When it comes to tracking your marketing efforts it is important to consider the number of ways prospects will come into contact with your marketing collateral. The idea (sometimes known as multi-touch marketing) is that most of your prospects will not convert the first time they come into contact with your products/service, but are likely to be exposed to multiple messages via the corporate website, a banner ad, word of mouth et cetera.

Tracking multiple touches in Google Analytics is easy and they offer many ways at refining the data to get a clear picture of the different mediums prospects are using to visit your site, with one exception, the conversion. Google has decided that the last touch, the source that turns a prospect into a customer (or achieves a goal) is the touch that should get credit for the conversion. Which works out pretty good in most cases except it doesn’t factor in human behavior and the use of Search Engines.

The problem: Read more…

Google Analytics Brian Clifton, Google Analytics, Initial referrer, multi-touch marketing, ROI, Ueser Defined

I watch our company’s current Adwords account very closely and yesterday I was surprised to see that all of our campaigns had stopped running. Drilling down into the ad groups, each of the keywords were “inactive” for search. Our maximum CPC is usually set to $.40 per click, but Adwords was recommending that we increase my Maximum CPC to $10.00 per click!

I spoke with a Google Adword’s support specialist and she explained that it was my quality score that had affected the Maximum CPC. I assured her that our ads were well targeted, but she was insistent on trying to “enlighten” me how Google Adwords quality score works. By the end of the phone call she had agreed to have a technical team member look into it further, but I would have to increase my Maxiumum CPC if I wanted my ads to appear.

This morning I checked our Adwords campaigns and they were back up and running without any changes. A few hours later I received this email from Google: Read more…

Google Adwords adwords, CPC, Google Adwords, Maximum Cost Per Click, page ranking, Quality Score

Choosing which Email Service Providers to Evaluate

When looking for an Email Service Provider it is important for your organization to develop criteria to identify ESP worth evaluating. This will help your organization create a “short list” of Service Providers who match your company’s needs.

Email Send Volume

Almost every ESP bases their pricing on your email volume, so it is important to identify how much email will your organization will send on a monthly basis when your email marketing system is fully implemented.

Organizations will differ on how often they send emails to their various lists, but this is an example of an average Organization’s send volume by contact type: Read more…

Email Marketing Deliveribility, Dynamic Content, Email list, Email Marketing, Email Service Providers, Triggered Events