ExactTarget Review: Email Service Provider
My fifth and final review in the Email Service Provider Round-up was ExactTarget. ExactTarget was named a “Market Leader” by the Jupiter report for Top ESP 4th quarter 2007 and they hold mind share within the Email Service Provider industry.
User Interface
ExactTarget’s UI had a modern, easy to use design. It attempts to model the design after MS office so the features are easily found. The homepage has a dashboard of active and recent campaigns as well as notification of feature updates and news from ExactTarget. Creating a campaign from start to finish was a very easy process even when adding advanced setup such as template creation or custom html campaigns. The workflow for creating a new campaign forces you to evaluate any SPAM notices before the campaign can begin.
The Bad: It did not have a set of Test emails that you could store within the system. Each test email address had to be manually entered.
Deliverablity
Part of my review was to send the same email campaign using each ESP that was in the round-up to determine what the baseline deliverability rates for each ESP.
Results of the ExactTarget test email campaign:
- Number of emails sent: 199
- delivered: 176
- Hard Bounces: 13
- Soft Bounces: 9
- Unique Opens: 17 (10% open rate)
ExactTarget has a dedicated deliverability team and are dedicated to heading off any ISP issues in real time.
Why was ExactTarget’s Open rate lower then Listrak? One possibility that was presented is that a larger segment of email addresses happened to have image suppression enabled. They also argued that the better metric to study would be click through rates as click-through actually measure customer engagement.
Final Thoughts
In my Email Service Provider review, ExactTarget was the better choice. Long term, they are going to have better deliverability rates because they are the industry leading mid level ESP. They have scale, a robust feature set, a better API, and a much larger pool of resources. They are also a leading SaaS (software as a service) company so they will continue to expand their product offerings.
Check them out ExactTarget- Email Service Provider and let me know your thoughts and personal experience with them.
Related posts:
- StreamSend Review: Email Service Provider
- Delivra Review : Email Service Provider
- Listrak Review: Email Service Provider
- Part 1: Email Service Provider Round-UP
- Lyris HQ Review: Email Service Provider
Thanks Lary
oh boy….misinformation is running rampant here. The true test of deliverability is based on the reputation of the sender which should fall on your following of best practices, not the ESP. That school of thought is not how the ISP’s decide if your message is going to get delivered, it used to be a while ago but that is not longer the case. ET, Listrak and the others tested are not configured correctly with custom DNS to make the proper assessment of which ESP is the best on the deliverability front nor can that assessment be made in a short period of time using a minimal amount of emails. Your reputation is built at a minimum of 90 days with most ISPs and that will only be if best practices is adhered to. With that being said, there are services out there that follow these guidelines and offer all of the features any mid level marketer would need (even more than Exact Target) without an increase in overhead.
If anyone wants to chat,let me know (301-990-9857 x217), I’m not sure if you have heard of eLoop since we don’t advertise a lot or pay Jupiter for their biased opinion but I would highly recommend you give us a look before getting involved with one of these other solutions. Don’t get me wrong, they are a market leader, but leading the market is not always reason for choosing an ESP. We win over ET clients constantly due to a more advanced feature set, custom DNS, dedicated account managers for all clients and a much lower price point. With folks being asked to do less with more these days, we have not only gained a ton of market share because folks are starting to “get it” but that we also add value with our RegReady application for website monetization and lead generation.
It is just a wiser choice for those who have already been down the ET road.
Jeremy,
I would like to address your issues but first try not to be so “sales focused” in your comments. It comes across as a little desperate. If you would like to talk about advertising then send me a private message and we can talk :^)
I take your claim of “misinformation” very seriously as it calls into question my knowledge of Email Marketing. So lets look at the issue of reputation. What you seem to ignore is that ESPs have their own reputations and relationships with ISPs (or at least the better ones do) and the IP addresses under the control of those ESPs are closely monitored by their deliverability teams. If they cannot keep their own IP addresses in good standing with the ISPs then what are the odds they would be able to help manage our own reputation?
Seeing how an ESP handles “spam traps,” hard bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints will reflect the reputation and baseline deliverability of an ESP.