Part 2: Email Service Provider Round-up

Email Service ProviderCriteria 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. Continue reading →

Part 1: Email Service Provider Round-UP

Choosing which Email Service Providers to Evaluate

Email Marketing Round-upWhen 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: Continue reading →

Email Marketing Modernization Project

After evaluating our company’s current Mass Email application I quickly determined that it could not meet the requirements of a modern email marketing program. Since email marketing is going to play a major role in reaching the company’s sales and marketing objectives it was easy to see that we were going to need to replace the old system.

Over the last 2 months I have been the lead on our Email Marketing Modernization project.

The objectives of the project are:

  • Replace the current in house solution with a Email Service Provide
  • Synchronize the corporate databases with the ESP through an API
  • Create “closed-loop” email campaign programs and a complete email campaign process.

My goal here is to structure my findings in a way that will allow you to follow along and use these steps in your company’s own email marketing modernization project.

Part 1: Email Service Provider Round-UP

Good luck and let me know your thoughts