The Whitelist

Kara Trivunovic  – email strategist extraordinare — gave a great presentation at today’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami.  The subject: how to run an effective RFP when choosing an Email Service Provider.

After the jump,  her Top Ten list of things to keep in mind:

10.  Know your organizational strengths and limitations;

9.  Get the IT department and your code monkeys to give their input toward the RFP;

8.  Define why you’re looking for a new solution in the first place;

7.  When writing the RFP, ask open-ended questions (‘how’ and what’) rather leading ( ‘can you’ and ‘do you’) questions: make them explain;

6.  Set reasonable expectations: the RFP process typically takes between two and three months. (NB: We can run your RFP process to completion in three weeks);

5.  Thin out the crowd through external research: try to pick only a few likely vendors instead of 2 dozen ESPs across the board;

4.  Be transparent with both vendors and internal staff;

3.  Analyze the quality of the responses;

2.  Share feedback with all participants, the vendor who won the business and why they won, and those that didn’t and why they didn’t;

1.  Learn from the process: you’ll be doing another RFP some time in future!

Tags: email service providers, emailsummit 2009, ESP, kara trivunovic, RFP

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Business to business email marketing, Email marketing solution, Email service provider, email marketing best practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.