Email Deliverability Consultant’s Take on ESPs vs. Marketing Automation

For my latest blog for the Email Experience Council, I took off my email deliverability hat to tackle the issue of ESPs vs. marketing automation software. I am seeing that email service providers (ESPs) are moving more and more toward the marketing automation model.

The evolution of the ESP from a simple emailing platform to a full-fledged, feature-rich offering is only natural given the changing landscape of marketing today. And that evolution is beginning to close the gap between the ESP platform and the marketing automation platform.

“The evolution of the ESP is to be expected given the changing marketing landscape and shifting customer expectations. The further we move away from batch-and-blast and move toward one-to-one marketing, the more we have to take into account that one-to-one is not as simple as a really targeted and timely message. It means the platform by which it’s delivered too, for example via mobile or a social networking site.”

Most top tier ESPs now have drip and triggered email streams and some kind of web analytics, both capabilities that make ESPs more similar to marketing automation software. I also predict lead scoring will be next, as ESPs position themselves to compete with marketing automation platforms without losing sight of their own unique capabilities.

So why should an organization choose an ESP over marketing automation or vice versa? Read my blog and find out.

Marco Marini, our CEO, and Michael Kelly, our Director of Strategic Alliances, will present the in-depth and groundbreaking information released earlier this year in our email marketing whitepaper “Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP.” Presented Wednesday, September 16 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, the webinar is useful whether you’re shopping for a new email service provider or want to compare your current ESP to other email vendors.

As an email marketing vendor that represents a multitude of email service providers, ClickMail Marketing is in the unique and objective position to help you take a critical look at the over 100 ESPs out there, ensuring you find the one that’s the best fit for your company. We do that by covering the 20 factors you need to consider, and helping you determine which factors matter the most for your company to improve its email marketing results. We’ll teach you how to evaluate the ESPs and even provide you with a scoring sheet.

Find out more by clicking here. Especially if a new ESP is on your to-do list for the coming year!

You can also download the email marketing whitepaper either before or after the webinar at our email marketing library: click here.

I just read the Silverpop whitepaper* added recently to our email marketing library, on “6 Fixes to Dramatically Boost Email Marketing Results.” Each of the six fixes has numerous parts to it, and I was struck by how many of these are email best practices, best practices we’ve blogged on and written about in our email marketing newsletter.

Silverpop’s email marketing whitepaper is divided into six common email marketing mistakes:

1.    No preference center
2.    Not managing expectations
3.    Mailing too frequently – or too infrequently
4.    Ignoring subscriber feedback
5.    Relying on process metrics to measure and communicate email performance
6.    Getting the timing wrong

These are all broad topics, but as I mentioned above, each has plenty of specific advice and email best practices described to help you overcome the common mistake.

Once again it reminds me that our world, the world of email marketing, is made up of possibly countless moving parts. Maybe it’s more of a galaxy than a world! But that’s why it’s so important to keep reading blogs, newsletters and whitepapers, and to attend webinars and email marketing conferences. And then tweak and tweak and tweak, constantly improving your email marketing campaigns so you can constantly improve your email marketing results.

*For this whitepaper click here and look for the Silverpop whitepaper title “Discoveries and Opportunities: Fixes to Dramatically Boost Email Marketing Results.”

We recently did that for a federal credit union with more than 72,000 members worldwide and close to one billion dollars in assets. You can imagine how much email marketing an organization that size must do. They use email for transactional messages as well as to confirm new accounts and settings changes.

Email solutions provider Silverpop was providing an email marketing solution to the credit union, including building a custom interface. But the email solutions provider’s workload meant that although they could be the ESP, they couldn’t build out the custom interface in time to meet the credit union’s schedule.

Silverpop had email marketing vendor ClickMail (that’s us!) step in and build the custom interface, while sticking to an aggressive delivery timeline.

This credit union situation demonstrates how we as an email marketing vendor work for and with our email marketing clients. We’ll help you launch your email marketing programs, and we’ll also go the next step by helping you create custom reporting tools or windows. And we’ll do it all on time and on budget, just like the case study project!

Integration means getting information in and out of the application, so your email platform can work with programs like Web analytics, CRM, CMS and custom reporting dashboards. These days your subscribers are less tolerant of generic “batch and blast” content. Email has to be more timely, relevant and personalized. And that often means email must be driven by data from outside the email marketing application via integration.

That also means your email service provider (ESP) has to enable this kind of API integration. If you haven’t looked into that yet, here are some questions to ask when you do:

• Does your ESP have pre-configured integrations with the platforms you want to integrate to?
• Is your ESP platform Web services compliant?
• What is the breadth of the API functionality?
• For pre-configured integrations, does it do everything you need it to do? Now and in the future?
• For custom integration, is the security and robustness of the API calls adequate?
• Does your ESP have the redundant, scalable infrastructure to support the integration?
• How many API calls are served and how many are served without error?

For more about integration, and 19 other factors to consider when choosing a top tier ESP, download our latest email marketing whitepaper. We’ve compiled a decade’s worth of experience as an email solutions provider into this one hands-on whitepaper, and even included a scoring sheet. If you’re shopping for a new ESP or evaluating your current ESP, this email marketing whitepaper is a must read.

Since releasing our newest whitepaper this month, “Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP,” hundreds of email marketers have downloaded it from our Web site, and wiped us out of our hard copies at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit. Now we’re getting recognition from noted email marketing experts too!

In a ClickZ blog post by Bill McCloskey titled “Is Your E-Mail Getting Delivered on Prime or Subprime IP Addresses?”, ClickMail Marketing’s newest email marketing whitepaper is held out as a useful tool for improving deliverability. In his blog, Bill points out the importance of email deliverability calling out a few key points from our whitepaper, but also the importance of IP reputation to deliverability.

Read the ClickZ blog post about our newest email marketing whitepaper. And download the whitepaper, complete with a useful checklist for comparing the 20 critical factors among differing email service providers.

They say email marketing is the relationship medium, and that makes sense. Email is not a great tool for customer acquisition, but it is great for retention and lead nurturing. And retaining and nurturing are about relating. You might not be ready to buy right now, but if I stay in touch with you and keep providing you with useful information over time, you’ll get to know me, warm up to me, and choose me when you are ready to buy. I will have developed a relationship with you that paid off later.

But if we accept email to the relationship medium, what does that mean for email marketing ROI?

ClickMail is an email marketing company. We help our email marketing clients make more money. We are very ROI-driven on behalf of our clients. That’s one reason why we represent several ESPs, not just one: We want to match you up with the ESP that works best for your business and offers the most ROI.

But neither we nor our email marketing clients can lose sight of the long-term value of the email recipient. As an email marketing company, it would be easy for us to push our clients to email more often, to do batch-and-blast emails instead of segmented campaigns, and other tactics that result in short-term gain (sales) but long-term pain (unsubscribes, spam reports).

So maybe there’s a different way to measure email marketing ROI beyond dollars and sense. What might that be? What might that look like? What value would a measurement like that have, for us as an email marketing company and you as an email marketer?

Have ideas on this? Send them to blog@clickmailmarketing.com.

What’s a conscientious email marketer to do? Just pay attention.

Everything you need to know about relevance, etc., is available to you. Your customers and email subscribers are constantly telling you what works and what doesn’t. You just have to listen. Listen and you’ll know what type of content is most relevant, how often they want to hear from you, which subject lines get the most opens, what type of calls to action get the most click throughs…and more. Look at unsubscribes, forward to a friends, click throughs, responses, conversions, and any other data for insight.

If you’re using any kind of decent email marketing company or email service provider (ESP), you should have more than enough data to sift through and learn from. Every email marketing campaign you send out should be analyzed after the fact, lessons gleaned, and adjustments made for the next one.

Don’t stop reading the case studies, email marketing blogs like this one and definitive resources like MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments. You must always learn and improve and you can only do that by keeping up with all the moving parts that are email marketing. But look first and foremost to your own audience for the real, most applicable knowledge. Because in the end, they are the ones who will spend their money with you, or not. They are the ones who matter most. And they’ll tell you what you need to know if you just listen.

If your email marketing company or ESP is falling short, and failing to deliver the types of data you need to adjust and improve your email marketing ROI, then it’s definitely time to download our latest whitepaper and evaluate your current ESP…or choose another.

Yet there is an email service provider that best fits you and your company’s email marketing needs. You just have to know what matters most to you when choosing an ESP, which strengths are absolutely critical for your business and which weaknesses you cannot endure. This means you have to start your ESP search internally, by delving into what drives your email marketing program goals now and in the future. You must also take a hard look at your company’s capabilities, including that of your staff and any existing technologies you may want to integrate with.

This might sound like a lot of work, but now there’s a resource to help. After a decade of helping clients choose ESPs, we as an email marketing advisor have learned priceless lessons about fitting the email service provider to the business. And we’ve compiled that knowledge into one comprehensive and free to  you email marketing whitepaper: “Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP.”

This free whitepaper presents 20 critical factors for you to consider when choosing an ESP, including why each factor matters and what to look for. We’ve also included a scoring sheet you can use to evaluate ESPs against these 20 factors. This new email marketing whitepaper will help you take a thoughtful, informed approach to your ESP selection, so you can compare apples to oranges and still make a wise choice.

Whether you’re in the market for a new ESP now or want to see how your current one stacks up, you’ll find this whitepaper an invaluable resource. Download your free copy right now!

The official name of our latest white paper is called Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP, but around the office, we call it Our Latest White Paper. It’s popular, we ran out of copies at today’s Em@il Summit in Miami, but it has yet to land on eBay for the simple fact that it can be downloaded right here.

At today’s session on HowTo run an effective ESP RFP,  presenter Kara Trivunovic singled ClickMail Marketing out as an example of a company that can take the pain out of choosing the right ESP for you.  With that endorsement, we passed-out every copy of Our Latest White Paper we had with us.

Click here to download your very own copy!