For decades, the analyst industry played a central role in how technology gets bought. A CMO, CIO, or Head of Digital trying to navigate a complex martech or data stack, turned to firms like Gartner Group and Forrester. You paid for research. You booked inquiry calls. You waited for Magic Quadrants and Waves. You relied on vendor positioning to help reduce risk.

The old analyst business model worked when information was scarce. It no longer is.

AI has fundamentally changed the economics of research. It can summarize markets, compare platforms, analyze vendor claims, normalize feature matrices, and model TCO in seconds. Large analyst firms built their businesses on that informational advantage. For the most part, that advantage has effectively collapsed.
And the impact of that collapse is going to reverberate far and wide.

This doesn’t mean analysts are going away. It means the old analyst business model is.

The End of the Research Paywall

The core product of large analyst firms has always been information packaging:

• Market overviews
• Vendor comparisons
• Category definitions
• Trend reports
• Frameworks & Best practices

For decades, those lived behind expensive subscription paywalls. Buyers paid. Not because the research was extraordinary, but because there was no alternative.

Now there is.

AI can ingest earnings calls, product documentation, pricing models, security disclosures, roadmap statements, customer reviews, and even architectural diagrams and synthesize them rapidly.

In practice, however, this synthesis is often incomplete, uneven, and occasionally wrong.  It is constrained by information scarcity, selective disclosure, inconsistent terminology, and the lack of primary validation that comes from direct vendor and customer interaction. That said, the implication remains the same.

For many buyers, the perceived sufficiency of AI-generated analysis now outweighs its actual accuracy. Feature matrices, competitive landscapes, and “good enough” comparisons can be produced faster, and often appear to be more current than analyst reports published months later, even if they lack depth, context, or reliability.

In other words, it isn’t that the quality of analyst research has been fully replicated by AI. It’s that the “what” layer of analyst research has been functionally commoditized in the eyes of many buyers who are increasingly comfortable trading precision and validation for speed, clarity, and narrative coherence.

The notion that buyers need to pay $80,000 a year for access to PDFs explaining what a CDP is, how composable architecture works, or what the difference is between batch and real-time marketing is increasingly hard to justify.

That part of the business is going to shrink.

The Structural Problem for Big Analyst Firms

Large analyst firms were built for a pre-AI world:

• When vendor information was fragmented
• When architectures were opaque
• When synthesis was slow and expensive
• When buyers needed guided education

AI reverses all of that. Much of analyst output today is already formulaic:

• Repackaged vendor briefings
• Sanitized market positioning
• Carefully worded commentary that offends no one
• Frameworks designed to preserve vendor relationships
• Research written to support reprint sales

AI is extremely good at that kind of work. Which means the middle of the analyst market “the research factory” is on the nomination list to be automated.

What will remain is brand, enterprise procurement contracts, and boardroom credibility. Gartner and Forrester will still be used as “checkbox” validators. Their logos will still appear in decks. Their quotes will still show up in vendor pitches. But their influence over buying decisions will decline.

Because buyers will no longer confuse access to information with judgment.

Where Boutique Analysts Win

As AI floods the market with information, buyers are realizing something important. Information isn’t what they need.

They need judgment.
They need context.
They need experience.

They need to know what really happens when a platform is implemented at scale. They need to know which vendors oversell. They need to know which roadmaps are fiction. They need to know who is quietly underinvesting in engineering and who is about to get acquired.

“AI can tell you what vendors say. Not who’s overselling.”

That is where boutique analyst firms live. Boutiques don’t sell research, instead  they sell outcomes.

• They provide guidance in vendor selection and design sandboxes.
• They curate deep market intelligence, platform analysis, and practitioner perspectives.
•  They operate as domain experts focused on specific disciplines such as retail, financial services, customer engagement, CDPs, or data platforms.
•  They negotiate contracts.
•  They fix failed implementations.

They live inside real transformations, instead of market categories. And because they aren’t structurally dependent on vendor sponsorships, they can afford to be honest.

For instance, they can say:
“Don’t buy this platform. It will fail.”
“This roadmap will slip.”
“This architecture will not scale.”
“This vendor is being shopped.”

That independence is priceless.

The New Analyst Stack

In this time of AI, the analyst model is being rewritten.

AI becomes the first layer of research:

• Market mapping
• Vendor discovery
• Feature comparisons
• Architecture education

Boutique analysts become the decision layer:

• Platform selection
• Commercial negotiation
• Implementation strategy
• Risk management

Large analyst firms become the procurement layer:

• Brand validation
• Boardroom comfort
• Risk signaling

The hierarchy flips. Instead of analysts being the gatekeepers of knowledge, they become translators of reality.

 The Bottom Line

AI isn’t replacing all analysts. It’s replacing lazy analysis.

If your work is built on generic frameworks, surface-level research, or repackaged information, AI will get there faster and cheaper.

Insight still comes from judgment, context, and experience — not from access to more data.

What survives is real expertise, real experience, and real accountability. The future of the analyst industry belongs to people who have scars, opinions, and receipts. And that, frankly, is how it should be.

The post AI Is Disrupting the Analyst Industry.  And That’s Good News (for Buyers). appeared first on Email vendor selection.

1. Negotiate a contract extension with your vendor before starting the RFP

Let’s start with the mistake that’s both most common, and the most problematic to brands doing an RFP. And that’s timing.

The selection process is going to take longer than you think. Trust me on that. And if you do finish it in the time frame you planned, it’s likely you rushed some things and skipped other steps entirely. Which makes it more likely you made a bad choice. So if your contract expired in the second half of the year (or early in 2026), then you need to get moving on your RFP right away.

It can’t wait “until later”. If your contract expires in the first quarter of this year and you want to switch vendors, you might as well flip a coin. You don’t have time to run a thorough RFP process. And your current ESP knows that.

You are not going to finish your RFP process in time to get migrated to your new platform before your current contract expires. Even if you are convinced I am wrong about that, what’s the downside to being prepared? None. And if I’m right?

That’s why I always tell our clients to negotiate a month-to-month (preferred) or 3-month (better than nothing) extension before issuing an RFP. Because as long as your current ESP believes it has a chance to retain your business, they will be very accommodating. 

The minute your current email provider thinks you are leaving, they will become much more inflexible.

Now there are some vendors that will never give an extension of less than a year. If you are stuck with one of those vendors, then you need to give yourself 12 months to select a new partner and complete an ESP migration.

So if you’re 6 months out with one of these, it’s already too late. Start planning for a switch in 2026. If you contact me, I am happy to tell you what you can expect from your current vendor.

2. Bring in an outside resource to help manage your RFP

The second most common mistake I see brands make when managing an RFP is inviting ESPs into the process who have no business being included.

Listen, I think the vendor landscape is more confusing than ever. Even I get confused!

Do you understand the differences?

There are significant differences between the various ESPs. These differences have a huge impact on how good a fit a particular ESP will be for your brand.

Most email marketers don’t see these differences. And who can blame them? Sales people will pitch their platform to anyone as a perfect fit, and the various analysts are always rating vendors without a thought to how different they are from one another. 

Don’t fall for the herd mentality

There is also a little bit of “herd mentality” among email marketers. And that thinking leads many to invite ESPs to pitch their business simply because it seems like everyone else is looking at the same 2-3 vendors.

So with a lack of understanding the differences between vendors, and the tendency to look at the same few “hot” vendors as everyone else, a brand can end up with 6-8 vendors in its RFP, of which only 2 or 3 are actually going to be a good fit.

I don’t like the odds of making the right selection in that RFP, do you? Which leads us to…

Know which channels are most important to your customers

Particularly in the case of ecommerce brands, you need to understand which channels your customers use most often to engage with you. Some ESPs are “mobile-first”, others are “email-centric”, while others are truly “omnichannel”.

Creating a mis-match between the type of ESP you select and your customer behavior is going to lead to a lot of unhappiness for you and your customers. 

You HAVE to get this right.

Bringing in an outside consultant will greatly increase the odds that you will make the best  choice. Their business depends upon knowing the differences between the vendors, and making sure you only look at those who represent a good fit. I know it sounds self-serving to mention getting outside help. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s a smart thing to do. 

3.Use a scorecard and make your decisions for the right reasons

Just the other day I talked with a vendor. They were back pitching a prospect they had pitched the year before and finished second.

The winner of that RFP had been the personal favorite of a VP who imposed his will on the entire process. Predictably the team using the platform hated his choice, as did IT. Of course, the VP has long since left the company. So just a few months after the migration to the new vendor, here they were again looking at their options. 

There are always going to be people involved in an RFP process who have favorites going into the RFP. That’s normal, and there are a lot of reasons why a particular ESP might be someone’s favorite. And look at it from different angles, like procurement, IT, marketing.

But it becomes a problem when the person with a favorite ESP can drive the decision in a particular direction (like the unhappy brand mentioned above).

Using a scorecard

The best way to prevent a new ESP selection based on the wrong reasons is to use a scorecard driven process that allows for direct, side by side comparisons of the competing vendors.

Use scorecards that cover features and functionality, services, and pricing. This has two key benefits.

First, if everyone’s scores are treated equally, a single person can’t drive the outcome. So even if someone strongly supports one of the ESPs in your review, he or she can’t force that decision.

Second, it allows for the input of everyone on your team who wants a say in the decision. If everyone is responsible for the vendor selected, then everyone has a stake in making sure it works out. And trust me, that is a very good thing!

4. Complete your RFP and come to a decision

The road to a great new vendor relationship is littered with the corpses of RFPs that never made it across the finish line. There are so many reasons why an RFP doesn’t come to a conclusion, but the result is the same. Nobody is happy – even the brand involved – when an RFP never gets concluded and a new vendor doesn’t get selected.

Here’s a partial list of reasons why an RFP might never come to a conclusion. 

• running out of time and having to sign an extension with your existing vendor,
• reaching a point where you don’t have any good options
• no one has the energy to continue

You’ve got a day job, and RFPs take up a lot of time. This is where consultants can be useful, doing most of the heavy-lifting for you.

Don’t lose sight of the reason you started

Sometimes the RFP has dragged on so long that no one remembers why it was started in the first place. Maybe the person who started it isn’t even with the company any longer! If you’re not going to finish your RFP, put it out of its misery, and make sure you tell the participating vendors that it’s over. 

The worst thing a brand can do in these cases is to pretend that nothing happened to begin with, leaving the participating vendors in the dark about what decisions did or did not get made. But the point is, don’t let things get that far.

Keep pushing through to a decision. There’s a reason you started the RFP process in the first place – don’t lose sight of it!

Even if that means backtracking a little to make sure you are evaluating the right platforms on the right features and functionality for your unique needs.

The only ones who like unfinished or unending RFPs are the incumbents, who get to keep the business without making huge price concessions. They’ve realized you aren’t moving, and have no reason to cut pricing to keep you on board.

5. Understand what you absolutely need in your contract (and what you don’t).

There are too many unknowns on both sides when you enter into a contract with a new ESP to hope you can actually get everything 100% right at the outset. So you should focus on what you absolutely must get right. The list is short:

1. Limits on liability.

Let’s start with the obvious – I’m not a lawyer. That being said, when negotiating contract terms, vendors will want to include clauses that attempt to limit or exclude damages that the client can claim if a breach of contract occurs.

This makes perfect sense. If there is no limit to liability, there is no financial limit on the damages in the event of a breach. Vendors will try to lower the limit as much as possible, often to no more than the total value of the contract.

While vendor lawyers and finance teams want the limit as low as possible,  brand lawyers are going to reach for the stars. As the client you need to understand what the financial consequences of a breach can be to your company. There’s no doubt that it can be more than the contract value.

This is often the most contentious part of a contract negotiation. You need to ensure that the lawyers get this solved upfront. It isn’t fun, and I’ve seen it blow up deals. But if both sides are committed, then there is a middle ground that can be reached.

2. Service level agreements and associated penalties.

This sounds similar to the liability issues, but service level agreements are vastly different in degree of seriousness. SLAs are things like platform uptime, campaign turnaround, and other day-to-day operational issues. These are in a different league than data breaches.

You need to nail down in the contract your expectations, and attach a painful enough penalty that the vendor does everything in its power to meet the SLAs.

Both sides are going to come to these from completely different starting points, so expect to meet somewhere in the middle. But remember every promise made during the pitch, because now they are going into the contract!

3. Contract termination.

No one is going to argue that a breach of contract allows the client to prematurely end a contract. Where it gets tricky, is what is known as “out for convenience”.

This allows a client to terminate a deal “just because”. Vendor financial people hate these, and client lawyers love these. In defense of the vendor, if you have a 3 year contract with 90 day “out for convenience”, then the contract itself is actually a 3 month contract. It’s not a 3 year contract.

Vendors often make pricing concessions based on the length of a contract, knowing that discounts for migration (for example) can be amortized over the entire length of the contract.

So they will naturally push back HARD on any kind of out for convenience. On the other hand, client-side lawyers hate being tied down to any kind of contract they can’t get out of. So they will push hard on this. The poor email marketer is stuck in the middle and needs to lead both sides to some kind of middle ground. We’ve done this several times for clients and vendors at a contract standoff.

Once you get these three items nailed down, it’s time to recognize that you don’t need to nail everything else down 100%.

Think about services and support in your contract.

Trust me,  you are going to need something here no matter how “self-service” you consider yourself to be. But you only need to get in the ballpark of what you will need if you write the contract correctly.

In the contracts we negotiate for our clients we try to arrive at the right number of hours, but we also stipulate that an audit of actual hours used be conducted 6 months after the cutover to the new vendor. This gives everyone enough time to settle into a routine and know what the real need is.

If the client is using more hours than they are paying for, then they can either cut back on what they expect from the ESP, or add hours to the contract going forward. And if they aren’t using all the hours they are paying for, the retainer hours can be adjusted down.

Frankly, it’s a great time to do an RFP

While the vendor landscape is complex and confusing, it’s also seeing more innovation and new players than we’ve seen in many years. You will likely be amazed at some of the new offerings.

Lots of vendors you wouldn’t have looked at last time around have been busy adding capacity, new features, and/or entirely new channels.

If you follow the best practices above in your RFP, you will ensure that you make the best possible choice for your company, and negotiate a deal that works for both sides.

If you keep that in mind, and this article close by, you’ll be off to a great start! 

The post 5 keys for a successful MarTech RFP in 2026 appeared first on Email vendor selection.

Because of the blurred lines between these platforms (see diagram below), the answer isn’t always obvious. A marketer doesn’t want to end up paying for overlapping functionality. Or even worse, spending a lot of time and effort looking into tools they don’t even need. 

We’ve created this simple four step process that helps you go through a combined ESP and Customer Data Platform (CDP) selection.
But first, why are CDPs so popular?

CDP trends and popularity

Customer Data Platform (CDP) mania didn’t reach its peak last year, and so far it shows no signs of slowing down.

Every digital marketer wants one, wants to consider adding one, or is looking for advice as to whether or not he or she needs one.



There is a lot of interest in CDPs, as they promise to be a solution for the elusive challenge to unify all data. But the real question is whether or not you need a CDP to accomplish that!  Because when you look under the hood… 

Enterprise ESP and CDP, is there a difference?

In my conversations with clients a light bulb often goes on when we look at the functionalities of both. And they say something like, “say, a lot of that CDP functionality sounds suspiciously like the things our ESP is already doing!”. And you know what? They’re right!

This chart shows the overlap between the platforms, but be aware that it’s an evolving picture and the overlap grows larger every day.

Because there is this overlap between the two types of systems, it’s critical to understand what your ESP solution is capable of. There isn’t a CDP in existence that can send email campaigns and automated/ triggered emails. But there are, as we’ve noted, ESPs that can do a lot of what a CDP does around data unification and aggregation.

Where to start your ESP and CDP search?

Which means if you begin your process with the search for a CDP, you are always going to need to add an ESP as well. But—and this is the critical thing to remember—if you start your process with a search for the right ESP partner, you may not end up needing a CDP at all!

There are a couple of reasons why you might not need a CDP.

First, there are a lot of ESPs who now come with what I call a “CDP Inside”. In other words, they have built a fully integrated CDP platform to go along with the ESP platform.

Second, there are many ESPs that have many of the same characteristics of a CDP without necessarily covering all of the bases completely.  But you might not need all the functionalities. In which case a solid ESP is all you need.

Take your requirements detail from 20 to 200+ lines

Start out with a clearly defined set of requirements. It is the best way to ensure that you aren’t adding platforms to your martech stack that have overlapping capabilities (stop paying double!).

And I don’t mean a list of 10-20 high level requirements. You need to really get into the weeds, in which case you’re more likely to come up with 200+ requirements.

With a good list in hand, it will be much clearer. Once you’ve selected your ESP partner that meets most of those requirements, you can determine which of your critical requirements, if any, have yet to be met. Only then can you reasonably determine whether or not you need to also consider a CDP.

Do you need a CDP? 4 steps to know 

If you think you need both a CDP and ESP, here’s the order of actions you should follow:

1. Create a detailed requirements document for your data management and digital messaging needs
2. Conduct a rigorous RFP to select a new ESP
3. Conduct a gap analysis between the capabilities of your new ESP and your original requirements document
4. If—and only if—there are significant gaps identified in #3, then go ahead and conduct a rigorous RFP for a CDP

Follow these 4 steps and you can be relatively certain that you won’t be paying for more than your need, or for overlapping capabilities in two separate platforms.  You can put that money to much better use elsewhere in your marketing program!

Let’s back up a little bit though, because everyone is looking into the CDP market, how do I double check whether or not I need one?

Grasping the ever-changing definition of a CDP

To begin evaluating whether or not you need a CDP, you first need to know what it is exactly. There is little consensus as to the precise definition of a CDP and it seems to be changing all the time.

For the sake of this article, here is my definition which is also very close to that of the CDP Institute.

For a platform to legitimately claim CDP status it has to:

• Support unstructured data,
• Be highly flexible to use and model your data,
• Act as a true integration hub, not proprietary in nature and
• Provide real-time access.

A CDP should have open APIs, meaning the CDP can receive and provide access to the data and be connected to any systems.

All these features and functions should be included to be a real CDP in my book.  A lot of vendors that call themselves a CDP don’t check all the boxes. Many predictive and B2B analytics vendors, for example, claim to be CDPs because they need to aggregate customer data to do their job in the first place—but that doesn’t make them a CDP. 

3 things a CDP actually does:

What does a CDP actually do, you ask? The following are the functionalities you can expect.

1. Data Aggregation

All customer data is neatly organized and available for immediate use. Data collected and organized with a CDP is visualized through individual data profiles for each user.

2. Single Customer View

Data from multiple online and offline sources is combined to create a unified single customer view This 360-degree view of the customer is possible because all customer data is brought together in one central location.

3. Accessible Data for 3rd Parties

Data contained within a CDP is ready for use in 3rd party systems focused on adtech and campaign delivery.

So which comes first, the ESP or the CDP?

CDPs are hot and we’ve seen this before in the martech space, and behind every single one of these “technology hype cycles” something has been drilled into our psyche.

This has been going on since the years leading up to 2000 by everyone from Gartner Group to the Harvard Business Review, plus an untold number of consultants.

What is it? The fear of ever-growing customer expectations and the absolute necessity to provide industry-leading customer experiences. If you think this is a recent focus of digital marketing, and martech in particular, take a look at this quote from the forward of a book first published in 2002:

Building Great Customer Experiences

By Colin Shaw, John Ivens · 2002

If you’d read that earlier today, and didn’t know where it came from, you’d have no reason to believe it wasn’t something somebody has just written in 2021!

I will leave you with one last thought:. In the collision between ESPs and CDPs that is happening right now, ESPs are going to win and CDPs will eventually be part of an enterprise ESP platform.  It’s already happening with the ESP platforms at Zeta Global and Adobe, for example. So don’t rush into adding a CDP now if you can wait a couple of years.

The post Four Simple Steps for making a CDP vs ESP decision appeared first on Email vendor selection.

One topic that doesn’t get enough consideration is the role that your procurement team should (and shouldn’t) play in your RFP.  When it comes to RFPs, you might not have a whole lot of choice about whether or not to involve procurement.

Sometimes procurement has a rule that every X number of years you have to RFP. In (semi) Government and enterprise this is very common. If it isn’t a company rule, they’re not going to be able to tell you that you need to start an RFP, but they might need to give approval to start the process.

All of which brings me to this key point: understanding what procurement does well, and doesn’t do well, will be critical to the outcome of your RFP. 

What is procurement?

Procurement itself is the action of obtaining or procuring something. Goods, services, or works from an external source, often involving a competitive bidding process. This includes agreeing to terms and conditions.

The Procurement Department manages the procurement process.
They are the group within a company that is authorized to issue :

• Invitations to Bid,
• Requests for Proposal,
• Requests for Quotation,
• Issue contracts.

A Procurement Department will also issue purchase orders and negotiate terms.

In a nutshell, the role of procurement is to
1) make sure your process is run correctly,
2) that the services match what you need,
3) and most importantly: that the price is right.

Most procurement departments are more than capable when it comes to making sure the process runs correctly. They manage RFPs all the time. Though most of these RFPs are not for a new marketing technology like an email service provider. And that presents two critical hurdles for them when it comes to knowing the services you need and that the price is right.

Your procurement team doesn’t really know what you need.

How could they? Email marketing platforms are incredibly complex systems. This isn’t like buying printer paper, or janitorial services for the office building.
Those two are mostly price-driven considerations. But when picking a new ESP, price should never be the primary consideration. Platform alignment with your requirements should be #1. 

Your procurement team doesn’t really know what you need (something that sends email?). So they aren’t a good place to start when you are building the requirements document for your RFP.

I’ve seen requirement documents for RFPs that were clearly dusted off versions of an RFP performed 3-5 years previously. You can’t really blame your procurement team for falling back on the one your company used the last time around.

It’s understandably hard for them to know how far platforms have evolved over the years. But when you stick too closely to old RFP requirements, you’ll end up with the ESP that was perfect for you… 5 years ago!

Your Procurement team has no idea what the price of email should be.

Procurement folks are great at comparing prices between vendors, and they are also good at getting a vendor to cut a bid. That is why vendors often pad a bid to cushion the inevitable procurement “haircut”.

If your procurement folks don’t go into the RPF process with a solid understanding of what good pricing looks like, you can’t be sure you’ve got the right price. It’s not their fault. It’s highly likely you don’t even know what you should be paying.

ESPs have a talent for making their pricing models hard to understand. They’ve learned to add different types of fees that allow them to reduce their dependence on CPMs. This will be news to most procurement teams, traditionally focused on the CPM as the key pricing component. 

We see more pricing proposals from ESPs in an average year that any procurement professional is likely to see over the course of his or her career.

We have been able to track pricing trends over the last 10 years, something that no procurement person (or email analyst firm) has access to. And the ESPs know we have this data, which makes a price discussion completely transparent. Who do you think is going to get you a better price?

What is the role of Procurement in your RFP?

There can be a role for procurement in your next ESP RFP. We’ve had some great working relationships in past RFPs with the procurement teams at our clients.

In fact, in a couple of cases, it was procurement who brought us into the process. Here is an overview of different phases, and the role of procurement in your RFP.

Working with an outside consultant in an RFP process doesn’t mean the procurement team isn’t doing its job. Rather, it’s a way for the procurement team to ensure that they ARE doing their job. A consultant can help guide the client’s email team to the best ESP for its unique requirements. And use the in-depth knowledge of the market pricing to get the right price.

On the other hand, procurement doesn’t agree to the use of outside consultants, they can be very effective at sabotaging your efforts.

A Sad Ending to an RFP

I remember an RFP we were hired to manage a few years back.

Apparently, procurement had not been asked to participate in a different RFP the previous year for a new Content Management System (CMS). They didn’t like that. Needless to say, they made sure they had a seat at the table for the ESP review. 

It was clear from the first meeting that the woman from procurement was going to make it her job to make the process as miserable as possible for everyone involved. From both her company and us. And she proved really good at it! She demanded to be the one to interface with us.

We’ve never created so many versions of a requirements document before or after. She asked for numerous edits of dubious merit from each new version she received. After that, she declared we needed to convert all the requirements from statements to questions.

This had absolutely no bearing on the document, but it created another delay and a lot more make-work for our team.

Long story short, right around this time the email marketing lead (otherwise known as “the person who hired us”) left the company. Was it related to the RFP process? I don’t know. Once she left the scene, procurement wasted no time in cutting Email Connect loose from the RFP.

At the time the reason given was that they were going to put it on hold. But a short time later, a couple of ESPs reached out to us asking if we were running the RFP for a brand. We weren’t, both vendors remarked how much the RFP looked and sounded like one that we would have created. The story could have ended there, but now that we had a pipeline into the process, we were able to stay informed of the RFP’s progress.

Sadly for the vendors, the RFP dragged on for 12 months under the direction of our former procurement nemesis at the client. It finally sputtered to an inconclusive ending with the incumbent keeping the business. No winners here!

All Stakeholders are in this together, so get them together

All brand stakeholders need to understand that bringing in a consultant to help with an ESP RFP isn’t an either/or proposition in your ESP selection team.

We have seen time and again that the best outcomes happen when we partner with a client’s procurement team for the RFP. We need them, and they need us to for the valuable insight and expertise we bring regarding platforms and pricing.

If you are about to begin your own RFP and you’re getting pushback from your procurement team on bringing in outside help, insist they meet with the consultant.  This can make all the difference in the world.

RFPs where all the stakeholders are aligned are successful RFPs. You don’t want to ignore your procurement team’s advice, you want them on your team.  But you also want them to focus on what they do best, and only what they do best.

The post RFPs and your Procurement team: A must-read survival guide appeared first on Email vendor selection.

When email marketers embark on an email software RFP, there are many things they already know. For example, they know the pain points with their existing Email Service Provider (ESP).

Common pain points with your current ESP can be:

• Missing functionality in the platform,
• Issues with the tool or services provided,
• and/or a feeling that you might be paying more than you should be paying.

In addition to the things email marketers know going into the RFP, there are also things they know they don’t know. These are the question marks.

Email marketers might have questions going in to an RFP like:

• Where is the market in terms of pricing?
• Can anyone solve the pain points I have?
• Who are the top email vendors today?

These are the questions that the RFP process itself is designed to answer.

Beware of your RFP Blind spots

But there is a third category that lurks within every ESP RFP, and it can lead to a breakdown in the RFP, or worse, a bad decision in the end. That category includes the things an email marketer isn’t aware of he/she doesn’t know. The Blind Spots. What typically falls under this category? Let’s take a closer look at several.

1. There are much bigger differences between ESPs than you have been led to believe (by everyone)

Most ESPs will tell you that they are the best ESP. And lots of analysts are in the business of telling you which is the best ESP. Neither of which tells the email marketer who might be the best ESP for his or her particular needs. You have to lift the curtain yourself to see that not every ESP is created equal. That’s because no ESP want to limit the opportunities they have to win business by admitting they can’t do something another vendor can do.

The downside is that often an email marketer will include ESPs in their RFP that really shouldn’t be included in the first place. They are solely there because they are “hot” in the marketplace.

I call it the “Flavor of the Week” syndrome.

Everyone’s time is wasted when an ESP that’s a very poor fit is included in an RFP, but even worse is when that ESP wins the RFP.

Including the wrong ESP, not knowing the right one

How could the wrong ESP possibly ever win? If a marketer doesn’t created a well-defined requirements document it’s actually easy to pick the wrong ESP. Or if they place too much emphasis on pricing above everything else.

The truth is, you can’t be expected to know all the differences between every ESP. Which is exactly why you should consider involving someone who knows the market and can help you select the vendors to include in your RFP. The last two enterprise RFPs we guided were won by vendors our clients wouldn’t have invited to participate in the RFP without our advice.

Think about that for a minute.

2. ESP pricing models are (almost) impossible to compare

ESP pricing models have become much more diverse and complex. ESPs have become very good at making side-by-side price comparisons between vendors almost impossible to do. 15 years ago an email marketer could basically compare CPM to CPM and determine which vendor had better pricing.

But over the last several years different categories of pricing have been added by these vendors. Things like data storage fees, subscriber fees, and technology platform operations. There’s no consistency between vendors, some charge for one thing, others for something else.

Avoid “whack-a-mole” pricing
What all of the new fees are specifically designed to do is allow the ESPs to present lower CPMs in the hope that a prospect’s focus will be solely on that number. Don’t believe me? In negotiations we’ve conducted on behalf of our clients we’ve seen vendors react to our request to lower one fee by raising the CPM. We call that “whack-a-mole” pricing.

In reality, the CPM listed in most pricing proposals today is only a partial CPM. Your actual CPM is your annual email volume divided by your total annual fees. We’ve solved the price comparison problem by creating a Common Pricing Template which forces the vendors to put pricing into our format for side-by-side comparisons of various pricing proposals.

If you wait to understand various pricing models until you’ve asked for pricing proposals in your RFP, you’re too late. The ability to make accurate comparisons will be hindered by a lack of understanding how each vendor arrived at its final cost.

Not fully understanding pricing models can be particularly painful if you end up selecting one of the ESPs that require upfront payment for your email program each year. Yes, you read that correctly. Nothing like paying a seven-figure amount before you’ve even started to migrate off your old vendor (and while you are still paying for the old vendor’s services!).

Wouldn’t you have liked to know that you had to pay in advance before you made your choice? I’m pretty sure your CFO would find that information useful!

3. You (marketing) and your IT team might have very different ideas about what the ideal ESP looks like

We have seen this scenario time and again in our work with our clients. And it’s not just a division between marketing and IT. There’s also the campaign production team, who also has its own ideas on what the ideal solution looks like.

This can lead to vigorous disagreements about the choice of vendor, and entire departments unhappy with the final selection.
Knowing what’s important to each department in advance can save you much grief during the RFP process and after the final selection has been made. Some vendor solutions can bridge gaps between teams better than others. Depending on who is making the decision at your company, the list of vendors you include can change dramatically.

Here’s a list of each group’s general priorities from our experience in managing email RFPs:

Marketing VPs and Marketing Directors priorities

1. Huge emphasis on the stability/reliability of the platform
2. Interested in the availability of value-added services like analytics and creative
3. Critical to use various sources of data in real-time before it gets stale
4. Also focused on robust reporting and analytics capabilities

IT priorities

1. Tend to focus on the ability of email vendors to play the data “where it lies” (as opposed to marketing who doesn’t care whether or not it needs to move around) and overall data security.
2. This often takes the shape of an on-premise solution like Adobe, or a hybrid like MessageGears.
3. Or they gravitate towards email relay solutions that offer easy connections and extensive APIs like SparkPost and SendGrid, which typically don’t come with marketer-friendly UI’s. Have a look at the best SendGrid alternatives here, most of them have easy-to-use interfaces for marketers.

Campaign Production priorities

1. Top priorities include how intuitive and usable the platform itself is.
2. Ability to do everything they need to do without involving IT or the ESPs services team.
3. Speed of the platform in performing campaign production operations

Pro tip: It’s an exceedingly good idea to make sure your campaign production team supports your choice of vendor. They’re the ones who will be using it on a daily basis and aren’t necessarily going to learn all the ins and outs of a platform they don’t like.

Conclusion: Shine a light on your Selection Blind Spots

You may have plenty of Blind Spots, things you don’t know you don’t know. But you can get help to make sure things go smoothly in your RFP.

For all of the reasons we’ve outlined – the vast differences between ESPs, the complexity of pricing models, and the differing requirements of your internal stakeholders–it makes a lot of sense to bring in help before starting your own ESP RFP.

Find a selection partner that brings a deep understanding of the pluses and minuses of the various vendors to ensure that you invite the vendors best suited to address your unique requirements and get a great deal.

The post These Blind Spots Will Derail Your Email Software Selection (or Worse) appeared first on Email vendor selection.

1. IBM Marketing Cloud becomes Acoustic

In early April of this year, IBM agreed to sell its remaining marketing platform and commerce software assets to private equity firm Centerbridge for an undisclosed amount.

At the time of my first column, I wrote that the common assumption was that Centerbridge planned to create a new company from those assets, which included the email marketing platform from the acquisition of Silverpop. And that’s exactly what they did.

On July 15th Centerbridge Partners debuted Acoustic, which they describe as “A New Marketing Cloud Bringing Humanity to AI-Powered Marketing”. The new company offers services centered around AI and marketing cloud technology, and claims its ambition is to “bring back a personal approach to the art of marketing”. Everyone is talking about AI, and it’s still not clear if that means better, more expensive, or a bit of both.

In his blog, Mark Simpson, the CEO of the new Acoustic platform states what needs to be done first. Which is integration:
“Our first priority for our products is to improve their ability to connect with each other. While this exists to some extent today, we will now take the extra step of unifying our underlying data structure.”

What’s an email focussed client to do?
There’s a lot of talk about AI-powered marketing, and clearly Acoustic is staking out its claim in this space. And unlike IBM, it appears that Centerbridge is going to invest some serious money into the platform. I’ve seen reports that they will invest $10 to $20 million over the next few quarters to help Acoustic re-architect its platform. Is that enough? No way to know at this point.

What’s notable about the launch of Acoustic is the lack of emphasis around its email marketing capabilities. Companies that focus on their marketing cloud offer tend to ignore clients using them solely as an email point solution. Email marketers often do not benefit from falling under a marketing cloud, it remains to be seen if that will be the case for Acoustics’ email clients.

2. Epsilon and Publicis

On July 2nd Publicis closed on its deal to acquire Epsilon. I have no doubt that enormous integration issues remain, but Publicis is already busy introducing the Epsilon services offering to clients.

How the companies sort through the integration issues will determine how successful the acquisition will prove to be. Epsilon itself often struggled with its own acquisitions, with clients wondering who actually owned the relationship with them, and numerous Epsilon teams all pitching clients for business.

How Publicis’s advertising clients react to possible client conflicts created by the Epsilon acquisition will also be something to closely watch. In the world of marketing services from which Epsilon came, competing brands are often serviced by the same provider.

For example, Epsilon works with a number of financial services companies. In the world of advertising, however, competitors do not co-exist at a single agency. In fact, one of the reasons holding companies like Publicis were created was to allow the different agencies within a holding company to service clients that couldn’t be serviced by a single agency brand (competing car brands, for example).

What’s an email focused client to do?
Only time will tell if this acquisition turns out to benefit Epsilon’s email clients. I don’t see any reason at the moment for them to be overly concerned, but any acquisition of this type is at least a distraction to the Epsilon team. Email clients will want to closely monitor the situation on an ongoing basis for the next 12 months.

3. Yes Marketing and Adobe… and Avanada

On May 16th, Yes Marketing—the email marketing arm of Infogroup—announced a new partnership with Adobe that would pair Yes Marketing’s widely respected agency services team with the Adobe email platform. In other words, Yes Marketing is going to become just one of many agency partners of Adobe.

It’s easy to see how that benefits Adobe, as it will now get served up by Yes to take over platform duties for current clients of Yes. It remains hard to understand how Yes (or its clients) benefit from this arrangement.

Avanade partnership to launch an Adobe practice
Adobe’s promiscuity when it comes to official agency partners was reinforced when on July 15 it announced that it’s partnering with Avanade, the Microsoft and Accenture joint venture, to “help our mutual customers rapidly develop, implement and derive value from Adobe and Microsoft’s digital business solutions.”

As part of this partnership, Avanade will build an Adobe practice, connecting Adobe Experience Cloud with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure. As an aside, Avanade is Microsoft’s largest system integrator and operates in close alliance with Accenture Interactive. With partnerships like this, it’s hard to see Adobe spending a whole lot of effort on its Yes Marketing partnership.

What’s an email focused client to do?
As we have since learned, clients currently on the Yesmail platform are now in a situation where at some point over the next three years, they will be forced to move to Adobe Campaign. A migration is a migration, so current Yes clients should strongly consider looking at their options through the RFP process. Adobe Campaign might be a great fit, but you won’t know that unless you look at other vendors before the move.

How to handle the constant change in the world of email marketing.

As I said, it’s only a matter of time before the next big change in the ESP vendor landscape. Change is constant in the world of email marketing. If you’ve been with the same ESP for 3 or more years, you might be very surprised at how different your options look today.

So as you approach the end of your current ESP contract, you owe it to your company and yourself to explore your options. Particularly if you are one of the three we’ve been discussing.

The post How changes in ESP landscape affect clients: Acoustic, Epsilon, Yes Marketing (part 2) appeared first on Email vendor selection.

We make it our business to understand the vendor landscape and who fits where in the ecosystem in helping with Email vendor selections. And with all these changes this has become almost a full-time job in itself!

1. IBM Marketing Cloud sells software assets to Centerbridge

IBM got into the email services provider action with its acquisition of ESP Silverpop in 2014. It combined that acquisition with others it had made and created the IBM Marketing Cloud to go head-to-head with marketing clouds launched by Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe at around the same time.

Competing in the marketing cloud space takes a lot of time, focus and money, and IBM never seemed to have its heart in the game. It doesn’t take much to fall behind, and while the other cloud players continued with strategic acquisitions and investment, IBM sat tight.

The first sign of a change in IBM’s strategy came last December when it unloaded several of its martech assets. WebSphere and Unica were sold to HCL Technologies for $1.8 billion.

In early April of this year, IBM sold its remaining marketing platform and commerce software assets to private equity firm Centerbridge for an undisclosed amount. Centerbridge has indicated that it plans to create a new company from those assets, which includes the email marketing platform formerly known as Silverpop.

What’s in it for email Clients?

Clients on Silverpop when it was purchased by IBM picked up little advantage over the years. The big winner was IBM’s own email marketing team which up until that point had been forced to email from an internal email platform that was clunky to use. They started sending on Silverpop as fast as they could.

IBM’s growing indifference to the marketing cloud strategy led to a lack of platform investment and product strategy. It created a good marketing campaign around “Watson” with a focus on AI, not so much on Watson Campaign (Silverpop). But marketing is marketing, and investment is something entirely different. With the sale to Centerbridge, the outlook for its email marketing clients look to remain about the same.

Customers shouldn’t expect a lot of investment in the platform. If anything there will be a decrease in adjacent email-related professional services. PE firms are looking to quickly maximize the value of these types of acquisitions and increasing the multiples. So expect a focus on improving the technology margins, and cut people because of the lower margins associated with services.

2. Epsilon acquisition by Publicis

It was probably inevitable that Epsilon would get put into play, following Denstu’s acquisition of Merkle and IPG’s takeover of Acxiom’s core database business. Barely two weeks after the IBM announcement, Publicis announced its $4.4 billion acquisition of Epsilon from Alliance Data Systems.

Epsilon is one of the largest players in the marketing services space providing clients with a range of marketing services spanning database marketing, direct mail, email marketing, web development, loyalty programs, analytics, data services, strategic consulting and agency services.

Analysts generally viewed the acquisition as being driven by the increase in the data and analytics services Publicis can provide its clients and the volume of first-party data Epsilon holds on U.S consumers.

What’s in it for email Clients?

Epsilon deserves a lot of credit for its ongoing investment in the Agility Harmony email platform. It’s a powerful tool for enterprise brands. But there are two reasons for its current email clients to be concerned.

First, Publicis has a poor track record in prior integrations of large acquisitions (see: Sapient). If history repeats itself here, there are going to be several years of integration bumps that will be an ongoing distraction for the Epsilon team.

—“Wait, you mean there’s an email business here as well?!”.
The second reason Client might want to be wary of is that the entire email business is likely to be an afterthought in the acquisition and future plans of Publicis. When eBay purchased GSI Commerce in 2011 it also acquired the ESP eDialog which GSI bought in 2008.

The eBay acquisition was driven by its interest in the online commerce services GSI had developed. It didn’t really know what to do with the email business and ended up, after several years of declining business, selling it to Zeta Global in late 2015. I’m not suggesting that Publicis will sell the Epsilon email business down the road, but it likely won’t be a focus of attention either.

3. Yes Marketing announces a strategic partnership with Adobe

The email world had about a month to catch its breath before the next shoe dropped. On May 16th, Yes Marketing—the email marketing arm of Infogroup—announced a new partnership with Adobe that would pair Yes Marketing’s widely admired agency services team with the Adobe email platform.

In essence, this means that Yes is going to retire its own proprietary email platform in favor of Adobe’s Campaign. In all new Yes Marketing opportunities it would be pitching its team and Adobe’s technology.

This approach has been tried before. Around 2012 Acxiom quietly decided that it would retire its Impact platform (or at least stop investing in it) and partner with then ExactTarget (pre-Salesforce acquisition) on future new business opportunities. It also encouraged many of its largest clients to move to the ET platform. Going forward Acxiom would focus on the services side of the business, with a strong team it had built over the years.

What’s in it for email Clients?

I’ll admit to being very surprised by this announcement because we think very highly of the Yes platform. It remains very competitive, unlike the Acxiom Impact platform in 2012 which in truth had fallen behind the competition and required a lot of new investment. Several years of failed attempts to sell the entire Yes Marketing unit of Infogroup likely contributed greatly to this decision.

Judging from the Acxiom experience, this isn’t going to turn out well for anyone – Yes Marketing most of all.

For clients currently on the Yesmail platform, they are now in a situation where (at best) they are going to be using a platform that will no longer see any investment or improvement or (at worst) they will be forced to move to Adobe (or RFP) because Yes retires the platform completely.

Adobe already has many long-standing relationships with services providers including both Merkle and Epsilon. So the “partnership” around new business is likely to be a one-way street, something Acxiom learned the hard way with ET.

And in the case of Acxiom, ET also walked away with several of its largest and best-known clients after they migrated platforms. The end result was the sale of what was left of the Acxiom email team and clients to Zeta in 2016 for a reported $50 million.

It’s a whole new ESP Landscape… again!

Hard to believe that all 3 of these events were announced within a month of one another. They are shaking up the hierarchy of enterprise ESPs and leaving existing customers and future prospects wondering what’s best for their businesses.

Often the customers of the acquired companies can benefit from an acquisition. That was the case when Digital Impact was acquired by Acxiom and Cheetahmail acquired by Experian. Also the customers of the platforms sold to Zeta Global by eBay and Acxiom found themselves better off.

At this point in time, I would find it very hard to articulate a benefit for any of the existing customers of the mentioned Enterprise ESPs.

We will have to wait and see.

The real question is whether their customers are willing to wait and see. If not, we are here to help with your RFP.

Editors note: After publication, our editor reached out to several employees of IBM Marketing, Epsilon, Adobe and Yes Marketing with the request to post any reactions here. The Dutch saying goes “Silence implies consent”, so we are very curious to hear the responses.

The post Do recent changes in the ESP landscape benefit clients? IBM, Epsilon, Yes Marketing appeared first on Email vendor selection.

But once you let emotional shortcuts influence your decision-making, your RFP process is in serious trouble! Read on to learn how to spot emotional shortcuts people are most likely to take and how you can avoid them in your own RFPs.

How do emotional RFP shortcuts end up in your selection?

An emotional shortcut isn’t just about feelings / emotions in your email marketing RFP. As you will see, the definition is more about the absence of facts:

What is an “emotional shortcut”?
An “emotional shortcut” is drawing a conclusion based on subjective, or emotional criteria rather than decision-making based on facts. It often omits one or more important steps.

Emotional shortcuts often aren’t consciously used. Rather in good faith with the belief that everything pertinent has been weighed and considered.

In the Email Service Provider (ESP) RFP process marketers often call on emotional shortcuts. It is tough to process an avalanche of information in your RFP, particularly if it hasn’t been structured to make apples to apples comparisons between the various vendors. It is no wonder we want to reduce the (cognitive) effort and time required.

With this definition in mind, it’s obvious why a marketer who finds himself in the position of believing all ESPs are the same will look for other ways to make decisions on which vendor to award the business and which ones to eliminate.

The problem with taking these shortcuts in your selection

When you rely on emotional shortcuts to separate the ESPs pitching your business, your process has broken down. The problem is threefold:

• You can’t validate or even share your decision criteria with the team or your management.
• You open your decision to second-guessing which can set the process back a couple of steps.
• Most importantly, the odds of making the right choice of vendor partner plummet.

Vendor salespeople have long understood this. They use this tendency for prospects to take emotional shortcuts to their advantage in the sales process!

Shortcuts to avoid in shortlisting and evaluating ESPs

Marketers will often take Emotional Shortcuts (ESCs) throughout the RFP process without even thinking about it. It can already start with the decision as to which vendors to invite to your ESP RFP. Here are some of the most common problematic shortcuts we’ve steered our clients away from during some of the RFPs we’ve managed.

Here are a few common Emotional Shortcuts to avoid.

1. The Analyst shortcut

What does the Forrester Wave say about vendors? Or any other analyst with whom I am familiar? I will just invite their top 6! This might feel like you are doing your homework. – and analyst reviews can contain valid datapoints – but you are relying on someone else’s opinion who has no particular idea about your unique requirements.

Most of these analyst rankings are prepared by folks who’ve never been in your shoes – they’ve never worked for an ESP or been an email marketer that used an ESP as part of their job (don’t take my word for it, look them up on LinkedIn).

Relying on analyst rankings as your main source of information is like buying a car based on the advice of someone without a driver’s license! Imagine if writers for Car & Driver rated cars without ever driving them!

2. The Proximity shortcut

Which vendors do I know from off the top of my head? Who has made an effort to stay in contact with me? This is certainly a measure of just how well-known a vendor is, or how badly they want your business. We trust what we know, but this has no bearing on who might be the best fit for your company.

As I mentioned earlier, the best salespeople are those that understand this emotional shortcut. They count on the friendship they have built with you to get their company included when you RFP. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having friends, as long as you are not taking a shortcut and have your evaluation colored without considering facts.

3. The Peer opinion shortcut

What platforms do other marketers use? You can’t talk to a group of other email marketers without their MarTech stack eventually coming up. Peer opinions are one of the most dangerous emotional shortcuts a marketer can take. Why do I say that?

At any given time up to 20% of an ESPs customers are extremely unhappy with that vendor (for some vendors that number is significantly higher). There could be lots of valid reasons for that 20% of detractors to be unhappy, but often it’s simply the result of a relationship gone stale.

If the person whose opinion you ask is among the 20%, you’re going to get a very negative impression of their vendor – so you exclude that vendor from your RFP. But if you asked one of the 80% of promoters what they think, and you heard great reviews you would have included that ESP!

Isn’t that good review hard data? Not really. All you learned is that their vendor might be a good fit for your company if both of your companies were exactly alike in every way.

How much of your selection is based on facts and how much on feeling?

Despite what analysts would have you believe, there isn’t a “best” ESP. But there is a best ESP for your company. You’re not going to find it relying on shortcuts.

Emotional shortcuts in your ESP evaluation

Let’s assume that you made a solid shortlist without taking emotional shortcuts. Maybe you even hired an outside consultant to help with your shortlist selection.

Like I mentioned before, if someone has never driven a car, how can his or her evaluation be trusted? I think experience with platforms is valuable. Does this experience guarantee expert advice? No. So it can be good to bring in a consultant experienced in platforms and the RFP process !

Once you’ve cut the original list down to a shortlist of 3 or 4 vendors, it is time to meet in person and get a closer look. This is another inflection point where emotional shortcuts can ruin clear decision-making. If you leave it up to the vendors to present whatever they want to focus on, your are likely to get very different meetings. After all, vendors prefer to show their strengths and for each vendor that is likely to be different.

At this point, rather than finding substantive differences during the presentations, marketers may revert to emotional shortcuts that are easier to apply.

Beware “pretty pictures”

When I worked on the vendor side I always had my creative team make some email templates and landing pages (aka “pretty pictures”) for the prospect, whether or not they were asked for. And I would also bring my creative director to every one of these meetings. Why?

Because “pretty pictures” break up the monotony of a long meeting and prove very memorable when determining whose presentations were preferred. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to showcase my team as a way to differentiate ourselves, and they did outstanding work. So while it wasn’t just a stunt, it still provided the prospect team with the ability to take an emotional shortcut when determining which vendors to keep in play.

The appeal of the presenting team

The team in an in-person meeting also has (not surprisingly) a huge impact. It is one of these emotional shortcuts you need to be aware of. I’ve seen clients gravitate towards a vendor with a weak or unfit tooling, but a strong – or likable – presenting team much more often than the reverse. But note that you are not only selecting the presenters or sales people, in many cases they are not even your contacts later on!

Using a scorecard system to stay objective

Emotional shortcuts taken at any point in your selection process might result in you picking the best vendor for your specific needs – then again maybe you will win the Nobel Peace Prize. When you rely on emotional shortcuts to separate the ESPs pitching your business, your process has broken down.

With a good scorecard system, the impact of emotional shortcuts can be minimized at the presentation stage of your selection process – minimized, but not always eliminated.

In RFPs we guide, we use scorecards at each decision-point. So each decision is made as objectively as possible.

We score the RFP responses with one type of scorecard, the in-person meetings with another, and the final sandbox phase with its own unique scorecard. Vendors move on in the process based solely on how they rank in the scorecards.

Taking emotional shortcuts in the RFP process will likely result in a breakdown at some point. Of course you want to avoid that. If it happens to you, we would be happy to help get your RFP back on track. You won’t be the first person to make that call to us!

The post Faux-facts and emotional shortcuts; how to ruin an email marketing RFP without even knowing it appeared first on Email vendor selection.

A well-managed RFP process gives email marketers the very best chance of making the right choice. But a poorly shaped RFP is hardly any better than asking a random email marketer who they “like”.

The best selections are based on objective criteria, but you have to craft your questions and process so they uncovering the important differences.

Or you will end up saying:
“We don’t know how to choose! Every ESP can do everything!”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve answered the phone and heard those words. On the other side is a frustrated email marketer several months into his or her RFP process.

Those calls usually result in an engagement for our team to guide the selection. But for you, it doesn’t need to get to that point.

If you think every ESP looks alike, it’s because:
* you aren’t asking the right questions during your RFP process.
* you aren’t asking for enough information.
Probably both.

There are huge differences between enterprise ESPs.

Differences that — based on your requirements — can make one your ideal partner, and another ESP a terrible choice.

Some enterprise ESPs can handle and ingest large amounts of data from numerous sources in real-time. There are other ESPs where the data never needs to leave the system. The better solution is the one that fits with your situation.

Even more significantly, some enterprise ESPs act mostly as software companies, whereas others call themselves marketing services providers. While they could both offer services, their organisational focus influences what you can expect from them.

You want to find the man behind the email marketing curtain. And to do that, you need to shape your RFP so those differences are not just revealed, but the impact on your business becomes clear.

Do away with the Yes/No RFP questions in your email RFP

A big mistake many email marketers make in the RFP process is creating an RFP questionnaire that focuses on “Yes or No” questions. “Can your platform do XYZ?”

If your procurement team is driving the process, your RFP is bound to have YES/NO type of questions. Procurement people LOVE simplicity and box checking when gathering requirements, because they:
1) don’t really understand what the marketer needs, and
2) the differences they focus on are primarily around pricing.

(I’ve also worked with some fabulous procurement teams over the years— generalizing here to make a point).

If you give an ESP salesperson the option of simply replying “Yes or No”, most of them are going to tell you what they need to tell you:. Which is Yes.

The Yes tick box has a magical attraction to the salesperson. Ticking Yes only has benefits for sales. It improves the chance to advance and – has zero negative consequences.

To make it worse, not every Yes means the same. You could ask three vendors if they can provide email send-time optimization. All three answer Yes.
Vendor #1 does it only at the campaign level, not at the subscriber level.
Vendor #2 does it at the subscriber level via native platform funtionality (no additional cost).
Vendor #3 can do it via a 3rd party integration that is an added cost.

Stopping at Yes doesn’t reveal those very significant differences. If your questions aren’t detailed enough, niether are the answers you are going to get.

Now how are we going to compare if everybody seems to do everything?

In short: If you ask Yes/No questions, you are going to get a lot of “Yeses” and ticked boxes. And you know what happens then? All the enterprise ESPs look and sound alike. And you end up saying: “We don’t know how to choose! Every ESP can do everything!”

Most of the time vendor RFP responses are nothing more than shelf-ware.

Meaning they are more likely to end up on a shelf in your office than they are being read cover to cover. When you can’t make a detailed step-by-step comparison, why would anyone take the time to read them?

How to Dig deeper into what the vendor can do for you

There’s a simple way to avoid this situation, but it takes more work from the email marketer. The first step to take is to dig deeper around every question. We never let the vendors get away with a simple “yes”—not if they want to advance to the next round of the RFPs we manage. How does that work in practice? We score and compare vendors head-to-head against the current provider.

Clients only want to migrate to a platform they represents a step-change improvement over their current provider. By responding with a simple Yes, there is no way to determine if that vendor does something better than the others. Top scores come from explaining how the solution exceeds expectations, rather than merely meets it. That needs more than a Yes.

We don’t stop with “Can your platform do XYZ?”

The types of follow-up questions we ask that go deeper are:
“is that functionality native to the platform, or provided via third-party?”,
“is that functionality out-of-the-box, or does it need custom development?”,
“how many integrations have you done with company ABC?”.

We also ask how they do it.

Only when you dig a layer or two deeper, you begin to see real differences between the platforms. Think back to that send-time optimization example we gave earlier.

And because you are asking the questions, these differences likely matter a whole lot to you. It does take more work on your part because now you have to actually read and compare the vendor responses.

Beating the “Yes, looks good” presentation

Left to their own devices, most ESPs will present the things in their platform’s that they think show the best. But for each vendor, that will be different feature and functionality.

So after 3-4 presentations you will know that each does one thing really well. But you still won’t have any idea which platform actually addresses your needs.

In the vendor presentation to your team, make them focus on how they can address and solve your use cases.

Managing your email marketing RFP right

The key point to take away is that going through an RFP process is no guarantee you will make the right decision for your company. A poorly managed RFP is hardly better than doing no RFP at all, plus it’s a lot more work for you!

RFPs remain the best path to making the right choice, but they have to be managed properly. Bringing in a consultant for your RFP is recommended. It will pay for itself many times over in getting a good deal from the selected vendor, and in ensuring that you don’t find yourself heading back to another RFP in a few years because you made a poor choice.

The post How to beat Yes-men during your email marketing RFP appeared first on Email vendor selection.

1. The Email Platform

We like to get this out of the way as early as possible. Everyone’s platform will send your email and provide reporting back to you. If you’re an enterprise email marketing client there are 10-12 options for you (despite what Forrester told to you in the last Wave report about email marketing vendors). And if you plan to go with a full-service option, you can skip the demo. What do you care what the tool looks like? You won’t be using it, and besides, demos are boring. Trust me.
More email platform options for SMB
If you’re a Small to Medium Business you have even more options. This makes this part of the Request For proposal (RFP) harder than if you are enterprise-sized. Every platform has its strengths and weaknesses, so your evaluation needs to focus in on those that meet your specific business needs. There will always be more than one option.
For both enterprise and SMB email marketers the information you really want is the ongoing investment being made in the tool, and the product roadmap. The last thing you want to do is pick a vendor whom that you will outgrow before you’re ready to make another move. And if the ESP is experiencing capacity problems (they won’t tell you that, but their clients will), run the other direction.

2. The Referral client

I have never understood the value that marketers place on this part of the process. Even the worst ESP on the planet has a few clients who will speak kindly of it, if for no other reason than they are nice people. I’ve been fortunate in my career to have a number of clients who were more than willing to speak on my company’s behalf to help us land new business (I hope you know who you are—I owe you a lot). I also had clients at the very same time who—for any number of reasons—cursed the day I was born. When I was asked to provide a prospect with references guess which clients I provided?
Every ESP has fans and detractors
This is important for you to recognize: At any given time every single ESP you are considering has its fans and its detractors within its client base. Because none of them are perfect 100% of the time (yes, that pains me to admit). Your best bet is to try and speak with both so you get a more balanced assessment.
There’s no reason you or your search consultant can’t reach out to other clients of each ESP that you’re considering. Ones not provided directly by the ESP. And while I tend to weigh the positive reviews more heavily than the negative, I like to hear both sides.

3. The People at your ESP

Everything really important in your relationship with your ESP spring from the people who work there. The quality of their ideas, their service and ultimately the success of your program is dependent upon the people assigned to your business. And this is only magnified when you are in a full-service relationship.

The email platform is secondary to the email people
The success of email marketing agencies demonstrate that marketers are recognizing that the platform is secondary to the people. Neither of these shops is tied to a single proprietary platform. You bring the platform, they bring the people. That’s not to say that you won’t find some excellent people on the services teams at the ESPs. You definitely will.
Whether you go agency or ESP, the point is that you want their best people working with you. You should insist on meeting the team proposed for your business as part of the pitch process. Falling in love with the head of strategy—someone you won’t see again for at least 6 months—doesn’t really do you or your business any good.
Engaging in some dialog lets you begin to see how they think about your business and your industry. Get a verbal commitment on the “who”, and get a contractual commitment (in a SLA) on the “how much” to ensure that the people who sold you are also the people who service you.

4. The “Man Behind the Curtain”

One thing the be on the alert for is when an ESP offers you something and is hesitant to go into great detail about it. As in, “don’t pay any attention to that man behind the curtain.”
A prime example of that is “the bundle”. This is where an ESP offers you and all-in price for sending and servicing. Rather than give you a CPM for the send and then an hourly rate and hours required to service your business, this methodology makes everything “all in” in the CPM. You might hear the term “fully baked costs”.
Problems with “All in” costs
There are several problems with this. It makes and apples to apples comparison of the email marketing CPM impossible. It doesn’t guarantee you any level of service by the team assigned to your business. And it incentivizes the ESP to “send more email” to maximize their margin, which may not be what’s best for your brand. So ask to see a detailed breakdown of the bundle so you are clear as to what you are getting.
Another example of the man behind the curtain is when an ESP tells you that they have a lot of experience in migrating triggered and automated campaigns, but are reluctant to go into specifics. So make sure no man (or woman) gets left “behind the curtain”!

A “win now, figure it out later strategy”?

You need to remember that in the heat of new business battle even the most professional ESP can fall back on a “win now, figure it out later strategy”. In fact, that attitude is in no way unique to the world of email marketing. By focusing on the right things and asking the right questions up front, you and your company can minimize the challenges any organization faces during the migration to a new vendor. Because there will always be unexpected challenges…

The post Are all ESPs equal? 4 must-know ways to lift the RFP curtain appeared first on Email vendor selection.