By: MarketingXD

MarketingXD — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:05:00 +0000

Jordie asked for my take on this post…
I think there is increasing overlap between these market sectors, because the rate of technological change has been quite slow recently and “feature poor” vendors have been catching up. Good companies in all the sectors can send the volume of emails needed by typical customers, and do scheduling, and reporting, and provide an API for integration.
Where they differ significantly, in terms of features, is with multi-channel (social), optimization and advanced scheduling.
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As a potential client, you need to think about cost, lock-in and support, deliverability, multi-channel, full-service and optimization…
If you are a small client, you want a simple email vendor, so chose one that allows purchase by credit card – either pre-pay, or with a 1 month contract period. If you are a big client, you want deep discounts (cpm rates are falling ever closer to zero) and should accept a lock-in of 1-3 years.
If you are a small client, and your data is very clean, you probably don’t care about deliverability. If you’re a bit spammy, or you’re a big client, you should care a lot. This is a very complex field, so check that your ESP has a dedicated team, and try to negotiate a SLA for reaching the in box.
If you are a small client, you either don’t care about social – use a cheap ESP – or else it’s the core of your business and no ESP will be good enough – so check out specialist tools. If you are a big client and care about social, go for one of the big, multi-channel vendors and pay a correspondingly large price.
Full-service. Decide whether you want to design your own email, or let the ESP do it. This is a straightforward business decision, based on whether you see design as a core competence. Many ESPs will offer full-service options.
Finally, optimization. If your list is big enough for testing (more than about 5000) then testing can really boost the effectiveness of your emails. Small clients can do manual A:B testing of any template change and some email subjects – to get an idea what subscribers like. Big clients should do a huge amount of automated multivariate testing – if this is you, this issue might swing your decision towards full service or partial outsourcing, because keeping track of tests can be a lot of work.

Comments on: Email marketing solutions – the difference between small, mid-market and enterprise

By: MarketingXD