Teresa Caro
Caro Consulting
Gone are the days where you could create an email group in Microsoft Outlook®, write your email, and click send. Oh, you can still do it, but now there are consequences.
A consequence could be as small as not knowing your best client did not receive your email or as large as being found guilty of CAN SPAM non-compliance. For these reasons and many others, it is all the more important to choose the right email marketing service provider.
Today there are many email marketing service providers to choose from, but only one is right for your situation. To find the right service provider for you, here are some simple steps to get you started.
Survey the Email Landscape
Start off by reviewing your company as a whole. What type of emails is your company sending out today? Who is sending them? What does your company plan to send out in the future? Most likely your emails will fall into one of these four categories:
- New Customer Acquisition—List rentals, co-registration, and sponsorships.
- Drip—Ongoing marketing communications with customer or business leads as they move through the buy-cycle.
- Customer Retention—Database-driven communications & promotions focused on retaining, up-selling, and cross-selling current customers.
- Administrative & Transactional—Required communications with implied opt-in such as bills, receipts, and confirmations.
During this process ask the following questions about your current situation and then estimate what is planned for the future.
- Email Volume—How many emails does your company send each day? Each month? Each year?
- Campaigns—Of these emails how many are a part of an overall marketing campaign? How many campaigns do you send out each year? What type of campaigns?
- Users—Who will need access to the email marketing tool?
- Technology—What is your company's current system architecture? What are the needed integration points?
Do a Little Self Reflecting
To determine which service provider is best for you, take some time to go beyond the facts and do some self reflecting. Ask yourself:
- How much control do you want over your data?
- How much time is your technology team willing to commit to marketing activities?
- Do you want to commit one of your people to keeping your company's URL off the black lists?
- How much email marketing experience do you have today?
Focus on Features & Functionality
Once you have these questions answered, you are now ready to determine your specific requirements. Here are some features and functionality you should consider for your RFP (request for proposal):
1. Service Provider Type
- Hosted—Managed by the solution provider on its servers.
- Licensed—The software is installed on your servers and managed by your company.
- Full service provider—Provides you with the technology and the professionals to design, develop, and implement the campaign
2. Deliverability
Each month more companies and consumers add filters to their email boxes. In fact, statistics from Return Path, an e-mail hygiene and delivery monitoring service, estimate the amount of permission e-mail not delivered to inboxes increased to 18.7 percent in H2 2003, a 1.7 percent increase over H1 2003.
This means it becomes increasingly important to choose a company focused on ensuring your emails are delivered. Ask the service provider to describe how its tool works with these filtering methods: Challenge Response, Trusted Sender, White/Black Lists, Honey Pot, IP/DNS Intelligence, HTML/Image Suppression, Message Volume, Complaint Data, Content Filtering. (Source: 2004 Jupiter Research—Forms of filtering)
3. CAN SPAM
Service providers are very aware of the CAN SPAM regulations and how to keep you compliant. Yet, each company offers different tools to make it easier. Be sure to ask questions such as how are opt outs handled? How can you ensure sales solicitations are CAN SPAM compliant? Is there an automated function to handle those recipients who choose click "reply" to unsubscribe?
4. Other Considerations
The following are basic features offered by most if not all email marketing service providers. Yet each company has its own spin and specialty. Be sure to ask for details and samples for each:
- Reporting
- List Management
- Viral Marketing
- Content Creation
- Training
- Pricing
Create Your Short List
In the age of SPAM, black lists, and privacy issues, you do get what you pay for. Without knowing your situation it is difficult to make a recommendation, but here are some commonly mentioned companies to get you started: Bigfoot, CheetahMail (an Experion company), Constant Contact, Digital Impact, EmailLabs, ExactTarget, Got Marketing, SilverPOP, Socketware, and VerticalResponse.
You can also consider purchasing the following white paper Marketing Strategies: Selecting an E-mail Marketing Service Provider
There are many email marketing solutions out there, but finding the right one can be a time consuming process especially for someone who is already strapped for time. Not to mention, once you have it in place, knowing what to do with the software once you have it is the next challenge.
If you have the email blues, Caro Consulting can help. Send us an email or give us a call at 678-471-4472 today.
|
|
