Now that you’ve gone through the Request For Proposal (RFP) process with a few different Email Service Providers (ESP), you should have lots of information regarding the features of each. The next step is to examine the features of each and determine which one most meets your business needs. Each will obviously have its own strengths and weaknesses, so perform due diligence to find the one that caters your email marketing goals. Below are just a few of the features you will want to research with any ESP.
Dynamic Content
Since email marketing is growing more and more difficult, one popular trend is to personalize the email through dynamic content. If you plan to incorporate dynamic content into your email marketing stream, it is very important to have an Email Service Provider that can easily handle it. Be sure that you are comfortable with the process of uploading, implementing and reporting on any email campaigns you plan on sending.
Segmentation
Another common functionality that you will likely use on a daily basis segmentation. Since targeting emails by specific audience is another popular trend in email marketing, you should be sure that your ESP could easily segment your email list by any criteria you deem necessary. The process of segmenting your email list via the Email Service Provider should be user-friendly and able to be completed quickly.
Randomization
Anyone who uses segmentation in their email marketing strategy understands that there is a strong need to have control groups of customers. If this is the case for you, it would be worth your while to see if your new Email Service Provider has the ability to create random segments from the subscribers in your email list. If so, this feature can greatly reduce the amount of work you require from your database team, as well as improve your overall testing functionality.
Permissions
If you work in a business where there are multiple brands under a single organization, you might need your ESP to provide a way to separate each one. It’s also possible that you will have different team members working on different parts of your email marketing stream, so you’ll need a system that can handle a number of logins for separate users.
Reporting
The need for instant and accurate reports is crucial to email marketing. Since some testing decisions are made on the fly, you should research each ESP’s ability to timely report email statistics. Also take a look at the pre-fabrication reports available in the system. Most reports will include total and unique counts of sent, delivered, failed, opens and clicks as well as the corresponding rates. You might also find trending reports, email statistics by ISP or other engagement reports. If you are in need of something other than what is offered out-of-the-box, make sure you negotiate any custom report creation into the contract.
Data Tables & Your Email List
In addition to analyzing all of the features of your new Email Service Provider, you will have to decide how to handle the transfer of your data. As with any business, the information contained in your email list is sensitive and confidential. So it is important to make sure that your new ESP is compliant with your policies and can has the proper systems to handle your data.
You may choose from a number of different methods of making your data available to an Email Service Provider for mailing. Some ESPs can create a database of your information in their own system while others can simply dial in and connect to an external data source. Look into your unique business needs and determine which option(s) are most suitable to you. Be sure to consider such things as system speeds, internal resources and around-the-clock support. If you are not sure how to set up your data tables, you should be able to manually import data lists into the system.
Depending on your business type, it is also likely that you have numerous rows of data, with many fields of data available for every row, so it is important to make sure that your ESP is able to accommodate data tables of any size. They should have functionality available to quickly and easily query these tables and return data sets that may be used in your mailing campaigns. In addition, you should be sure that the processing time for mailings is not affected by the size of your email campaign. Multiple fields of data, dynamic content and segmentation in a mailing can significantly increase processing time, so choose an Email Service Provider that has systems and resources available to handle them.
Switching to a New IP(s)
If you switch your email marketing to a new Email Service Provider, you will most likely need to start using a new set of IP addresses. This can be a major interruption in your email marketing stream if are currently using an ESP since usually they are ‘rented’ from the ESP and are not owned by you. This means you cannot take them with you to the new ESP and will have to start fresh. The good news is that you now have the opportunity to set up your new email stream with as many IP addresses as your business needs.
It is normal to have several different mailing IPs to service your different email streams. Since different types of messages have different goals and delivery rates, set up as many as you need to get your most important messages delivered properly.
Welcome/Sign Up Message
– It is recommended to put your Welcome email on its own IP address since it is usually the first email received by your customers. This IP is likely to not have poor delivery rates because it receives all of the hard bounces from new customers inputting their email addresses incorrectly.
Transactional Messages
– It is very important to have all transactional messages such as order confirmations and shipping notices delivered to your customers. Since the number of this type of email sent is fewer than most of your other email streams, it can be helpful to create a separate IP for them. The delivery rates should remain high since you will experience very few or no bounces or complaints from these emails.
Marketing Messages
– These emails should also be sent from their own IP. Depending on your email marketing practices, you could generate lots of complaints that could affect how your emails are delivered.
When switching to new mailing IPs, another process to take into account is the warm up period. To ensure you have good delivery of your emails, you must make sure that your IP addresses have a reputation to send the amount of email you intend through them. This means that you will have to warm up your IP addresses and prove to the different Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that you are not spammers.
During the warm up period, you should plan to send emails that aren’t necessarily important to your email stream. They should be fairly generic and not marketing in nature, since it is likely that your initial email sends will not have high delivery rates. Examples could be surveys, change of address emails and general communications. You’ll first start off sending emails in smaller quantities, then gradually increasing them until your IP is warmed up enough to send your usual volume of emails.
By the time you’ve completed all of these steps, you should have a new Email Service Provider that is fully prepared to send your email. Hopefully you’ve chosen wisely and now have a new partner that is dynamic, advanced and able to move your email marketing to the next level.
