What's the BEST Email Marketing Service?
Email marketing continues to be the mainstay of most online marketing programs. It's easy, fast, and inexpensive to send out an email to your customers and the metrics on open and click through rates make the tactic very quantifiable. So what's the best email marketing tool out there?
Drumroll...and unfortunately the answer is the ever vague "it depends". I really do encourage everyone to do a careful analysis of the many email marketing tools available to determine what service is best for your specific organization. Competition among email marketing services is fierce not only on price, but also on features and functionality. Your decision should not be based on price alone. I recommend doing a weighted scorecard analysis before making a decision. A weighted scorecard takes some of the emotional factor out of choosing an application and helps you focus on the issues that really matter the most to you and your company. Here's how to do it:
First, make a list of the issues and features that are important to you in an email marketing tool. While price is one issue; other issues could include: ease of use; ability to personalize emails; list management capabilities; reporting capability; creative options; social media integration; support/training; and more. Try to keep your list to 7-10 things that really matter to you. Once you've got that, step two is to assign a percentage weight to each of these issues. The total should equal 100%. This will help you focus on the features that are really the most important to your organization. So for one retailer, price may be very important and have a percentage weight of 50%. For another, price is important but maybe only 20% of the picture.
Now you are ready to score your short list of potential email marketing services. As you review each marketing service within each of the categories, give it a score of 1-4. Then, multiply each score by the weight you've given to that feature to get your weighted score. Once you've scored each service in each of the categories, add up the totals. The service with the highest total score is the one that best meets your stated criteria!
Following is an example of a scorecard for a fictitious "ABC Email Marketing Service":
As your email list grows, and you become more comfortable with email marketing, you want to be sure you have a service that gives you the most flexibility to customize campaigns and take advantage of the latest features. While there are hundreds of email marketing services to choose from, keep in mind that there are generally three tiers of providers. The first tier is designed for small businesses and generally offer free or low-cost pricing. Examples of these providers are Constant Contact, Mail Chimp and iContact. The middle-tier providers offer more functionality including more robust segmentation, personalization and automated email campaigns. Examples of these providers include Bronto, ExactTarget and Lyris. One service unique to our industry is SnapRetail which, among its features are a library of home accent and gift manufacturer images, as well as email templates designed specifically for retailers. At the top tier, you will find email marketing services such as Silverpop, BlueHornet and CheetahMail. These providers offer very robust customization and analysis, but you'll need to be doing a significant amount of email marketing to even qualify for their service.
What features and functionality are important to you in doing email marketing, and which email marketing service do you like the best?
Tim commented:
Nice article, I have been using Captivate Mail for my email marketing software. They are really good.
Penny Schneck commented:
All excellent points! Thanks for contributing to this conversation!
Penny Schneck commented:
All excellent points! Thanks for contributing to this conversation!
michael commented:
There is no doubt that email marketing is here to stay. It is even more powerful when proper follow up is implemented!! Over at used15passengervan.com, we used email marketing often.
Chris Communicator Corp commented:
This has been touched on by other people, but it's definitely worth reinforcing the point that any decisions about potential email partners should be based on both support and technology.
Once you get to a certain level, many of the email solutions out there offer very similar functionality. From a technical perspective the things that really make a different are the way thet platform allows you to host, manage and access your data, and also the usability of the solution. Data is the driving force behind all email programs so you need to go with something that offers relational data capabilities to allow you to mirror any data structures you have in your own systems within the email tool, as opposed to a platform that has a single table data structure. As for usability, I think that one is quite self-explanatory but there are some really terrible products out there in terms of ease of use. I'd probably also throw robustness / scalability / security in there too as some other factors to consider...
In addition to the technology, a good email partner should provide you with the right level of support to allow you to get the most out of the system. Technical support (i.e. fixing it when you can't make it work) should be a given, but the real value comes from strategic support - identifyng your objectives, helping you implement new strategies to achieve your objectives and providing ongoing analysis and input on best practice to maximise ROI. Your email provider should focus on the value of your email program rather on the volume of messages you send.
If somebody is charging you on a 'cost per message' basis then they're probably going to try to sell you more emails regardless of your ROI. A good email partner will advise you to send fewer emails if they believe it will make you more money
Penny Schneck commented:
Thanks for these additional comments. All of these options and criteria for evaluating an email service are important. The criteria I listed are just a few examples. You must decide what is most important for your company and weight that importance. Thus, there is not one "best" email service that is right for everyone.
NOTaSpammer commented:
Disclaimer - I am a Product Manager for an ESP.
Penny - you have provided a great basic matrix to get small businesses thinking about their ESPs.
I second the notion that price is not everything and should be one of many considerations.
Additions to the scorecard could include variables such as:
1. "Inboxing" (ability to get the message delivered) which may or may not show up on reports but is no guarantee that people actually open the email (5% of score)
2. Customer references from a similar business segment (2% of score)
3. Andy's suggestion of Customer Service (critical for many time and cost-conscience businesses) (5% of score).
The last and arguably most important: Value to the business! Can the business realize a high return on investment (ROI) from the partnership with the ESP.
Please check out www.whichesp.com to help refine your selection.
Mac McIntosh commented:
How about marketing automation? Using if/and/or/then email to nurture prospects and customers works much better than batch-and-blast, one-size-fits-all email.
Mac McIntosh commented:
How about marketing automation? Using if/and/or/then email to nurture prospects and customers works much better than batch-and-blast, one-size-fits-all email.
Andy from Benchmark Email commented:
Another factor that you'll want to consider that didn't make your scorecard is customer support. Yes, those things you have are all integral parts of email marketing, but everyone enters the email marketing realm at a different experience levels. Having someone there to help you along can be equally as important to your success.
Penny Schneck commented:
Thanks for adding your ideas to this blog! Along the same lines that you mentioned, another good place to post upsale messages is in transaction emails. If you client orders online, you are likely sending an email confirming the order. This is a great opportunity to add a tactful message with an additional opportunity to purchase.
REH commented:
There's no doubt that email marketing works BUT in addition to the traditional email marketing (mass email) one should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send from our corporate email addresses every day. I represent a company that has developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.
The basic idea behind WRAPmail is to utilize the facts that all businesses have websites and employees that send emails every day. These emails can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research. WRAPmail is available for free at www.wrapmail.com
WRAPmail also helps search for missing children with every email sent by incorporating an optional RSS feed from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children
