Choosing An Email Service Provider: Some Useful Tips

Over on the E-Consultancy blog, Dela Quist offers some excellent tips to help you find the right email service provider:

• Go for the larger companies. Their servers are going to be more robust, they’re likely to have more staff, including a big ISP relations or reputation management team and have the ear of companies such as AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo!.
• In particular, ask how many people they have working on ISP relations and reputation management. Ask whether their reporting can give you a breakdown by domain so you can see which ISPs are causing you problems.
• For those that prefer it, there are some very good European ESPs to choose from, but don’t be afraid to work with an American company as they dominate the email delivery space. This truly is a global business and experienced companies of scale are often US-based.
• Establish how familiar they are with your needs. It makes sense to try to find out what percentage of their clients are of a similar industry, size and have similar needs to you. You can then select the provider with the most clients matching your scale and requirements.
• Don’t be seduced by functionality.Focus on the functionality you need now or in the very near future. What you’re really looking for is ease of use and interface speed. The delivery service you choose should have a user-friendly, intuitive interface that makes setting up and automating repetitive tasks straightforward.
• Support is also very important, particularly if you’re going for a self-service solution. So ask how quickly they turn around queries, whether they offer telephone support or just email.
• Email marketing is all about understanding how your customers are interacting with your communications. So the reporting interface is absolutely critical and there are significant differences between products. For example, not all technologies allow you to group your mailings by campaign. In some ways, it’s more important to look at the reporting interface than at deployment functionality. Good email marketing is a constant learning and feedback loop, which requires detailed reports.

Source: E-Consultancy.com

Comments

[Robin Houghton]

Thanks Tamara. Although as per one of the comments on this piece at econsultancy, I do think that putting 'go for the larger companies' as the first point is contentious. It depends very much who your clients are. Mine are all small businesses (with small lists) and it took me a while to find an ESP who was interested in providing a decent service to this sector of the market. (What they say they do and what they actually do are often quite different!) We have used Sign-up.To for some years now and they have done a better job on service, deliverability and reliability than much larger providers.

The other point about 'don't be afraid to go for a US company' can also be a problem. As a UK company serving mainly UK clients with mainly UK customers, we have had issues with US ESPs' unwillingness to consider the anti-spam legislation of any country other than the US. It's also important to us that clients' data is housed on UK servers.

[Tamara Gielen]

Hi Robin,

Those are very valid comments. Thanks for sharing!