Read this Guide to help you choose the right Email Marketing Supplier:

• Profiles of top suppliers
• Select the perfect partner for your Email Marketing Programme

::: Introduction :::

In the digital age, product and offer give way to content. On the internet we decide what we want to see and it just appears, it’s amazing for the user but extremely competitive for the content provider. So when a prospect or customer comes to your site and you have impressed them with your specialist knowledge what’s to say they’ll ever remember to come back even if they know it’s important to them? You have got to capture data and get them on an engagement cycle - this means you need an email marketing programme and there are many issues to consider.

Good Email Marketing structures your points of contact in a way manageable by you and attractive and digestible to your prospect and customer. Using an appropriate email strategy, process and software you are able to invest creative energy in single emails knowing it goes to a few hundred or a few thousand of your most important contacts. The really cool thing about email software is that you know precisely who is interested in what. It´s like using the power of web analytics but more, in that it's not just data in aggregate form. You get to know what is most interesting and to whom. It can be a potent tool in tandem with phone calls from your sales team or to segment your lists behaviourally for more targeted and effective points of contact.

Take a look at the following leading Email Service Provider - 'ESP' - and take them to task with your problems and challenges. A checklist is at the foot of this section that gives you a start.

Concep are at the forefront of B2B marketing, offering modern tools such as Concep campaigner - a leading interactive email marketing platform for business to business marketers. Click for more >>   Responsys, a leading global provider of on-demand marketing solutions, provides the industry's #1-ranked technology platform and award-winning services to help enterprises define, automate, and optimise multichannel marketing communications throughout the customer lifecycle. Click for more >>   Spring specialises in the delivery of digital content to both email and mobile environments, working with businesses, exhibition designers and visitor attractions making the most of communication opportunities . Click for more >>   MediaCo (uk) Ltd is uniquely-placed as a leading full-service Online Marketing Agency.  Providing email marketing since 1999, our services include; consultancy, creative, copywriting, broadcasting and management and reporting. Click for more >>   dotMailer® is the web-based email marketing system used by organisations across the UK. Its focus is on advanced recipient tracking mechanisms, providing far more feedback and accountability than comparable systems. Click for more >>   Connectpoint Direct was a pioneer of email marketing in the UK, and remains one of the country's most respected email marketing service providers.  Find out how we can help you! Click for more >>   Sign-Up.to provide self-service permission marketing solutions for small/medium businesses. Our easy to use, powerful tools and free support enable marketers to get the most from their email and mobile marketing. Click for more >>   eMarket2 provides a range of EMEA wide digital direct marketing services, coupled with database and multilingual telemarketing skills. eMarket2 have the know-how and experience to turn eMarketing technology into customers. Click for website>> | changing service provider | buying email marketing   Down2Earth is eMarket2's award winning eNewsletter, as voted by ClickZ.com, is an eMarketing resource from eMarket2, that empowers you to positively impact your email marketing efforts & leverage your digital communications. Click for more >>   The DMA Email Marketing Council responds to the needs of  the industry and DMA members by promoting best practice and supporting the development of research and marketing resources which underpin innovative and cost effective initiatives within the email marketing sector. Click for more >> || National Email Benchmarking Report   CommuniGator offer both a hosted solution and licensed software for SMEs. With direct integration to CRM solutions, CommuniGator enables sophisticated segmentation and personalisation to maximise the return on email marketing campaigns Click for more >>   CheetahMail enables its clients to send highly targeted and relevant e-mail campaigns, resulting in lower costs and greater customer retention. Clients include Barclays, Dixons, HMV, Norwich Union, Teletext and uSwitch.com Click for more >>

::: Some important points to consider when choosing an email supplier :::

Stick to the Law, watch out for companies that don’t stick to UK law i.e. the UK data protection act. There are certainly some cheaper US companies that are to be avoided.

• Do I want to pay a straight per unit cost or pay for an integrated package?
• How will it integrate with my other channels?
• How stand alone is it?
• What level of support is there?
• Do I need to pay for a dedicated account manager?
• Do I need a managed service or self service?

One of the most important things is a pedigree for understanding data, you can have great creative and great content but if the data’s not up to scratch and it goes to the wrong person then you won’t understand the results and it doesn’t count for anything.

Speak to existing customers, it may be that they are not willing to be talked to but you would think if they have had great experiences then they would wish to speak about it.

::: Research :::

Studies show that two most important factors when selecting an ESP, email service provider, are Reporting and Customer Service.

The biggest concerns for email marketers are ‘conversion’ rates, followed by ‘deliverability’ rates and ‘click rates’.

In terms of how the email channel is used:

• 78% of organisations state that the primary use is to drive traffic to a website,
• 72% also use the channel to communicate new offers
• 48% of respondents acknowledge that email is used to create brand awareness.

The emphasis placed on ‘reporting’ indicates an increasing interest from marketers in wanting to understand how customers interact with their email messages and, given how business-critical email has become to so many organisations, their desire to measure the effectiveness of each campaign. In addition, the fact that customer service is more important than functionality and price to so many customers may help demonstrate why cost per thousand for delivery has levelled off.

The majority of companies (78%) believe that email marketing budgets will increase with 63% of respondents stating that the increase will not come at the expense of other channels, suggesting a rise in confidence in the effectiveness of the medium and its ability to generate returns.

::: Check List :::

1) Consider the profile of your audience and what types of communication programs would enhance your business goals. Does your ESP vendor allow you to easily create and evolve a profile database structure that supports every possible profile attribute needed to communicate in a highly individualized, relevant way at all stages of your customer lifecycle?

2) Specifically, does your ESP allow you to create and add as many profile attributes of any data type (text, numeric, date) as needed? To work with any desired unique ID? To create a multi-table relational database structure?

3) Can your ESP vendor scale to send tens of millions of emails per month and support the efficient handling and tracking of responses generated from this outbound volume?

4) Does your ESP vendor support bi-directional data feeds to and from multiple sources? For example, can simultaneous data feeds from a corporate data warehouse, e-commerce system, web analytics vendor, and external data services firm be supported?

5) Does your ESP offer a Web services-based API that allows real-time data transfers and message triggering?

6) Does your ESP vendor allow you to assemble flexible and reusable targeting rules based on profile attributes, including date fields, as well as response behaviour to previous programs?

7) Does your ESP provide user-defined segmentation rules that allow you to understand your recipient audience and deliver strategic pieces of content in any message program?

8) Can programs be automated such that:

a. Sequenced message streams can be delivered on a scheduled basis,
b. Date-based programs can send to a dynamic list on a scheduled basis, or
c. Individual messages can be sent in response to certain life-cycle or business-cycle events?

9) Does your ESP provide wizards for building and assigning modular sets of rules to strategic locations in message content using “WSIWYG/Rich Text” and/or “HTML source” authoring tools?

10) Does your ESP allow you to preview and test all dynamic content combinations before a launch?

11) Does your ESP allow you to assemble content rules that involve table lookups to deliver highly targeted 1-to-t message content?

12) Does your ESP vendor enable you to launch A/B split tests?

13) Does your ESP vendor provide comparison and analysis reports for evaluating the success of certain content combinations?

14) Does your ESP vendor offer real-time reporting?

15) Are visual analysis results available to evaluate how each creative element generates response?

16) Are dashboard reports available to quickly understand program performance?

17) Does your ESP vendor provide a full suite of metrics for each campaign launch, including gross and inbox delivery rates, total and unique metrics for opens and clicks, revenue metrics, unsubscribe, spam complaints, link analysis, etc?

18) Does your ESP allow you to view campaign launch performance metrics sliced by domains, ISPs, and user-defined segmentations?

19) Does your ESP provide you access to all individual level event data for ad hoc analysis?

To feed into this dialogue between customer and supplier or if you would like to suggest a topic for a future buyers’ guide please write me an email (andyc@themarketingleaders.com).

I hope you have found this useful, wishing you every success with Email!

Andy Codd
::: Communications :::
THE marketing leaders ^TM

(Post-script) - in the UK as of Jan 07, you will need to add your company's registration and VAT number and the address at which your company is registered. Dont get caught out!.