13 Crucial Steps When Choosing an Email Service Provider For Your Email Marketing
While there are many good email service providers, you must choose the one that fits your needs.
Email Marketing is one of the most successful marketing channels out there — despite being one of the oldest digital marketing tools.
Today’s email marketing is sophisticated, data-driven, and often complex.
You need an email service provider (ESP) that can provide you with the right services and be the proper fit for your business.
Here are the criteria you should look for when selecting your email service provider.
13 Crucial Questions to Ask When Choosing an Email Service Provider For Your Email Marketing
1. How good is your ESP’s reputation & standing ISP?
This depends on how well-known the ESP is and how much compliant they are.
You may have an email list of 1000 people. However, an ESP with a poor reputation may send half of the emails to SPAM and ruin 50% of your efforts.
2. Does your Email service provider have segmentation capabilities?
Be it your blog or e-commerce site, you’d find that your subscribers are connecting with you for different reasons.
They might have different preferences in product categories or the topics you write about. You must keep that in mind while sending emails to not alienate the subscribers. For example, if someone subscribes to Nike to get shoe-related offers and only gets blog posts, will that person stay with the brand?
An Email Service Provider with segmentation capability allows you to group your subscribers based on the criteria you set.
3. Can it automate sending emails?
It’s unlikely that any top provider won’t have this capability.
The advanced ones will have built-in funnels that you can take help. For example, what happens when someone subscribes? Your welcome funnel will send an email to welcome them to the group.
4. Does the ESP come with built-in and customized email templates?
You might be an expert designer, but you may not know how an email should be designed for mobile and web devices.
A ready-made template will make your life significantly easier.
5. Can your Email Service Provider run A/B tests?
Each time you’re sending an email, you should be running experiments to understand what your consumers like more.
An A/B test allows you to test separate elements of your email so that you can gradually improve your open rates and CTR.
6. How good is your ESP’s analytics?
Google Analytics or Youtube Studios provide stellar analytics for creators.
However, not all platform is as good.
You need to track a series of metrics to understand if your emails are getting you closer to your objective. Check if the Email Service Provider has them.
7. Is the Email Service Provider CAN-SPAM compliant?
CAN-SPAM is the US law to ensure you are not sending unsolicited pornography or marketing to email users.
If your ESP is compliant, it’s a good indication that they are responsible and don’t want to get blacklisted.
8. How easy is it to integrate your ESP with CRM, CMS & E-commerce platforms?
You might not be selling anything today but that may change tomorrow.
It’s a lot of work changing an email service provider. So, it’s better to know beforehand if your provider can meet your potential needs.
9. Is the ESP offering strong security to keep your customers’ data secure?
This doesn’t need any explanation.
In today’s world, data leakage or hacking is always a possibility. If your customer’s data gets stolen, they are not going to blame your ESP but your brand.
10. How good is customer support?
Early on in your journey, you might need to depend on customer support quite a lot. However, most of the problems you’d face can also be solved using the static resources they’d provide.
However, when you start having a more complex & segmented list, you might run into situations where you’d need help. If your ESP isn’t responsive enough, you can lose money and goodwill.
11. Does your ESP come with a free trial?
Without a test drive, how would you know if the ESP can meet your needs?
Usually, ESPs offer a week or so of a free trial. Make sure to check out the platform in detail before you sign the dotted line.
12. How long is the contract with them?
Even after the trial, you might run into issues that can force you to switch to another vendor.
If you have a short contract with your provider, getting out will be easier.
You can think of the annual discounts later on when you are sure of them.
13. How expensive is the email service provider?
Email Service Provider is going to seem quite expensive in the beginning — because you won’t have any revenue coming from emails yet.
However, check what the potential ROI would be with your conservative estimates. While email usually provides strong returns on investment, every case is different.
Final Thoughts
Choosing an ESP is a decision that should be taken with care.
It also starts a recurring cost for yourself. Be extra sure before you sign up.
