How to Pick the Best Email Service Provider for Your Business: A Comprehensive Guide
How an ESP works for you
To market your business via email, it isn’t enough to just have a platform that allows you to send them. ESPs offer tools and features that make the email marketing process more efficient, such as templates, planning tools, analytics, troubleshooting, and more. They make it easier for you to put together emails of any nature, and they guarantee that these emails reach your recipient’s inboxes. An ESP provides an avenue to make the whole email marketing process more productive for you.
All you need to do is find the platform that is best suited to the needs
of your brand!
What makes for a good ESP?
1. GDPR compliance
2. Good deliverability rates
Email deliverability describes the rate at which the emails you send successfully reach your subscribers’ inboxes. It is affected by several factors such as sending frequency, sender reputation, and how recipients engage with your content. Poor deliverability means that emails fail to reach intended inboxes, bouncing more often instead. The role of your ESP is to monitor its customers’ sending behaviors, weeding out the poor senders. Poor senders develop bad sending reputations by accumulating spam complaints, blocks, and low engagement from recipients. A good ESP’s customers collectively maintain good sending reputations, which translates to higher deliverability rates. Investigate the deliverability rates for an ESP before making your choice!
3. Detailed analytics
An effective ESP doesn’t just give you the means to successfully send marketing emails: it also gives you a way to track how well your emails perform over time. Effective ESPs provide analytics features that track open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, spam complaint rates, and even unsubscribe rates. Access to this data allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your email campaigns. With this knowledge, you can better adjust the nature and content of your messages to get the best possible engagement rates out of your subscriber lists.
4. Ease of integration into CMS and CRM platforms
If your business operates online, a Content Management System (CMS) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application is essential. Any email platform is instantly much easier to use when it merges well with existing CMS or CRM software. CMSs like WordPress, Squarespace, Joomla, and more allow you to monitor prospects’ online activity within your digital space while effectively delivering content to them. CRM apps like Monday, Zoho, Zendesk, and more make it easy to streamline your services to clients, effectively building good customer relationships. An effective ESP integrates well with these platforms, allowing you to send emails from them without necessarily switching between applications to do so. It is a convenience that saves you a lot of time and energy. Where possible, try out demos from ESPs to see how well they integrate with your CMS or CRM applications. The easier it is to use, the better!
5. Accessible customer support
It is common for there to be problems that arise when using your ESP’s services. Campaigns won’t always go according to plan, and using certain features and tools could become challenging. In situations like these, it is essential to have access to support from your ESP. Observe how easy it is to contact customer support, speak to someone on the phone or online. Check to see if there are resources online on your ESP’s website that help you troubleshoot issues or solve commonly occurring problems. An accessible support system makes using an email platform so much easier.
Important considerations to make before selecting an ESP
When choosing the best ESP to run your email marketing campaigns, it’s not enough to assess the platforms available to you. It is equally important to look inward, to figure out the needs and capabilities of your business. Self-analysis helps you narrow down your list of choices, helping you choose an ESP that’s competent without draining your resources. Here are some questions you can ask to help analyze your business and how well it will work with any ESP.
What is your budget?
How much money are you willing to spend on email marketing? You can determine this by looking at the number of emails you send as a business and how much your company spends on marketing, in general, every month. Different ESPs have different pricing models, and they charge variously for the services and features they offer. Look through their pricing specifics and plans, and see if your marketing budget can handle them. A good service shouldn’t cost you more than your business can manage.
What is the purpose of your emails?
Perhaps you wish to use your email platform to launch or promote new products or services. Maybe you want to generate leads with your content. It could even be that you wish to build a relationship with your subscriber base by regularly sending newsletters to keep them updated on topics that may interest them. Understanding the goals of the emails you want to send makes it easier to find an ESP platform with the features that make it convenient for you to achieve them. Some offer templates that make creating certain types of emails more efficient. Others offer features that allow for creative customization. Others have room for scalability, for when you choose to increase the number of emails you send over time. Not all ESPs will be the right fit for your emailing goals, but some may align well with your sending objectives.
How many emails do you intend to send?
The answer to this question relies on the size and nature of your business. Some ESPs offer pricing depending on the number of emails sent every month. A small company may generally send a few emails each week since it most likely has a smaller subscriber base. If yours is the kind of business that has ever-changing offers, regular promotions, or great content often, then you should be looking at sending more emails throughout the week. The number of emails you send is a simple way to determine which ESP platform to use.
How many subscribers do you have?
ESPs offer different pricing options depending on the number of contacts collected on your mailing list. Some of them model their pricing plans specifically around the number of subscribers you have. It makes your marketing strategy and budgeting easier if a plan suits the size of your already existing subscriber base. And when your list grows, there should always be an option to upgrade your existing plan!
What features do you truly need?
It is easy to be distracted by many attractive elements and characteristics that most ESP platforms offer. However, it is wiser to determine your most required features based on the needs of your email marketing strategy. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to figure out the most necessary features.
- Do you want ready-made email templates to save on time, or do you prefer the ability to customize your messages?
- Would you like to automate most of the sending process, or are you happy handling it manually?
- How important are analytics to your campaigns in the long run?
- Do you need help with scheduling and planning your email campaigns?
Depending on your email strategy, it should be easy to narrow down which features are most important to you and straightforward to find which ESP offers them.
With so many choices out there, finding a good ESP for your business needs may seem hard, but it doesn’t have to be! By learning about how an ideal ESP should behave and work for you, you can find the best platforms on the market. By asking yourself what objectives your email marketing strategy needs to accomplish and what features you need to achieve your goals, you can find the ESP that is the right fit for your business. From there, you set off on the path to effective email marketing, investing in an ESP that will lead your business to eventual long-term growth.
