E-mail marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools available
today. It's easy, affordable, direct, actionable and highly effective.
According to surveys, customers and prospects would prefer to hear
from you via e-mail than any other way. And when you add e-mail
to your marketing mix, you spend less time, money and resources
than with traditional marketing vehicles (for example, direct mail
or print advertising). Your time-sensitive information is sent in
minutes, not days or weeks, and you can see the results of your
efforts instantly.
E-mail marketing also enables you to proactively communicate with
existing prospects and customers instead of passively waiting for
them to return to your website, visit your store or office, or call
you on the phone.
The key to turning your first-time customers into repeat customers
is by building relationships. Even though email is faceless, it
can still greatly assist you in building a solid relationship with
your customer base. Tough competition will attempt to draw your
customer base away by undercutting your costs and doing whatever
possible to switch your customers over. The best way to prevent
your customers from jumping ship is to build a relationship with
them over time. What better way to do this than to provide useful
information right to their email inbox? Providing helpful hints
or coupons in an email message is a great way for recipients to
want to continue receiving your email, and coupons will motivate
action on the part of the consumer, providing you a way to instantly
obtain feedback on your campaign. The better providers of email
list management software offer open and click-through tracking,
giving your marketing department instant feedback on the e-mail’s
effectiveness
5 Good Reasons to Outsource Your Email Send
Building Relationships with ISPs
Recent research found false positives (opt-in mail filtered as
Spam) running as high as 19%, or nearly 1 in 5 emails sent. Getting
into the inbox is critical to your success with email and a good
ESP can help you accomplish this by having relationships with
ISPs, the 'gate keepers' of your recipients' inboxes.
Could you do this yourself in house? Maybe. You'd need at least
one person, dedicated full-time to the task that pro-actively
reaches out to the ISPs you are mailing to before there's a problem.
Even then, you may not succeed.
At a conference in Chicago, representatives from AOL and MSN confirmed
that they really don't have the personnel to build relationships
with every small mailer out there and prefer to work with ESPs
who represent multiple mailers.
2. Tracking and Reporting
Another big issue - without metrics like open rates and click-throughs,
it's hard to know which parts of your email campaign are working
and which could use some tweaking. Effective email marketing isn't
about the send - it's about the results of the send. And that means
tracking and reporting.
Some in house systems do offer tracking and reporting, many companies
don't use it. They cite resource limitations ("the tech folks
haven't have time to set it up"), unusable data ("we get
reports, but I'm not quite sure what's what"), cost ("adding
opens rate tracking would require an upgrade to our system")
or some combination.
But the bottom line is this: If you're serious about email marketing,
if you want to optimize your return on investment, you need to have
robust, reliable and timely tracking and reporting. In most cases,
using a good ESP is the easier way to get it.
3. Keeping up with the Technology
Asking a site visitor to take the next step is the 'call to action'.
This is the "contact us", "join our mailing list",
or "sign up today" option, which informs the site visitor
of the correct next step. Most people are grateful to be guided
through the process of evaluating a product or service, so if you
tell them that the next step is to sign up for a 30-day trial, many
of them will.
Email is constantly evolving. When the large ESPs starting tracking
open rates, I submitted a request to have our in-house system do
the same; "not technically possible" was their response.
I was a marketing person but at that moment I knew more about the
technology of tracking open rates than my technical team.
ESPs have to stay up on technology - it's their business, their
bread and butter. They are constantly looking for ways to improve
their service and provide additional value to their customers. It's
a competitive field. Few in-house technology teams have that kind
of motivation. And even those who do often find themselves understaffed
and over their heads very quickly. Small things, like an unsubscribe
link that goes bad, can cause big problems. For most organizations,
it's not worth the risk.
4. Managing Subscribes, Bounces and Unsubscribes
Some in-house systems handle this, but others require that you do
it manually. While it may not seem like much with a small list,
a larger list requires much more attention. And now, with CAN-SPAM,
not only do you have to remove people who unsubscribe, you have
to do so within 10 days.
Any outsource solution worth its salt will handle these things automatically.
In addition to saving you time, you'll get things your in-house
system probably didn't provide - like differentiation between types
of bounces, automatic removal after a certain number of bounces
and immediate unsubscribe to stay ahead of CAN-SPAM.
Another perk: double opt-in, the gold standard for permission-based
marketing, can be daunting to manage on your own but is usually
a breeze with an ESP. Why? Because they've got it down to a science
and you can take advantage of their learnings to optimize your confirmations.
5. Getting Sound Advice
Another benefit of working with an ESP is the advice they can provide.
Even if you don't pay for one-on-one consulting, most ESPs provide
education to their customers, ranging from optimizing your list
growth to avoiding spam filters to elements of good email design.
They see themselves as an ally whose goal is to help make you successful,
because if you're having success you'll maintain and perhaps expand
your email program. Few if any in-house solutions offer that - typically
it's a technical sale with a one-time fee. They may help your IT
folks set it up, but then you're on your own (especially where the
marketing side is concerned).
