Tips to Select the Right Email Service Provider

No business can survive without a robust communication platform. Email has emerged as the most powerful medium for communications related to business operations as well as marketing.

Right Email Service Provider has ability to provide detailed analytics in terms of success of email marketing campaigns. There is a plethora of details that can help assess the success of such campaigns including link click-through rates, delivery success rates, and email-read rates just to name a few. It is also possible to know individuals that have performed any of these actions.

Analytics and reporting are vital aspects of trusted email service provider. In order to understand the key aspects of choosing the right ESP, we need to identify significant attributes of a perfect solution provider that can guarantee a successful email campaign for boosting your business revenues.

Process of selecting Email Service Provider

There could be multiple reasons for a business to look for an email marketing platform such as growing need to become competitive, planning a substantial business growth, or a major shift in the marketing strategies. In many cases companies outgrow their in-house capabilities and feel the need to outsource marketing functionalities such as email marketing campaigns.

Before searching for an efficient ESP, you need to assess objectives as well as goals since these are ultimately going to decide the nature of email solutions you will require for accomplishment of your marketing aspirations.

Importance of sophisticated and future-ready platform

Internet of Things and Big Data are two significant factors that are driving most of the decisions related to enterprise IT infrastructure planning. Similarly, you need understand importance of huge volumes of customer data that is available with you designing optimized email marketing plans.

There are multiple aspects of email campaigns including trigger based sends, cross channel, and mobile marketing that can influence selection of the proper email platform. You need to confirm that the Email Service Provider is backed by expertise and experience in this domain.

If you know your needs for today and tomorrow in terms of strategies and technologies that would be required to run sophisticated email campaigns. Your service provider has to be technologically well equipped to meet challenges of tomorrow’s marketing strategies.

Businesses need to find ESPs that have potential to support their growth plans in future. In short, you ESP should be capable of growing with you.

If you have made a decision to implement an email campaign, then you need to find the right Email Service Provider. There are few criteria to be considered while selecting the right email host as mentioned ahead in this article.

Availability of private IP addresses

Always ask for a private IP address rather than compromising with a shared IP address for sending mails that are part of your email campaign. You need to note that a shared IP address would result in spam complaints that could have been already registered against some other client. Such complaints are bound to affect effectiveness of your campaign due to blacklisting of your shared IP address. Process of removal of your IP address from the blacklist is highly complex and time consuming. Hence it is advisable to get a private IP address from your ISP.

Budgetary concerns

While there is nothing wrong to expect an array of features from your Email Service Provider, you need to make a list of the most important features that are required to support your plans. This will help you find the proper plan that can be easily accommodated within the available budget.

Reputation of ESP

While searching for the Email Service Provider, you need to remember that your association with provider is going to be a long term affair. For this reason you must avoid getting trapped with fly by night operators. It is recommended to check reputation of the service providers by getting referrals or by reading reviews including positive as well as negative ones. Ideal ESP should have robust association with major providers including Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google to name a few. This will also make sure that your mails are not marked as Spam.

It is also possible to confirm reputation of the provider by knowing the length of service. ESP with a long track record is usually supposed to be a trustworthy provider.

Credibility

It is always preferable to send emails to individuals who have signed up with you for receiving emails including news-letters and other informative material. This is the most ethical way of building contact lists rather than piling up huge number of email addresses that may brand your mails as Spam since most of the recipients would not be expecting such mails. A genuine list of recipients improves delivery rate and protects your IP from being branded as Spam. This underlines importance of the opt-in process.

Robust infrastructure

Established Email Service Providers are backed by state of the art infrastructure that has multiple options of high-speed and secure internet connections to maintain unrestricted availability under any circumstances.

Conclusion

An Email Service Provider or ESP has the potential to transform an organization’s communication capabilities by streamlining business communications and improving ‘customer connect’ for better conversions with help of effective email marketing campaigns.