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Home » Computers And Internet Articles » Advantages Of Esps

Advantages of ESP's

Normally, as a company moving into email marketing you have to make a choice. Do you choose to have your own in-house system or do you go with an ESP (Email Service Provider)?

There are advantages for each option, but you really have to look at your company's specific requirements to see which option is best suited to your requirements. This article will talk you through the advantages of choosing an ESP and dispel some of the apparent disadvantages of choosing an ESP.

Small companies

Reputation

As a small company starting out in email marketing you have to straight away consider a lot of factors to get underway. The "buzz" issue in email marketing at the moment is reputation. Now in all fairness, you may very well be in a good position to start off by having your own dedicated IP address to send out from. What the webmail providers like to see in email reputation is a consistent email history whilst steadily rising in size. If you are going to go down the route of an in-house system you will have to put a lot of time and man hours into making this work. You will be personally responsible for setting up and managing your own reputation. This means that you will have to learn the ins and outs of email deliverability. Proper maintenance of your feedback loops, measuring complaint rates and having the relevant authentication coding in place is all essential in making your campaign grow successfully. As you can see, this can end up being very labour intensive and unless you can dedicate a serious amount of time to setting up and maintaining your email reputation, you may find that your campaigns are no way near as good as they could be.

On the other hand, if you were to move onto an ESP, you would be moving onto an IP address that already had a well maintained sender reputation. ESP's are always concerned with the reputation of their sending IP's and meticulously check it to ensure that they can provide a high level of deliverability. All worthwhile ESP's will also give you guidance on how to set up the rest of the information you need and even provide you with links so you don't need to put in the man hours to establishing your campaigns reputation.

Customer Support

As a small company, you are more than likely not going to know the ins and outs of email marketing. There are several different factors that effect your marketing campaign that are unique to email marketing. When you first start out, this can be somewhat of a daunting task bringing yourself up to date with all of this. With any good ESP though, you should receive a high level of customer support. I know that we personally offer to assist our customers in setting up a campaign which exceeds email marketing best practices to ensure that they can get a good level of open rates whilst also offer advice on how to healthily grow their mailing list.

Large Companies

Reputation

So as a large company you're in a completely different situation to a small company when it comes to choosing between a dedicated IP and an ESP. The question that you have to ask yourself is - Does your campaign have time to wait whilst you slowly build up your campaigns reputation? Hotmail recommends that on a ne IP address with no previous mailing history that no more than 5000 emails are sent from it a day. If you send more than this, you will risk an email throttle which will severely damage your deliverability.

With ESP's, you're moving your campaign onto an IP that already has an existing emailing reputation that should have been looked after by the provider. This means it will be consistent and without high complaint rates and therefore you will be able to start sending high frequencies of emails automatically. There is always this doubt cast by people in the email marketing community that when a company is on a shared IP with other companies, you have the worry of one of the companies letting the whole IP down by sending dodgy emails and getting the reputation of the IP damaged. What they don't seem to remember is that the ESP's themselves don't want this to happen and if you're signed up to a decent ESP you should know that they will monitor each customers emailing activity. If the ESP doesn't actually do this then they will lose their decent customers which will adversely effect the ESP's personal growth and success. This of course would be against an ESP's best interest. We're not just here to take your money and leave you to it!

Customer Support

You may or may not know this but the ROI on email marketing has decreased over the past couple of years (see article here). This of course has several factors that effect it; the introduction of Bacn could possibly be one of the biggest factors in this by watering down results. The other major factor is that email marketing is getting very popular and more and more companies are starting their own campaigns. This of course means that your campaign is going into the recipients inboxes with a lot of other emails; each one vying to be opened AND actually read. This means your campaign has to stand out from your competitors. Not only that but the email marketing world is changing rapidly. It wasn't long ago that the main issue in the email marketing world was wording and html to text ratios, now it's reputation and deliverability, and undoubtedly it'll be something else in a couple of months. Unless your company has a dedicated member of staff to email marketing there is a good chance that you will slip behind the times and end up having an ineffectual campaign. ESP's are only interested in Email Marketing and dedicate their whole day to reading about (*and writing about*) Email Marketing.

And here is another random article you might be interested in...

2 Pieces To The Puzzle Of Organizational Change

Kurt Lewin, the consummate applied social scientist, is responsible for giving us three of the ten concepts that support effective OC practice: Forcefield Analysis, The Three-Stage Model of Change, and the Action Research Model. I will cover the first two concepts in this article

Lewin's first concept, and practice tool, is called Forcefield Analysis. Lewin believed every organizational situation, no matter how dysfunctional, benefits someone. I have found this concept and tool to be very effective in Organizational Change practice.

Lewin believed the status quo is a result of driving forces and resisting forces. Driving forces are pushing or "driving" for change. Resisting forces exist because some parties benefit from the current situation, or status quo. Thus, the status quo is the result of the strengths of the two opposing forces.

In practice, Lewin recommended working to reduce the resisting forces, instead of increasing the driving forces. He believed simply increasing the driving forces would result in an escalation in the resisting forces against the change. The parties resisting change (supporting the status quo) are usually highly motivated.

Another concept closely associated with Forcefield Analysis is what Lewin called the Three-Step Model of Change. He believed change required three steps: unfreezing the current situation, moving, and then refreezing the new situation (a new status quo). At first glance, this may appear to be obvious and simplistic. But the steps are very important.

The OC consultant must first help the organization to see the dysfunctionality (ineffectiveness) of the current situation. Remember, we are dealing with some organizational members who benefit from the current status quo.

To move the organization or the unit (to change behavior) requires a planned intervention. This will be a time of insecurity and fear for many organizational members. Fortunately, there are many structured interventions available to OC consultants. I cover interventions in Part II of my book, "Strategic Organizational Change."

In step three, Lewin said we must "refreeze" the situation. In practice, I have found this step to be essential. In order to get the change to hold, there must be a supportive environment for the change. This means management must commit resources and reward desired behaviors; otherwise, the organizational members will slip back into their old, comfortable ways of doing things.

Anthony Buono has correctly added, "There is a significant difference between dealing with the type of episodic, discontinuous change that Lewin referred to in 1947, when he created this model (dealing, in essence, with organizational inertia), and the type of ongoing, overlapping, continuous change that is happening today." I expound on Professor Buono's comments in my chapter on Leading Change.