We all agree that email is great. Now, let’s see how we can make a good thing better. As email evolves, it continues to rank number one among all channels for digital marketers. But how can you take your highest performing channel and make it work even harder for you by diversifying your email service providers?
Save marketing dollars through load-balancing.
Since your email service provider, or ESP, charges by volume of email sent, it makes sense to send all your emails from a single provider, right? Counterintuitively, no. While volume affects rates at a single provider, it’s important to remember that not all ESPs cost the same.
What type of emails generate the most volume for your company? When you take the time to match message types (promotional, cross/up-sell, transactional, password recovery) to ESPs based on features and strengths, it’s possible to save significant marketing dollars.
Generally, a company might use lower-cost ESPs to handle transactional emails, like receipts, order confirmations and password recovery messages. Such messages are delivered to your most highly engaged customers – folks who are expecting to hear from you.
Alternately, your leads should be nurtured by a more powerful ESP with smart features designed to drive engagement and build relationships.
Improve deliverability (and thus email profitability) by playing to your ESPs’ strengths.
Consider your ESPs’ strengths. When you strategically match ESPs’ strengths – such as high deliverability to distinct ISPs or expertise in specific vertical markets – to your needs, you’re optimizing micro-deliverability of your email program and improving your email profitability. Because strengths can fluctuate, make sure to keep an eye on performance of individual ESPs over time.
Cover your bases to prevent costly mistakes by practicing redundancy.
While ESP outages aren’t common, they can be costly. Timeliness is critical for new business campaigns as it is for customer communications. Working with multiple ESPs ensures you have a backup. What’s more, you’ll be able to compensate for a temporary drop in delivery and performance from one ESP with another if and when that happens.
And last but not least, remember to centralize your email data.
Now that you’re thinking about how implementing multiple ESPs can make your email programs more effective and efficient, don’t forget to tie your systems back together. Centralizing email data across multiple ESPs is the final and arguably most critical step in making sure your new, strategic email structure works as intended.
Maintaining a global database for email will improve your targeting efforts in email and display (I’m looking at you, Facebook Lead Ads, Google Customer Match and Linkedin Targeted Self-Service Ads), it makes CAN-SPAM compliance easy for your marketing teams and partners.