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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...

Small Business 101: Deadly Ignorance

American small business is again in transition. Many employees, now working from home, are no longer tied to a geographic office and the woes of commuting. This is a relatively new phenomenon with hints of explosive sector growth in the days ahead. As this turbulent economy has forced downsizing, offshore restructuring and closures in large companies, many new entrepreneurs have been born. These are people, who instead of tirelessly attempting to find new employment and possibly enduring the same fate as previously experienced, are now starting small businesses and enjoying the benefits and perils of self-employment.

There's an old story telling of an Admiral's decision to fight a battle against overwhelming odds. It seems that he was approaching the coast of an enemy land, with a larger naval force closing in from behind and a great army approaching from the land ahead. He prayed and then addressed his men. He announced that their battle weary forces would land on the beach ahead, dig in and prepare for the upcoming battle. There was no turning back and no other alternative. He ordered their ships burned after they landed. Their only choice was to fight to win or perish. They defeated their enemy because he eliminated any other escape route. They were fixed on the goal of survival and none other.

That is the same attitude we as entrepreneurs must take. We can not afford to be denied. We must grow and prosper or our business will surely perish. We must constantly be looking for ways to cost-effectively market our business and increase sales. We must control costs and have sufficient cash flow for daily operations. Each of us must be persistent, relentless and vigilant. As CEO, we are the manufacturer, the sales team, the marketing department, legal office, accounting office, human resources manager, IT manager, the webmaster and so on. We can't afford to be all these positions. Our job is to sell! We must locate cost effective resources to help us grow and protect our investment in our business.

The growth of the internet has changed our marketplace as well. Years ago, a small business owner decided upon a geographic chunk of the market and set up shop. Today, that shop is typically located in an office at the entrepreneur's home. The marketplace is now the world. The costs of marketing products and communicating worldwide are so low that almost anyone can take part in this revolution. Sophisticated voice mail, cell phones, email and effective ecommerce web sites now provide the illusion of size and grandeur for even the smallest home-based business. The end customer typically has no idea whether their supplier is local or across the world. He may be dressed in a shirt and tie or in his pajamas! All that typically matters is that the exchange of product and services is successfully made for a profit.

It is critically important for the small, home-based entrepreneur to be aware of resources available to her as she makes this great leap. Too many people leap prematurely into business only to fail because of poor planning and insufficient financial resources. Do not get caught in this trap. Don't quit your day job until you have enough cash on hand to pay the bills for at least a year into your new venture. Become aware of and develop the resources available to you. You want everything possible going for you as you make this leap of faith into the entrepreneurial world.

Here in South Carolina, we have the outstanding Women's Business Center (http://www.scwbc.org), a division of the SCMEP, South Carolina Manufacturers Extension Partnership (http://www.scmep.org), one of the best kept secrets available to businesses at all levels in our State. Other States have similar programs modeled after ours. These are incredible resources, partially funded by the State and private resources, available at little to no cost to entrepreneurs, with the purpose of aiding the successful growth of small business. Some additional national resources are:

There are also numerous magazines devoted to small business, home-based business, marketing, sales, accounting, etc... Get tuned in to these and other resources available to you. Read your industry publications to stay abreast of competition and other facets of your business interests.

A single legal issue, FACTA problem, accounting error or marketing miscue can put you out of business. In the case of FACTA, insufficient security or poor record-keeping these days could find you legally responsible for a single employee's identity fraud issue, which may end up being very costly. A single lawsuit or vendor dispute can shut you down. Many entrepreneurs are ignorant, ill-prepared and under-schooled with regard to these and other issues. Do not get caught in the deadly ignorance trap.

There is more opportunity available today than ever before for the wise entrepreneur. Get all you ducks in a row before you make the fateful leap into the new world marketplace. Be smart, learn all you can as quickly as possible and take action on your ideas. Like the Admiral, be determined to win in the face of what may appear to be overwhelming adversity.

Copyright 2005 Daniel Sitter