Overview
An email service provider (ESP) manages the creation, sending and tracking of marketing emails. We all think of email as effectively being ‘free’, but email marketing comes with a number of costs:
The cost of devising the campaign (strategy, designing, copywriting etc)
The cost of sending the email
The opportunity cost of your customers’ attention (you can only send so many unsolicited emails before your customers unsubscribe)
An ESP is typically responsible for cost #2, but a good one can help get the best value for your campaign, and tell you how successful it was. In particular, it can tell you who opened your emails, how much they read, what they clicked on and what the outcome of the campaign was.
Critical functions
Your ESP should reflect the size of your business. For small businesses, you need a range of pre-built, mobile-optimised templates to help you quickly prepare and send your email campaigns, while reflecting your brand. Larger businesses will need the ability to create custom emails based on brand identity guidelines and campaign priorities.
You may want to grant access to your account to your internal teams, or maybe to an external marketing consultant; if this is the case, you’ll want a system that allows multiple users on the same account, with sophisticated access rights (to prevent people making changes they shouldn’t, for example).
Many ESPs will allow you to analyse and segment your customers (e.g. based on their past responses to your emails, or other data you know about them). If you don’t have a dedicated CRM system, or even if you do, these tools can be really powerful in helping you to target customers with different campaigns.
Important integrations
Your ESP should integrate with:
Your website, ideally including a sign-up form that allows customers to add their email address to your database - these are valuable contacts because they have actively opted in to hear from you
Social media, for the same reason
Your CRM system, to ensure you maintain a single, complete view of every customer, and don’t lose customer data should you change ESP provider
Possibly, your POS system, if you email customers an offer code / voucher that needs to be redeemed at checkout
Users
Your customers (both signing up for emails, and receiving them) - they are the most important ‘user’!
Your marketing team, or maybe an external agency - to enable them to update templates or devise campaigns on your behalf
