Decoding The Perfect Match: Finding Your ESP
What is the “best” ESP on the market?
One approach to finding the answer is by referring to industry analysts’ quadrants, waves, or the Litmus email service provider (ESP) market report. However, if I’m writing a blog about this topic — and you are reading it — the answer is certainly not as simple as we all thought it would be in 2023, 10 years after Salesforce acquired ExactTarget and Adobe acquired Neolane.
The email delivery tool remains the most frequently switched technology in a customer experience (CX) technology stack. With more than 20% of organizations replacing their email delivery tools, it’s no wonder I regularly receive requests for recommendations. Everybody owns at least one platform to send marketing emails, but nobody seems satisfied with their solution.
Where many anticipate that AI/Generative AI has just reached its Plateau of Inflated Expectations, ESP technology reached its Plateau of Productivity a long time ago.
There has been limited innovation in the email marketing space. A few vendors joined the space with email delivery capabilities, but finding the “best” ESP is a challenging endeavor.
Unveiling the Four Essential Components to Find the Right ESP
If there is no such thing as “best” ESP, there is an opportunity to find the “right” ESP for your business!
First and foremost, conduct an audit of the situation: determine the size of your organization supporting CX activities, the size of the team using your tech stack, the role of individuals and other relevant factors.
Looking for an ESP rarely is just about the email delivery capability. When it comes to evaluating your options, consider addressing four core components:
- Audiences: Ability to build audiences, gain insights and leverage them in customer experiences.
- Orchestration: Ability to orchestrate experiences across all interaction channels between the brand and the customer.
- Content: Ability to create the experience which will be delivered to the customer.
- Delivery: Ability to push the content on the desired channel. In the case of an ESP, we are focusing on email delivery.
Audiences are at the heart of this triangle encompassing the core components. After all, you should remember that technology decisions should serve your organization to meet or exceed customer expectations.
Some organizations may seek to obtain all these elements from a single vendor or technology, but it is common for enterprise organizations to evaluate these needs individually to compose their stack.
Component Maturity: Evaluating Each to Meet your Goals
It undoubtedly adds complexity seeing that multiple categories of technology have overlapping capabilities.
However, the maturity of your organization will often guide you in determining where to focus when selecting tools for each of the four components.
Quick description of the technology covered in the following section:
- Email Services Provider (ESP): tool typically focused on solely email marketing and not offering capabilities for any other channel.
- Marketing Automation Platform (MAP): tool also known under different names such as Multichannel Campaign Management (MCCM), which supports marketing needs on a few owned channels such as email, direct mail, mobile.
- Customer Data Platform (CDP): tool usually used to create or access a single view of the customer and integrate directly with delivery channels, such as an ESP or MAP.
- Content Management System (CMS): tool focused on content creation and management for different channels such as web and email. To simplify this article, we are also associating email content creation tools directly into this CMS category.
Audiences
Note: We are considering the maturity options where marketers are able to execute the audience segmentation themselves. A common scenario for enterprise organizations is to rely on marketing operation teams via SQL audience definition. While this may provide access to more customer data (more granular audience definition), lack of agility and slow time to market are often witnessed in these scenarios.
Few evaluation criteria suggested:
- Deployment: does the data need to be copied into the business application to create segments or can it be integrated directly with a data warehouse of choice?
- Scale: can the tool access any historical customer data information?
- UI: how easy is it for a business user to create audiences and discover new insights on the customer data?
Orchestration
Few evaluation criteria suggested:
- Deployment: does the data need to be copied into the business application to orchestrate or can it be integrated directly with a data warehouse of choice?
- Scale: can the tool access any historical customer data information?
- Integration: can the tool integrate with delivery channels of choice? Can it integrate with more than just marketing channels?
Content
Few evaluation criteria suggested:
- Content creation: does the tool offer content creation and content edition capabilities without coding skills required?
- Assets: can the tool integrate with the Digital Asset Management (DAM) of choice?
- Integration: can the tool easily integrate with delivery channels, such as my ESP for email?
Delivery
Few evaluation criteria suggested:
- Scale: can it provide send throughput levels (# emails sent per hour) and volumes (total number of emails pushed in a campaign) required for my business?
- Deliverability: what are the tools and support provided to ensure best deliverability results
- Testing: how can emails be tested prior to being sent to customers?
Additional Considerations for the Evaluation
While the four components above will help with the selection strategy, I often see additional considerations coming into the evaluation process, among them:
Deliverability is the practice of ensuring marketing emails reach customer’s inboxes. While the first rule is to refrain from purchasing email lists for marketing communications, there can be complexity surrounding the email delivery mechanism. Switching ESP systems for enterprise organizations often involves changing IP addresses from which emails are sent, and warming up new IPs requires planning and effort.
Pricing is always a key criterion in any technology selection, particularly when expenses are closely scrutinized. Historically, ESP solutions were charged on a CPM basis. However, some vendors have taken a different approach by charging based on the number of targetable customers, giving marketers complete freedom in determining the frequency of communications to send.
Reporting to analyze the campaign performance and eventually adjust the strategy. Most ESPs and MAPs will provide basic standard reporting capabilities. However, enterprise organizations often prefer to export campaign data into a dedicated BI tool, making this a less critical point of the evaluation process.
CX Stack for Email Delivery with ActionIQ
Via its CX Hub, ActionIQ provides a no-code interface for business users to build audiences as wide or deep as necessary to support CX needs within an organization. ActionIQ also provides an advanced orchestration layer used by 75% of ActionIQ’s clients.
That offering is often combined with an ESP or MAP which will serve as content preparation and email delivery in most cases.
However, most mature organizations have dedicated teams using a CMS for content creation which are directly integrated with the selected email delivery platform.
Learn more by reaching out to ActionIQ directly.
Find the Perfect Match for Your CX Needs
All-in-one, individual solutions and any combination in between is possible. The most important is to identify your need and prepare for the future where agility and time to market are often key to growing revenue.
Despite the lack of recent innovation in the ESP space, selecting an ESP is never just about email delivery. It should start with the customer in mind at the center, and then evaluate your approach around that customer.
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