What is Email Marketing? How can i choose the right ESP?

I think the biggest factor most people need to understand about email marketing is that it is NOT a science. There is no such thing as 100% deliverability or some magic “Pixie Dust” that can be sprinkled on your servers to help you deliver your email creative into the recipient’s inbox. There are only “best practices” which I am going to lay out in this post. It is important to remember that all email is basically the same. So, the question is, what makes some email get delivered, some go into the spam/junk folder and other email get lost in space? The answer is pretty simple, reputation. Below are the most important factors in helping you determine how to choose the right ESP and understand the fundamentals of email marketing and how it should be handled.

This list is in order of importance:

1. IP Addresses: IP address reputation is the most important factor with any email marketing software or system. If, during your email campaigns, recipients click on the spam button or complain about the email they receive from you, this will hurt your “IP Reputation”. If enough people complain about your email or click on the spam button, this will cause your emails to either go to the junk folder or be rejected all together.

2. Email Data: Your email data or records have to be good quality. If you have co-registration or crappy data, don’t even waste your time. Sending emails to people who want to receive them is the only way to ensure that your IP Reputation stay’s in the good graces of the ISP’s. List cleaning is also a very important aspect of email marketing. If you send 100 emails and 10 of them are to email addresses that do not exist, most major ISP will block your email based solely on trying to deliver to invalid email addresses.

3. The ESP: The company that handles the backend of your system and maintains it on a daily basis is probably more important than the system itself, if it is a decent piece of software. Managing feedback loops, white listing requests, bounce processing, list hygiene, and system maintenance are only a few of the many items that need to be monitored and maintained in order to keep everything running smoothly. Finding a reputable and knowledgeable company is more difficult than it sounds.

4. Email Software: Obviously you need a quality software system to bring this all together, so I am going to list what I feel are the important factors in choosing an ESP software package, other than what I have listed above that relates to the company behind the software. Here is a list of features that are a must; IP rotation, subject line rotation, bounce processing, open/click/unsub tracking, 1-click unsubscribe processing, fully integrated reporting on a campaign and list level, global do not send lists for the entire system (ie. Do not send emails to abuse@ or @spam.com), easy suppression file uploading, master global unsubscribe importation, time/date scheduling of campaign deployments, multiple users and privileges, spam scoring for creative’s and having a single web based interface to handle a single mailer solution to a system with 50 front end mailers.


Hope that this little gems of info helps ;)