Email marketing tooling in HubSpot

In 2012 the company added email marketing capabilities to their marketing software suite. The email tooling was originally developed by the Performable team, which HubSpot bought in 2011. Read more about the addition of email marketing tools to the HubSpot software.

The company was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in June 2006. Many of its first customers, employees and investors were from the MIT community.

HubSpot is known for using itself as an example of the inbound marketing strategy it develops software for.

How to start with the selection process

Well there are many sources that helped me in the selection process by providing key areas to look at and points to consider, including of course this website.

And yet the best description of the number one area to focus on sprang to me as I listened to the sermon at the local church one weekend. The sermon was about how we look at the journey without the destination in mind, simply enjoying the services and facilities of the Cruise Liner we are on called Life. We have no real sense of where we are going with this and don’t really know how we are progressing on that journey.

So how does this relate to selecting an ESP?

Gianfranco’s golden tip

Well, my one tip would be to think about where you want to be medium and long term with your Email/Social/Mobile marketing and select your ESP accordingly. There are 100s of ESPs out there and the task of matching to your needs is difficult, especially when most of them will actually do what you want and more.

Don’t be swayed by the vast amount of technology, services and consulting that is available. Be clear about where you are now and where you want to be in 6, 12, 18 months. You don’t want to be in a position where you have outgrown your ESP in year 1. A shelf life of 2 to 3 years is great but in some cases you may be looking to 5 years to cover the costs of the original switch.

Too many ESP functions are not used

Make sure that the fundamentals are covered before getting excited by the extra widgets available. In many cases ESPs are dumped not because they can’t provide the functionality, but because the client didn’t use the functionality they were paying for.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Before letting the ESPs into your house for a sales pitch get yourself in order

Think about:

1 – What the email platform needs to to for you

What will the email platform need to do for you? Crazy Suggestion? Not really. Too many organisations don’t think about what their email strategy is. What are you using and planning to use your emails for. Are they transactional or service messages? Are they for marketing?

Are you looking at just emails or are you actually looking for a platform that will deliver through other channels such as mobile, social, web etc.

2 – What are your volumes?

This can help you eliminate perhaps some of the platforms that can’t cope with the ‘enterprise’ volumes or indeed the speed with which you need to get the messages out. It good to know the difference between small midsized and enterprise email marketing solutions.

You’ll also need to know, because the ESP will want to know to give you a price. And that price will be a reflection also of the commitment you give them in terms of volume and length of contract.

3 – Who needs to be in the decision making process and at what stage

This isn’t just about IT and Marketing. It’s also about Customer Service and Operations. Think also about the teams who will be pulling the emails together internally. At the agency they were called Campaign Managers. And when does Finance want to look at the numbers with you. What does your ESP selection team look like?  There is often a Busines Case to be created.

If you are working at an agency, do you need to get the input from your clients as well?

This is also an opportunity to think about what is missing from your team and so what gaps the ESP could fill in terms of technical or strategic expertise

4 – What does it need to integrate with?

Think Website, Databases, Social Platforms, CRM systems, Content Management Systems, Finance Systems.

5 – Flexibility

Particularly true if you are an agency with a mix of clients. A platform that is geared up for truly sophisticated multi-channel messaging with 50 million emails per year may not be the right platform for a client who sends out just 50 thousand emails per year

But also think about how flexible you might want the ESP to be in terms of support. Do they need to at least be in the same country? Do you want them on site?

I am not advocating that you stick with one ESP for life, but you might as well be prepared for it..just in case.

March 2012 Terradata aqcuired longstanding ESP eCircle, to merge Aprimo.

Aprimo provides B2C and B2B companies with an SAAS software to manage several aspects of marketing including campaign management, lead management, brand management, e-mail marketing, event management, performance management, social marketing, spend management, and workflow & project management. Aprimo was founded in 1998 by William M. Godfrey and Robert W. McLaughlin.

E-circle, which was founded in 1999, is a privately held company with about and 400 employees and 1,000 customers. eCircle is set to merge with Teradata’s Aprimo unit.

The portfolio now combines eCircle’s messaging platform, the marketing management software of Aprimo and the data analysis vendor Teradata itself. The joining together of all three companies will result in the creation of one of the largest marketing applications providers in Europe, according to the announcement by of eCircle even the biggest.

eCircle delivers digital messages–ads and marketing messages–via email, social channels, and websites. In this it knows competitors like Exact Target, Responsys, and Silverpop and Emailvision in Europe. Aprimo already had some of eCircle’s messaging capabilities. Stephanie Miller, VP of digital messaging at Aprimo said eCircle’s technology is both more mature and more capable.

Stephanie Miller of Aprimo:
“eCircle will take us deeper into mobile and social, and it also brings us content-creation and content-management capabilities.”

Rolf Anweiler of eCircle added in an announcement on the eCircle blog:
“We’re delighted to be forming a new generation of digital marketing applications and are really looking forward to joining the Teradata and Aprimo teams whose combined skills, expertise and experience will help all our global customers stay ahead of the competition, taking Digital Marketing to the next level.”

The eCircle software will be integrated into Aprimo, but maintaining its current business operations and support for current customers once the acquisition is complete. In December 2010 Teradata acquired Aprimo, with which they gained access to deeper digital marketing capabilities, but Teradata and Aprimo still operate as standalone businesses.

Did Teradata make a wise Acquisition by bringing eCirlce in?

Forrester did an interesting analysis of the acquisition, by looking at the future of the deal. Will Teradata treat eCircle as a defensive portfolio play or as a bold platform play? Accoring to Forrester, both companies gain from the deal. Teradata is the bigger winner, since eCircle fills gaps in the AMS and ARM products: proven email service, integrated digital and social messaging, native software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery, and a strong presence in Europe. eCircle gains wider access to North America, marketing resource management (MRM) capabilities, and direct access to Teradata and Aster Data’s engineering talent. Forrester ends with stating the Portfolio play is safer, but not enough.

Steps by eCircle Aprimo and Teradata

The financial details fo the acquisition by Teradata of eCircle acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be finalized in the second quarter of 2012. The deal is  subject to regulatory European Union regulatory approval.

Once the Teradata eCircle acquisition is final, eCircle’s current senior leadership team will join Aprimo and continue to work for the company in similar leadership roles. eCircle’s Chief Executive Officer, Volker Wiewer, will be joining both the Teradata EMEA Leadership team and the Aprimo Leadership Team as vice president of Aprimo EMEA.

The press release by Teradata can be found here.

How Agencies often miss the mark and blow their chances in an RFP

Let’s take a look. There are very few brand new clients. Everyone has a history in business and with agencies. Some are notorious in the way they deal with agencies. If you encounter these guys, run the other way immediately.

You can easily blow an RFI or e-mail marketing RFP if you ignore a client’s context and content. Focus closely on revenue performance, past campaigns, current or previous positioning, senior executive changes, industry dynamics and who is on the search team, and the dynamics among these individuals.

Finding clues how to win an RFP

If you don’t zero in on the search team, you will surely miss the clues on how to win. Each team is a combination of working-level players, advisers and budget controllers, and senior honchos. Rank sometimes indicates voting weight or influence. Know who writes the email marketing RFP. But many of these guys individually or in smaller groups bring hidden and not-so-hidden agendas to the party.

Personalities can have a disproportionate impact on the decision. Consultants try to shield this information from you. But if you don’t know who you are dealing with and the likely distribution of power and influence, you’re out of it before you start.

Tactic one: Don’t confuse detective work with business

If you aren’t good at intelligence gathering, you’ll never win a pitch. The good news is that much of this information is public or accessible by tapping your individual and collective networks. The agency world is a small town, and everyone knows everyone else’s business. If you don’t take advantage of this fact, you’re dead.

But don’t get carried away. There is a necessary and sufficient amount of data to collect to pick apart the process and mount the pitch. This is different from the data you’ll need to actually do the business. If you confuse the two, you’ll waste valuable time and resources gathering information that will not materially add to your ability to win the pitch.

Failure tactic 2: Ignoring the brief

The pitch brief is a document hammered out by a committee filled with boilerplate and stilted language. It’s the ultimate bureaucratic output that more often obscures than illuminates the client’s true need. But buried in there is a list of stuff the client wants to know. Some agencies unilaterally decide to ignore this because they think they know what the client needs to know better than the clients themselves or their advisers. This is a high-risk strategy. If you decide not to tell them what they asked for, you’re usually done for.

Again, don’t get carried way. Understand the general thrust and the necessary documentation to prove your case. Every so often you get an OCD search team that insists you present specific data in a specific order to an exacting time table. But most want the basic information in any way you think works.

Extrapolation of questions
Some agencies interpret or extrapolate the questions in the brief and do lots of extra primary research to demonstrate how much they know or care. This can cut either way. Sometimes the research yields riveting new insights or documents and validates an idea that has been percolating within the client team. Sometimes it’s just more of what they already know or worse — it contradicts the client’s standing hardcore beliefs and automatically disqualifies you.

Linking the needs to your strenghts
The key is to do the math and connect the dots for clients linking your agency’s cases, experience, and strengths to the clients’ needs and questions in ways they can easily understand, process, accept, and score in your favor. As you do this, watch how much you guild the lily. If you don’t carefully structure the presentation and recap the points they’ll need to choose you, you’ll lose them and lose the business.

Failure tactics 3 and 4: Improper focus; wasting time

Focusing on you, not them
Most agencies have standard ways to pitch and a usual cast of characters who do presentations. This is a strength and a trap because it’s very easy to get caught up in your stuff and ignore the client’s stuff. The clients don’t know your shtick and don’t care. They aren’t interested in or wedded to the usual sequence of presentation, your favorite stories and jokes, or the patented processes or named stages of your strategic or creative process.

Clients care about what you can do for them. Choosing an agency is a primal, selfish decision. Who you are, how smart you are, and what you’ve done before are mere formalities that got you to this moment.

In the pitch, clients are living in the moment; they are listening to the logic, looking for snappy ideas and graphics, trying to figure out if you look like their 6th grade teacher, and trying to intuit how fast and how high you’ll jump when they call with unreasonable last-minute requests late Friday afternoon. People buy people. After that, goods and services get transacted. The artificially rational process disintegrates into an emotional free-for-all. Ultimately they are deciding who they’ll bet their jobs on. If you don’t make them feel safe, covered, and in control, you lose.

Becoming pitch chum
In a significant number of cases, the search team starts the process with one or two favorites going into the pitch. They know from the get-go that the winner will be one of these agencies. They select a third or fourth agency to make it look like an honest horse race, but you’ve lost before you start. This is more frequent in searches that closely follow CMO turnovers or corporate mergers.

If you ignore the warning signs or the predictable behavior of known CMOs, you become pitch chum and waste your time, energy, and resources on an RFP that you have no hope of winning. Everyone in the process — the pitch team, the search consultant, and the real contending agencies — have interests in withholding this information from you. But if you ignore the warning signs or fail to rigorously test for this situation at the outset, you will demoralize your team and disrupt your own business. Don’t forget a typical RFP can cost up to 30 – 40 hours.

Conclusion

Avoiding disaster begins with recognizing, understanding, and internalizing the fundamental truths that drive any RFI or RFP process. Every RFI and RFP begins with a burning need. Often it’s simply that the new CMO wants his or her own agency. Often it’s a combination of a practical need and a frustration with current agency partners. No matter what the catalyst, the RFI or RFP process is about fighting the last war and compensating for perceived deficiencies in the company’s current marketing or media arsenal.

The principal drivers of client needs are the desire for better-performing creative, more-efficient media spending, and faster, cheaper, and more congenial and streamlined production. Once in a while, clients want insight and vision. Everyone says they want it; few really do. In fact, most searches kick off with a new vision already partially congealed.

In as many as 50 percent of the searches, clients fall out of love with the people on their business or they’ve been eyeing a competitor’s agency. It’s a high-pressure people business. No one can indefinitely put up with too many prevarications, lies, zigs, and zags compounded by missed deadlines, over spending, and wrong forecasts. The old saw — you start losing a client the minute you win the business — is true.

As described above, at each stage in the process, there are behaviors, assumptions, or approaches that are always automatically fatal in the process. Try not to do them.

Setting up and deploying an email delivery system for their applications is something Most developers are not experienced at.

Baseline requirements for an mobile application email delivery solution:

1. A method of constructing IETF standard email messages
2. Reliable delivery of the email into the inboxes of all your users
3. Reporting and Diagnostics on transmission errors and delivery status
4. Colecting engagement data and reporting them, such as email open and click rates

There are also other considerations to take into account:
• Does your team have the expertise to setup and maintain an email server?
• Is there any training needed related to your email platform?
• Do you have time to fix issues when building and maintaining your own email solution?
• Do you want the responsibility that comes with running an email server?

Let’s compare the required resources to build your own e-mail solution versus using an email service provider. In this example, we will be using Postfix as a representative email server, typical of what a developer would use.

Summary: Experienced developers can get Postfix up and running in 1 to 4 hours. But then it would still miss some features that are considered standard with an Email service Provider..

Let’s look at the number of steps required to get a barebones Postfix server up, compared with using an email service provider.

Experienced developers can get Postfix up and running in 1 to 4 hours. Postfix will then deliver any properly constructed email, however getting the challenge may lie into getting these emails out of your email framework. Extra time is needed to implement monitor the delivery status and engagement data (email reporting).

Some other features might also be missing:
• Easy to use email templates for non-technical people to edit and deploy
• Processing and queuing for bulk email
• Whitelisting of IP addresses
• Applying for preferred sender status at various ISPs
• Blacklist monitoring

Conclusion

The decision build versus buy for an email solution for your mobile application is not only the work that goes into building an email server. Email delivery monitoring and analytics/ reporting for emails requires a lot more research and development time that could have gone into your application!

This is a guestpost of Jon Lim of Postage App. Thanks for giving us some insight into the E-mail for mobile apps world Jon!

Lessons when writing an RFP for email software selection:

There are some great takeaways for when you are running your own RFP for email software selection and for more creative email marketing agencies.

And lastly: When a bid is too good to be true, it usually is.

Great points to take away and as always very nicely sketchnoted by Mike, check his stream of of other sketchnotes here or subscribe to his newsletter.

The two main roads to take

There are two main roads to take: either one opts for email marketing software or marketing automation software, though many people mistakenly think that these terms are interchangeable or are just fancy ways of describing the same thing. As a result, business people incorrectly compare email service providers and desktop emailing software against automation based marketing services — which means they won’t always end up with the best solution.

Marketing automation and Email marketing tools are not the same

The mix-up may stem from the fact that email is such an essential tool for most marketing activities, which is why there are so many solutions available that include an emailing component. From that point of view, marketing automation is in part an email marketing tool. Although these platforms do share some common ground, they are not the same.

Differences between email marketing and marketing automation

While the two different types of software have functional similarities in some areas, they each in turn go deeper into certain aspects of customer relationship management (CRM). To understand which does what, it’s important to identify the goals of their basic differences:

Email Marketing Software — Email marketing tools by email service providers (ESPs) normally track interactions directly related to email campaigns. Some more advanced systems even allow people to set up logic steps to further engage subscribers, such as email autoresponders and other follow-ups, based on click-throughs or past purchase behavior.

Email Marketing Automation Software — In comparison, marketing automation systems (likeSalesfusion, Loopfuse, Marketo lead management and Optify) track the entire chain of online interactions that buyers have with a company, helping with making intelligent decisions based on those behaviors via a number of channels to seal the deal.

Both email marketing and marketing automation are excellent tools designed to help companies achieve their sales goals. But, before making any investment, it’s worthwhile to define those goals and understand which system will be most effective in achieving them.

Three distinctions between email marketing and marketing automation:

1. With email marketing, each subscriber receives the same or similar communications, such as an email newsletter, or events flyer. If segmentation is applied; the same content among different interest groups.

Marketing automation attempts to convert prospects through other targeted efforts, such as by sending relevant email communications gained by studying the various online and offline interactions of each individual.

While this provides more insight to help nudge prospects through the stages of conversion, it takes more time and effort to manage, limiting the effective scope of influence to fewer (but hopefully more crucial) clients.

2. Marketing automation systems integrate tightly with customer relationship management tools such as Salesforce. With this integration, a brand can have more productive conversations with a prospect in the later stages of their buying process. With that said, most email tools have some CRM integration, but often not to a great extent. Both however, allow users to leverage data to segment and personalize campaigns, as well as provide sales teams with insights into how their prospects engaged with those campaigns, but at different levels of depth.
So just what level of complexity is the best for you?
It comes down to personal preference, but sometimes, less is more. Which is why small to medium enterprises find email marketing easier to grasp and more effective.

3. In their own ways marketing automation systems and email marketing systems don’t just track users, they act based on what prospects do. For instance, a subscriber who visits a particular product page on a website could receive a particular series of emails over the successive weeks; all without users needing to do anything other than the initial setup procedure which he or she can then leave to its own devices.
Some people prefer automation, while others prefer more hands-on intervention. Deciding between the two all comes down to what works best for the individual business.

What kind are you?

Here is the thing; small businesses with limited resources and a fairly consistent target market won’t benefit much from marketing automation.
Marketing automation only starts to make sense when an organization finds that its customer base isn’t very uniform, or they have big-spending prospects that need (and often want) a lot of extra nurturing and spoon-feeding.

And while the pricing of email marketing tools is based either on the number of emails sent or the size of a mailing list, marketing automation costs more regardless and represents a significantly larger investment. Realistically, the large difference in spend can only be justified when a business is very confident that marketing automation systems will provide a dash of that secret sauce to help their company win more worthwhile conversions.

It also depends on the amount of content a business can churn out as setting up a marketing automation sales funnel requires much more varied content than, say, a generic monthly newsletter. In this sense email marketing is less demanding, as one can set up a few standard email templates, add some fresh content every now and then, and recycle until it becomes irrelevant to subscribers. Marketing automation users can end up with a routine that fails due to a lack of resources to produce content.

Ultimately, marketing automation is more about learning about people and leveraging that info. Emailing is more about timeous, impactful communication, where only minimal information is needed in order to launch a successful campaign; which makes it easier and more sensible for small to medium enterprises.

When it comes to email marketing itself, you have the choice between a purchased emailing package and a hosted emailing solution. These two, again, are very different.

There are a least five distinctions between email marketing as a cloud service and purchased software:
1. Templates on purchased software can quickly get outdated. Hosted solutions must stay ahead of their online competitors and new updates on international webmail services, which is why they maintain fresh template libraries that can also be live-tested on different email clients, or even mobile devices through the service itself.
2. Off-the-shelf software often doesn’t have advanced features, offering only basic newsletter creation and sending tools. ESPs offer extra features such as microsites (an archive of old newsletters), reports and stats, Real Simple Syndication feeds (RSS), subscriber segmentation tools, A/B split tests of subject lines, spam checkers and so on.
3. The cloud service solution provides an opportunity to drill down further into subscriber behavior, allowing one to send a more targeted campaign. Only basic tracking and statistics tools are available with purchased packages. One can typically only track new subscribers, unsubscribes and bounces.
4. Purchased software has to be downloaded onto a computer, which always bares a risk of inviting viruses and it also takes up disk space on a hard drive. With a hosted solution, all one needs to do is go online and log into the application.
5. There are extra costs if the purchased product is required on more than one PC. In other words, users may need a multi license version. This can end up being fairly pricey, not to mention that users cannot access their accounts from anywhere else except those specific computers; whereas all that is needed with a hosted application is access to any internet connected computer or tablet.
Truth is, although a hosted solution is not for everyone, many still find it far more useful than a purchased software package because of its progressive functionality and up-to-date support.

Image credits to tychay and gillicious

Yet it’s fairly common to move between Email service providers (ESPs) to gain a better deal, features or service. There are a lot of potential issues to consider, and they might become headaches, particularly if they aren’t considered.

When moving to a new ESP there are many moving parts to be taken care of, both the setup and necessary configuration of the new ESP platform and changes to external interdependent elements. In this article I’m focussing on the external, interdependent elements as these are easily overlooked.

Issue 1. From email addresses

Typically your from email address will change as a new domain or subdomain will be used. This could impact your inbox placement so you need to advise your subscribers in advance of the change to the new from email address, so they are aware of the change and preferably that they whitelist your new address. The new domain or subdomain will also need your IT to be involved in settign up the DNS for pointing of the domain.

Issue 2. Deliverability

You will be moving to new IP addresses and domain(s). This means you will need to re-build your sender reputation. If you are using dedicated IP addresses and have substantial volumes a warming process and gradual change-over is called for. If you had a good reputation before there won’t be a problem in re-building it, it is just a process to manage.

Issue 3. Data migration

The email address and associated user profile data needs to be transferred. Don’t forget to ensure that not only the active data is transferred but also the suppression data. Unsubscribed users, hard bounced addresses and spam complaint addresses need to be migrated.

Issue 4. Post click tracking

If you’ve got post click tracking set up so that the email solution reports on conversions on your website, you will need to update the tracking HTML your web pages. If this is on the purchase pages you will almost certainly being using an SSL certificate and need a new one for the new link tracking domain with the new ESP.

Issue 5. Subscribe processes

Where is your subscribe form? Do you have several subscribe forms? Such as on your website, campaign specific pages, embedded in your social media pages and recommend a friend forms? Audit all your subscribe forms so they can all be updated to submit data to the new ESP solution. The last thing you want is subscribers being added to a black hole.

Issue 6. Unsubscribe process

Likewise for the unsubscribe process, where is this managed? What needs to be done to ensure future unsubscribes are reflected in the new platform?

Issue 7. Transactional and external triggered emails

If you’ve got abandoned cart, welcome emails and transactional emails in place then these will be triggered from systems external to the ESP and re-integration will be needed. This could be a major challenge.

Issue 8. CRM integration

If your CRM has automated synchronisation to the ESP platform you need to plan for updating this integration.

Issue 9. Live email continuity

Once you’ve started broadcasting with the new ESP what happens to your old emails? You need to make sure the links in the campaign you sent yesterday with the old ESP continue to work otherwise you could frustrate customers and lose sales. In particular there is a legal need to ensure the unsubscribe links work.

This article appeared on SmartInsights before, download their Digital marketing strategy and planning Word template here

But as it turns out, only a few enterpise level e-mail marketers will truly get the value from this report.

History of the Forrester wave email marketing

The history of the Forrester Wave report dates back to the days of Jupiter Research, who used to do the “Email Marketing Buyer’s Guide” report yearly. Forrester announced the acquisition of New York City-based JupiterResearch in July 2008 and then went on and released “The Forrester Wave: Email Marketing Service Providers” in December 2009. The latest instalment is called “Forrester Wave Email Marketing Vendors” – notice the name change –  and was released in Q1 2012

The Forrester wave email marketing vendors 2012

The email marketing vendors report can be split up into two segments. The first part shows three graphs based on a survey conducted under 74 email markeers. All email marketeers are customers of the 6 vendors included in the Forrester Wave report.

Research method

At the end of 2011 Forrester conducted product evaluations, interviewed 18 email marketers and did an online survey of 74 email marketers to gain client feedback on their vendor and the market. They interviewed six vendor companies: Epsilon, ExactTarget, Experian CheetahMail, Responsys, StrongMail, and Yesmail Interactive. All the interviewed and surveyed email marketers were provided by the vendors themselves.

The first part of the report goes into the survey, with questions about the largest challenges in email marketing, which email tactics are often applied and what these marketers think is the most important part of the vendor offering.

Largest challenges in email marketing
The largest email challenges for the surveyed group of email marketers are:
1. Integrating email with other channels (57%),
2. Leveraging dynamic content (50%) and
3. Leveraging segmentation (43%).

Often applied email marketing tactics
The email vendor report also includes a table with the most applied email tactics, split up in daily versus once a month or more. There might be some ambiguity in the interpretation of these questions. Because what is a “welcome email program”? and what does “Coordination of email with mobile” entail? It does give a nice roundup of what Forrester thinks are the future tactics that an email marketer could consider when selecting an Email Service Provider.

Most often applied email tactics
1. Run welcome email programs (93% at least monthly),
2. Coordinate email with site promotions (85%),
3. Segment users based on site behavior (73%).
The least applied email tactic in the list is the Coordination of email with mobile (43%)

Most important email vendor offerings

It becomes more interesting when the marketers rank the different parts of vendor offerings by importance. Good account management is at the top of the list for these enterprise email marketers. Second is the integration with other online tools and third is the automation of next-best action. Proprietary offices around the world is deemed least important, but not all email marketers surveyed work for an international company.

Email marketing Vendors in the report:

The second part of the Forrester report is the actual email marketing vendor wave chart and a table with the wave scores. Forrester decided to narrow the number of vendors included in the report and only looked at Enterprise level email marketing vendors.

The Forrester wave scores the email marketing vendors based on Current offering and Strategy and then plots them in a graph. The final ranking labels the vendors as either, “leader”, “strong preformer” or “Contender”. You can see the chart by clicking on it on the right. The report can be downloaded here.

Instead of 15, there were only 6 vendors included. (we list more than 300 email service providers here). There are two chapter that try to explain why they selected these 6 vendors instead of the 15 that were in the 2009 edition. The are called “The email marketing vendor evaluation explained” and “What changed from our 2009 Forrester wave”.

Email service providers that were not included:

• Email service providers that were labeled “Niche providers” for several reasons. Including a B2B focus or because they have lead management integration as their main product proposition.
• Email service providers operating mostly from Europe
• Email service providers with less than 25% enterprise clients
• Email service providers with less than $100 million in email revenues for 2010
• Email service providers that earned limited Forrester client inquiries

For comparison, the  criteria from the 2009 report were:

• Does the vendor provide software-as-a-service?
• Does the vendor have revenues of at least $10 million from email?
• Does the vendor send volumes of at least 200 million/month?
• Does the vendor have at least 35 enterprise-level customers?

The truth is that some of the criteria in the 2012 report (like percentage of enterprise clients or main focus market) aren’t shared by marketers that are selecting and Email Service Provider. Therefore the true value of the report will be less for these marketers. Even if they are among the select fortune 1000 companies that Forrester is aiming at.The last selection criteria “Prominence in client conversations” seems a bit out of place when you are making an industry report.

Press releases:

5 out of the six vendors included in the report sent out a press release:
StrongMail Identified as One of Six Top Email Marketing Vendors for Enterprises
Responsys Named a Leader in Email Marketing by Independent Research Firm for Fourth Time
ExactTarget Named a Consistent Leader in Email Marketing by Independent Research Firm
Experian CheetahMail Achieves a Leader Status and Top Scores as Cited by Independent Research Firm
Yesmail Interactive – moving forward

It might be interesting to note that we could not find a dedicated press release by Epsilon Interactive, but Golden Lasso although just mentioned in one line in the report, did seize the opportunity to inform the world about it.

Forrester Wave  Email marketing vendors 2012

Forrester has made the Forrester Wave Email marketing vendors 2012 into a report that is usable (but certainly not complete) for the American email marketers looking for an enterprise level solutions. After a break of two years, the report was highly anticipated. Too bad that it does not carry it’s value over to other segments or countries.