Nice to meet your email program: 10 things to tell your new ESP immediately
When joining a new ESP, building a relationship and understanding with your email vendor is one of the most important steps. You can quickly move forward in implementation of the email marketing software and towards email marketing success.
Make sure you inform your ESP and tick all the boxes with our list of 10 things a new sender must tell the vendor immediately (and why).
1. Share your email marketing Goals
Knowing your Email marketing goals will allow the vendor to help you reach your targets, and ensure you are get the most value from the platform. Setting goals will also influence the sender’s overall strategy. If needed the email service provider can even help you set the right goals.
2.The Data Sources of your opt-ins
This allows the ESP to verify where the data is from, how old it is and when it was last sent. Listing data sources protects both the vendor and the client from dangerous data by protecting their brand and helps ensure relevancy in emails.
The vendor will need to know how the data was gathered, such as a single or double opt-in. To provide the highest possible email deliverability when switching ESPs, this will help the vendor decide what IPs to use for sending as they could benefit from sharing an IP with other customers if their data is single opt-in, but be on their own IP if everyone has explicitly signed up for their mailings.
3. Email marketing Strategy
Chances are that the new sender already has what they believe is a robust email marketing strategy, however they are likely to benefit from the years of experience the vendor holds to help them refine their strategy further; by providing actionable insight reviews and account management to assist the sender with ideas they may not have thought of previously.
This could include targeted birthday emails based on last purchase, or a device and location targeted lifecycle campaign to guide the customer through their newly purchased service or product. The vendor will also be able to identify if they have thought about using SMS to further their customer interaction.
4. Measurement
The vendor will need to know how the new sender measures email success to make sure that they have the right goals for their sector. The vendor would usually advise on using further advanced (email) measuring tools the sender may not have come across, such as post click tracking or integrations with tools such as Google Analytics.
5. Email Volume per month
The sender’s volume of email sent is needed to determine the IP allocation, as well as to allocate the best account manager and other aspects of management of the account. Additionally it also allows the vendor gauge how they can help improve the email marketing strategy and increase their volume and usually their email marketing ROI.
6. Email List size
The size of the new sender’s list allows the ESP to plan whether to host on a shared or dedicated environment, and is often used as a basis for suggestions on list segmentation.
7. Audience
By correctly identifying the new sender’s audience the vendor will be able to assist in sending the right style of email, send it at the right time of the day and potentially personalise it with relevant features, offers and information. Location targeting can be particularly useful, and device reporting as well as intelligent time sending can make sure that the sender has optimised their emails as effectively as possible to increase open rates.
8. Your email creation process
By asking how the sender designs and creates their emails the vendor can make sure that their creative methods are compatible with all email clients, and advise on whether they will be able to edit the messaged in the what-you-see-is-what you-get visual editor (where applicable). It also means that the vendor knows if they are created by an external agency, in which case they may be able to offer creative services for a competitive price.
9. CRM and integrations
Often the new sender’s data will be sitting on a CRM which they will already be familiar with. By integrating their CRM with the email service provider, it allows the sender to utilise their own CRM and use marketing automation for their data, keeping it up to date and using optimal reporting abilities.
Lists can be automatically sent over to the vendor and report data sent back to the CRM. For some senders that means that most people need not change the way that they are working, with the added bonus of having all their email marketing campaign data at their fingertips without having to familiarise themselves with their new email marketing software.
10. Level of knowledge
Lastly, it is important that the ESP finds out about your of email marketing knowledge. This is so that the vendor can tailor conversions and/or training sessions to meet those requirements and ensure the client is getting maximum value from their email marketing (and platform) as soon as possible.
If you are switching ESPs, make sure your new ESP is well informed about your wishes and understands what you are trying to achieve. It will allow you to quickly move forward in implementation of the email marketing software and they might just surprise you and suggest some great email marketing tactics you never thought about.
This article was written by Chris Northwood together with Andy Thorpe of Pure360.
Image via Flickr
