MarketingSherpa Blog

As one of the most commonly outsourced services, an ESP (email service provider) can be a great asset to a marketing team. Choosing the wrong one, however, can slow projects and inhibit email creativity, as well as cause issues with subscribers.

Finding the best ESP for your company means more than just wandering out into the marketplace with a wad of cash. It’s about understanding what your team — and your customers — uniquely need from the email marketing channel.

Many of the case studies I produce for the MarketingSherpa email marketing newsletter deal with an ESP switch, in differing variations. Usually, I’m writing about a stellar campaign that was produced after a marketing team broke free from the constraints of an ill-fitting ESP.

If the search for an email service provider is done correctly, it should be labor intensive. Which means you don’t want to have to do it very often.

Step #1: Perform an audit on the processes and workflows you currently have in place

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“I think the most important thing is that companies are realistic about what their expectations are for a technology investment, and realistic about their own capabilities,” Preston Wily, President, Sewell Corp, said.

In this interview, Preston speaks about his MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 panel presentation, which was about “what we didn’t do right” when making an investment in their email marketing program.

Preston recommended that when making technology selections, marketers ask themselves:

• Define what your goals are from the program
• Make those goals crystal clear to your team
• Ensure those goals are also clear to any potential providers

If a marketer does end up in a situation similar to the one Preston and his team were facing, having made the wrong choice in technology, he advised that “they should be realistic about the situation, where they’re at and what they did wrong.”

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