Adventures in Mobile Marketing

I just saw a new low volume ESP emerge on the scene, and before eye rolling and “not another one!” I wondered just how difficult it is for people who want an ESP to pick one, amongst the myriad of options. So this is what goes through my mind when I evaluate a small volume ESP:
- Do they understand CAN-SPAM
- (if they have a blog) is their advice in line with best practices recognized in the community
- What kind of clients do they have, and are those examples, examples of good email?

Now, as a person shopping for an ESP, don’t get overwhelmed. Think about these questions:

1. Do you need a lot of handholding? If so, check if they have consulting available, or a reputation for good customer service.

2. Are you interested in leveraging templates? Templates are a great way to keep costs down and ensure that your audience, no matter the browser/email flavor, can have a rich experience. Some vendors have better looking templates than others.

3. Do you want a price-per-email, or a flat rate? I personally don’t like per-thousand rates, because it penalizes a prospering business, and there are some ESPs out there that loosely according to the amount sent.

4. If you can admit you’re responding to an ad, do some research before finally deciding. Some of the smaller size ESPs will give you a lot better customer service than the ones that are large and can afford marketing. But also, the ones that are busier will have better persistent systems, failover, etc. But in the negative, they will also have other customers that are spammy which can affect your campaigns.

There are a basic set of features to good ESPs:
- Very good sender reputation handling, a relationship with ISPs and feedback loops
- Sophisticated templates that work in all major browsers, O/S, webmail and email clients.
- Recommendations on best practices in email marketing
- Metric reporting on bounces, sends, opens by campaign

There are also new and emerging technologies that some are including (sometimes free, or included):
- Preview of design in various inboxes
- Email to RSS so you can distribute content (and vice-versa)
- Sharing chicklet to leverage social media
- Certification available with GoodMail so you can use video in email
- Response filtering, reusable segmentation
- Integration with web analytics for live, transactional emailing