How to choose the Right Email Marketing Solution for your company?

Email marketing has made a huge buzz in the online industry these past few years. Various studies have shown that targeted email marketing campaign generated about 7 to 12 times the response rate of the traditional snail-mail marketing.

Email marketing has been the easiest strategy to do since the emergence of the Internet. It became easy to communicate with people and reach your target audience with the use of this technology. That is why more and more companies have ventured into this marketing campaign for the hopes of better results for their business.

We have seen that companies spend millions of rupees just on email marketing, which has considerably increased over the past few years. That is why several vendors that provide email marketing products and services came out to take advantage of this booming market.

There are indeed several solutions and services available for any company’s needs, but the thing is, it is difficult to choose which one would suit your company best.

Before starting to evaluate the different solutions available, it is best to understand email marketing campaign and its components better. Email campaign involves strategy, creativity, copywriting skills, list management, process execution, reporting and analysis. Some of the service vendors provide most, if not all, of these categories. Depending on your company’s specific needs, you may avail some or all of these features.

Email marketing service providers can be categorised in three main areas: off-the-shelf, mid-range, and high-end solutions. Evaluate the main characteristics of each solution in terms of the features, benefits and costs.

·        Off-the-shelf solutions. This type of service is ideal for small businesses willing to allot internal resources for email marketing. The features commonly included in this type of service include sending personalised HTML emails, list management, basic tracking and reporting, and customer service.

  

     The maximum number of emails off-the-shelf products can handle is around 500,000 per month (which may vary from service to service). This kind of service can range for as low as Rs. 1500 to Rs. 20,000 per month. However, for most of these service vendors, ownership and control of list, reporting and data tracking are theirs. Some vendors also charge per email if the data listing is large or they provide the database to which your marketing message is sent.

·         Mid-range solutions. The vendor provides its clients with fully customised solutions, from strategy formulation to tracking, analysis and maintenance, depending on the clients’ needs.

This type of service provider is ideal for small and mid-sized entities with advanced marketing needs. These companies are usually those that are comfortable in using outsourced marketing services and customised solutions.

The costs of availing the service of mid-range solutions providers depend on per e-mailer depending on the size of the database. They will be happy to share the database they may have created over a period of time. The application that these service providers offer can also be licensed for use for a monthly or annual charge.

·         High-end solutions. These high-end marketing companies are focused and really specialise on email marketing. These providers offer sophisticated marketing technologies capable of launching and monitoring online or offline marketing strategies that involve millions of recipients.

These providers offer a more comprehensive data analysis approach such as helping their clients identify historical patterns to improve their conversion rate. The cost of availing the services of high-end providers range from could be couple of lakh rupees per campaign.

Each company has its own unique set of requirements, and email marketing has evolved to offer different solutions to address those needs. When choosing the right email marketing service, keep in mind your company’s needs. List down all possible vendors that you think will suit you best, and then map out each one to identify which among them can address all of your company’s requirements.

Price is always an important factor to consider. However, you do not have to always sacrifice quality of service for a low price. The important thing to be addressed is your internal needs and requirements. If you choose the right service provider for your company, paying a bit steeper price may not matter anymore since you will eventually earn it back with the huge returns that the marketing campaign promises.

Several big organisations have realised that email marketing is such a unique field and most traditional marketing practices just don’t keep up with the online world. This is in-spite of the fact that people are bombarded with spam and response rates may have gone down, but when it comes to actual number of responses, it still is something that finds a mind space in the marketing managers plan. Saurabh Srivastava of Ixigo mentions that Ixigo restricts itself to two e-mailers per month to its users, but it is still an important part of their online marketing strategy.

So when it comes to choosing your email-marketing provider, be sure to make the right decision for more successful years ahead.