Introduction
An Email Service Provider (ESP) is a platform that allows you to send email campaigns to large mail lists. There are many ESPs in the world. They offer user-friendly interfaces, list management tools, analytics, and many other features that make it easier for businesses to have a working email marketing strategy. They can be integrated into your CRM or CMS to work seamlessly with any email lists you already have. However, choosing the best ESP for your business isn’t an easy task.
Importance of ESP for effective email marketing
Email Service Providers simplify managing your email lists, collecting new email addresses, and analyzing email marketing campaigns. But an ESP will not only help your email marketing campaigns with ease. Choosing the right ESP will optimize your deliverability and open rates and ultimately lead to more sales. Most ESPs have personalization tools that will make it easy to customize your email marketing to different target segments within your audience.
The only problem is, with so many options available, how do you know where to start when choosing an ESP for your business?
Here are some key points to check when you are choosing an ESP:
- Pricing
- Features
- Scalability
- Deliverability
- User-Friendliness and Interface
- Integration Capabilities
Let’s examine each point in detail to understand why it is important for you to check it.
Pricing
When you want to use any tool for your business development, one of the first things that you check is the price of that tool. It is very natural because you must know how much you will spend and how much you will gain after using that tool. The same is true when choosing ESP for your business. Fortunately, there are many ESPs, and they offer pricing for almost any type and size of business.
The key point for you is to know what budget you will spend on Email Marketing and, more importantly, how many emails you will send. This is important because there are cases in which you can use ESP like Mailchimp and spend no money if you send less than 2000 emails in a month. So plan what you want from your Email Marketing strategy and then choose an ESP to not waste money on something you could get for free.
Features
When choosing the right ESP, it’s helpful to have a clear idea of your email marketing strategy. For example, how many emails are you going to send? How are you going to capture new subscribers? Do you want to be able to track stats in your database or within the ESP itself? Which metrics do you want to track? What are you going to use your emails for?
Once you’ve mapped out your strategy, the features you require from an ESP will be clearer. Ask yourself questions such as:
- Do you want ready-made templates? Or is the ability to customize more important to you?
- How much segmentation and personalization do you require?
- Are you going to maintain subscriber lists?
- Do you need Automation/triggered emails?
- Will you use Spam filter testing?
- Is A/B testing important for your strategy or not?
- Do you need integration options?
These and other questions that you have in your mind will help you make the right decision because the features are the most important part of a working email marketing strategy.
Scalability
After answering all questions and deciding which is the right ESP for your business right now, it will also be very useful for you to answer this question: “How big will your business be after one year, two years, and so on?”
This will help you imagine the scalability you will need from the ESP for your business and check if the one you choose can provide you with the features you will need in the future. If so, you made a great choice. If not, consider other options or, at minimum, know that after a year or two, you will have to change your ESP. This will help you consider all the risks that you may have when it is time to change the ESP.
Deliverability
Deliverability is the likelihood of your emails getting into your subscribers’ inboxes.
Sometimes, your emails can get sent to a subscriber’s junk mailbox, flagged as spam, or bounce, not getting delivered.
And apart from wasting money on sending emails that will never be read, this will negatively affect your reputation as a sender, and you could even be blacklisted.
Recently, an Email tool tester did some research on which ESP has the best deliverability rate, and here are the results:
- MailerLite moved up and reclaimed the #1 spot with 96.5%, an increase of 4.8% since the last round.
- Mailchimp was not too far behind with 95.5%, claiming the #2 spot once again with an increase of 2.85% in their overall deliverability rate
- Aweber moved to third place with 93.2%; their results have been consistent over the last few rounds.
- Drip saw the most significant increase, scoring 86.7% overall, up 24.7% since our last round. Their highest deliverability was round 3 with 95.3% – onwards and upwards!
- CleverReach has been one of the most consistent providers in our previous tests. However, their deliverability rate dropped to 79.3% this round – their lowest score since our fourth round in 2019. The main issues were a lot of undelivered emails to AOL and Yahoo.
- GetResponse achieved its best result ever (91.28%). Can this level be maintained next time?
- Sendinblue’s rebranding as Brevo did not help it to achieve better deliverability. With a measly 67.7%, it is only good enough for second-to-last place.
User-Friendliness and Interface
Choosing an ESP means you will spend some time working with it, and selecting the one with an interface that won’t disturb you while using it will be easier.
Many think this is unimportant, but the more you like the working process with your ESP, the better results you will have. You will likely explore all the features, try new things, create new templates, clear your mail lists, and optimize them with an ESP with a more user-friendly interface for you than the one without one. As you noticed, we mentioned “a user-friendly interface for you” because it may vary for everyone as there are no certain rules for something to be user-friendly for everyone.
Integration Capabilities
When using Email Marketing, it is very important to integrate it with your online shop, blog, website, CRM, and many other things. This is why you should take it seriously when checking the integration features of each ESP.
Although many features are common for almost every ESP, you must check the exact match for your needs and the features of ESPs to choose the one that will give you 100 percent of what you want.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many key points to check when choosing an ESP, and here we look at many of them. However, you should also explore independently to find the right ESP for your business. Our article will help you on your way to choosing an ESP.
