FactorEblog: What will an ESP (Email Service Provider) do for you?

The mechanics required to create and send successful email campaigns may be more complicated than you think, so it is important to find an ESP that can provide everything you need to make the whole process as easy and as effective as possible. Here's a summary of what they will do:

Permission and other rules and regulations
Ensure the best email deliverability, and provide design and spam testing
Automatic subscriber management
Great designs across all media, pcs, mobile phones and tablet devices
DIY templates or fully managed services
Detailed post campaign reporting

This is the second blog in our series all about what to look for in an Email Service Provider, and what to do when you've found it...

Permission and other rules and regulations

Good email marketing is permission based.

email marketing goes straight to your customers inbox, so it is very important to respect their privacy and to comply with anti-spam regulations
Spam is illegal. Sending people unsolicited email, commercial or otherwise, is against the law in many countries worldwide. It’s a small world these days and who knows where your email recipient may be. Besides that, wouldn’t you rather be talking to people who you know are interested in what you have to say?
A good ESP will make sure that you follow the rules. It is not in their interest to be found breaking the laws, too many spam complaints can result in their service being blacklisted, so behind the scenes there will be stringent checks and procedures in place to ensure their service complies with the regulations.

Email deliverability, spam filters and testing

Your well written, great looking emails won’t do your business any good unless they are actually delivered. Your ESP should have:

a stringent Anti Spam Policy to comply with email rules and regulations
authenticated servers, making them a trusted source for email origination so that when you send your campaign, it has the best chance of reaching the destination inboxes
spam testing - no naughty words or suspect phrases! Your ESP should provide spam filter testing to see if your email may be blocked. It may be that a change of wording in your subject line or content will improve your results.

Automatic Subscriber Management

So you don't have to:

Your ESP will provide the means to import and update your subscriber lists, filtering out duplicates and anyone who is already unsubscribed or deleted from that list
Website sign-up forms will automatically add new subscribers to your lists
Unsubscribers - there must be an opt-out link and unsubscribers should be automatically removed from your lists, immediately
Multiple lists and segmentation. You should be able to set up multiple lists with segments within those lists, and be able to send to all lists or just one segment for highly targeted campaigns.