Email marketing services: defend yourselves!

Anybody looking to do email marketing needs a piece of software or a service to send out the emails, manage the address lists, provide reports on delivery rates etc. etc.

There are fundamentally two choices here.

1. Use an Email Service Provider. That's a third-party who send out the emails on your behalf. They provide the delivery infrastructure and management tools, which you access remotely via your web browser. They usually charge a fee per email sent, though are some are moving to flat-rate pricing.

2. Use a Software Vendor. You pay a one-time fee for a piece of email marketing software you can install locally to manage your email marketing.

I know the ESP model well, but am not familiar with software, so feel unable to offer people a fair assessment of how you might decide which is best for you.

So here's my challenge.

If you are an ESP or you sell email marketing software, would you be willing to present the case for your approach in a feature here at Email Marketing Reports? I'm looking for two to three representatives of each side to step up to the plate.

I'd just want you to lay out the arguments for your approach. And then address some of the criticisms that I might raise based on what the other side says?

Of course if you've used or worked with both software and an ESP, I'd love to hear from you, too.

If you're up for a quick chat or written deposition, please get in touch. Let's see if we can give people the chance to make an enlightened decision on what's best for their situation.

(If nobody steps forward, I will do the research myself anyway, but I'd prefer to have direct input from the frontline.)

Service listings | Tags: email marketing, esp, email list software

Permalink | May 14, 2007 | 0 comment(s)
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