How to select an Email Vendor

Below I am sharing the questionnaire I used to ask E-mailer vendors before sorting them for email marketing.

I consider below mentioned factors important while selecting a email vendor but different managers use slightly different factors for choosing a vendor.

Please fill in details against each factor/question below.

1. Email automation (drip and triggered) –

1. What is the Degree of flexibility allowed on the tool.
2. Lead scoring ability of the tool (ability to identify the most engaged subscribers and communicate with them accordingly)

2.       Deliverability – (rate of successful handoff between servers)

1. Is your company/tool is rated by analysts like Forrester, Jupiter, eMarketer, Clickz, marketingsherpa or any other renowned agency?
2. Is deliverability consistently monitored?
3. Can you have you own dedicated IP mail server address?
4. Do you have a team of postmasters to interact with ISPs?
5. What is the recipient’s inbox hit rate ?

3.       Authentication support

What all levels of authentication support offered (mark all offered) –

1. SPF (sender Policy Framework)
2. senderid
3. Domainkeys
4. dkim (domainkeys identified mail)

4.       Usability – how easy is it to use the tool based on the below factors (mark response against each factor)

1. ease of navigation
2. the testing environment
3. reporting
4. account configurations
5. profile settings

5.      Integration – (integration with Web analytics, Crm, Cms and custom reporting dashboards

1. Does the platform/tool have pre-configured integrations with the platforms we want to integrate to?

6.  Segmentation and targeting

1. Can we determine past recipient behavior?
2. Does the platform offer support for data tables (relational data)?

7.  Reporting and analysis

1. Do the tool/ Platform provides standard metrics including total emails sends, deliveries, opens, click through and forwards.
2. What level of detailed reporting is available for bounce messages (i.e. why did a message bounce)?
3. Does the platform offers downloadable, programmable (i.e. set and forget), post-click through reporting?
4. Do you have flexibility to customize the reports?
5. How easy is it to export results?
6. Can we tag links for analysis in Web analytics tools?

8.  Sub accounts

1. Does the platform provide option to create sub accounts? (To separate or share data and content among departments.)
2. If yes, does the platform provide ability to set various permission levels and feature sets on sub accounts?

9.   Reliability

1. What is the server uptime?
2. How many releases and/ or upgrades does the ESP (service provider) do on a quarterly basis?
3. How much unplanned downtime did the tool suffered in the last 12 to 24 months?

10.  Customer service

1. What hours are calls answered?

11.  Scalability

1. What delivery capacity exists (i.e. marketing messages vs. transactional messages)?
2. What mta (mail transfer agent) is being used?

12.   Platform training

a. Are there costs for initial or follow-up training?
b. Is training available both online and live?
c. Is training mandatory before being allowed to call customer support?
13. Security

1. How safe is my internal database?
2. Do you have network intrusion detection?
3. Do you have Firewalls installed?
4. Employee screening?
5. What are the encryption safeguards?
6. What type of audit trails is available? Can you see who logged in and did what?

14. Differentiates and supports marketing and transactional emails

1. Does transactional messages are send with a different dedicated iP address?
2. Does the platform have ability to send rich-media (htmL) transactional messages that allow for metrics tracking (opens/clicks)?