Email Marketing – How to start Guide

Email Marketing is very important for the success of any business and choosing a right Email vendor for Email marketing is equivalently important and necessary.

Choosing right Email marketing vendor that suits your business objectives and generate significant value for your business offerings is a must. I am sharing below the process I follow and adopt while shorting and selecting an Email Marketing Vendor for my clients or for the company i consult.

The Email vendor selection process involves 4 simple steps:

• Sorting 5 – 6 email vendors based on recommendations, Existing clients list, others
• Contacting the vendors and initiating the process
• Checking the vendors credentials and platform suitability

• Cost negotiation & testing the tools
• start using the tool and see the results.

Lets understand each process one by one

Sorting vendors:

There are primarly 3 ways of sorting vendors to initiate the process

1. Asking friends in the industry for reference
2. Research online
3. Check newsletters of others for service provider

As the steps are self explanatory and clear, we will get good number of leads to start with, next step is approaching the vendors either through emails or call them directly.

Checking the vendors credentials and platform suitability

Ask the vendors following simple points to understand their platform/ tool:

1. Email automation (drip and triggered)

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

3. Authentication support
4. Usability – how easy is it to use the tool based on the usability factors
5. integration – (integration with Web analytics, Crm, Cms and custom reporting dashboards)
6. segmentation and targeting option
7. reporting and analysis ease
8. Sub accounts creation option
9. Reliability
10. Customer service
11. Scalability
12. need for any Platform training
13. Security
14. Differentiates and supports marketing and transactional emails

The answer of the above will help in sorting the vendor and make the decision making easier, for detailed questionnaire check “Email vendor questionnaire“.

Also check vendors credentials or client list provided by them or listed on their website.

After going through this process, you may have sort listed 2-3 good vendors and its the time for rates negotiations.

Negotiations can be done on volume of emails you are intended to send, standard industry email rate in India is from 3 paise – 10 paise but can be negotiated further, meanwhile during your cost negotiation ask the vendor for some testing credit and shoot test mails from all the vendors you sorted. Make sure you send similar offers through email to different set of database and your each link on the eamil is tagged properly to analyse the performance of the test later.

Now based on the rates offered, testing done  and suitability of the vendors platform choose the vendor you want to continue with.

Now its the time to do some serious email marketing