“Hate” is a harsh word. And yet I’ve heard it used by several marketers referring to the email service provider (ESP) that they’ve willingly selected. Two marketers who have partnered with five different ESPs over the years recently told me, “We use the ESP we hate the least.” I felt as if I was listening to someone in therapy.
Why use a vendor you hate?
When selecting an ESP, the choices are a single-point provider of email solutions or a partner that offers several solutions that are often rolled up into a giant marketing automation platform. You should be leery of these extended-solution families.
In an SAP study of B2B buyers, 52 percent said that the biggest risk of getting a purchase wrong is wasting company money. Nearly 23 percent of them said that losing internal credibility is their top concern.
To avoid these risks, marketers may take the conservative approach and choose a well-known SaaS (software as a service) behemoth, one of the all-in-one marketing platforms that include email services. But is this the best way to go? By attempting to be everything to everybody — in the form of complete marketing platforms — they may fail to provide excellent technology and service for every operation.
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