Email Marketing - Separation Could Be a Great Thing

Author: Emily Alford

Sometimes, separation is a good thing. And when it comes to your email marketing platform, separation could be a great thing.

If you’ve ever searched for a new email marketing solutions, you probably know that there a lot of options out there to choose from — maybe too many. While leading cloud services (like Amazon SES and SparkPost) often offer specialized email delivery infrastructure at a cost efficient price, they can be a pain to set up, often requiring an entire IT team to do the job. On the other end of the spectrum, ESPs offer a complete solution by packaging together the platform front-end and vendor delivery back-end. However, this option is usually a very rigid solution — not to mention pretty costly.

Luckily, a best-of-breed email marketing solution offers the best of both worlds, allowing email marketers to select and incorporate required elements, while maintaining flexibility and cost-efficiency. Best-of-breed solutions provide access to a strong simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) infrastructure to manage the technical side of email delivery coupled with a feature-rich platform front-end to easily and efficiently manage customer lists, segmentation, content, and analytics.

Here are a few reasons to consider separating your front-end platform from your back-end delivery vendors for an easy-to-use, more personalized email solution.

Content produced in collaboration with Ongage.

Audience engagement varies

As most email marketers know, you’ve got some enthusiastic customers who open everything you send. And you’ve probably also got some customers who occasionally click on a discount, but other than that, radio silence. If you keep spamming the inboxes of less engaged users with messages that will most likely get ignored, chances are those customers might soon become former subscribers.

Instead, the best course of action is to adopt an advanced email marketing platform that provides smooth management of multiple IPs — for each and every sub-account and audience.

That way, it’s possible to define rules that route emails for more engaged users through your premium IP address. Additionally, less engaged users will be routed through another, lesser IP address, or sub-account, so their actions don’t negatively impact your IP reputation. A robust front-end will achieve easy definition of engaged and less engaged segmentation via behavioral rules.

You have multiple web properties

A lot of organizations are juggling many different web properties for each of their unique brands or mailing genres. For example, a department store definitely has users who are interested in deals on women’s clothing and housewares, but not necessarily children’s clothes. And while there may be some overlap, different customers have different needs and interests. In a case like this, the common and best practice is to manage unique properties on separate sub-accounts and IPs.

Separating these lists gives marketers a more holistic view of the entire email operation, as unique lists can be managed from a single marketing dashboard. Plus, opportunities for easy cross-promotional activities across web properties, shared content, statistic comparison and evaluation of performance are much more readily available with a single dashboard view. That means it will be much easier to tell a customer interested in linens and shoes that both are on clearance without forcing them to look at products that don’t interest them.

You want to reduce costs and increase margins

Delivering the right message to the right user is important, but being able to do that at scale is crucial to the success of any email marketing operation.

For email marketers who manage operations for multiple audiences at various levels of value or engagement, the possibility of using multiple SMTPs can have drastic benefits on ROI. For higher value operations, obviously you want to select a top-tier SMTP vendor — you know the superior delivery is worth the price tag. But if you’re tied to a single ESP or SMTP provider, you might be forced to use that same expensive SMTP even when mailing lower value campaigns.

With a component based solution, you can connect multiple SMTP vendors to a single dashboard and switch between them with a single click. That way, you can make sure you’re serving up the right content to the right audience — and the right price tag.

They say break-ups are always hard, but separating your front-end from back-end means more accurate messaging for your audiences and easier-to-use options for your entire organization. It means improving efficiency and increasing margins, so you can do more of what you do best. What better reason is there to ditch your old solution?

Ref: www.clickz.com