Not sure what you gain by diverting emails via different SMTPs? We gathered email experts to lay out the benefits. Here’s what they had to say
Recently, we shared advice from experts about How to Keep Your Email List Clean. Once you follow those tips and have a spotless list, you will then graduate to more advanced tactics for getting your messages inboxed. By using multiple SMTP relays, you benefit in multiple ways.
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Load-Balance Email Marketing Costs
Steven Coufal, senior email marketer at Software Advice, a research and analysis firm for email marketing software explains,
“One potential benefit of utilizing multiple systems would be if your business had different segments of targets that require very different levels of functionality from an email marketing tool. If this is the case, you could potentially save money using a more basic email marketing type tool for one segment, instead of doing all your email marketing efforts via
a more expensive marketing automation system.
For instance, say you have two distinct target groups, customers and prospects. For customers, you only really need to send monthly newsletter blasts; but for prospects, you want the ability to do campaign nurturing, website tracking, dynamic content, progressive profiling and other more advanced marketing tactics. In that case, you could save money by using a more basic email marketing tool for your customers.
Since most email marketing and marketing automation tools are priced per contact, you could potentially save some serious cash. For instance, for 10,000 contacts you could get MailChimp, an email marketing tool, for $75 a month, whereas a standard marketing automation system like Pardot will cost
at least $1,000 for the same amount of prospects. These cost savings could be huge for your business.
Before you get started, it’s important to be very thorough in understanding what you need from each system for each target segment. If you go through the trouble of implementing a tool and then later discovering it won’t work for your needs, you’ve already wasted a lot of time, money and effort.”
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Different Tools for Different Purposes
Adonis Gaitatzis, Growth and Development Guru at Zackees tells us, “We use multiple vendors to send emails to our customers. The biggest challenge is in creating email templates that work and look nice in all platforms. Some, like MailChimp, have amazing email design tools. Others do not and we must hand-code HTML and test in tools like Litmus to see how the email will look in various email clients.
Different email tools are good for different things, and there’s no single email tool that does everything.
Whenever we want to announce a sale, new feature updates, or contests that are time-sensitive, we send a newsletter through MailChimp.
Whenever we want to guide a customer through a process of understanding or unlock doors for them in terms of knowledge or interaction, we use a drip campaign with Customer.io. This allows each new customer to develop a relationship with our company at their own pace.
Finally, when we need each customer to review their product or refer a friend, we use Referral Candy, which automatically sends an email a certain number of days after a purchase and coordinates the details of a referral campaign for us.
Together, these tools allow us to create a much better customer and sales experience than if we simply pumped out newsletters or tried to manage these relationships on paper. ”
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Multiple Benefits and Best Practices
On Jordie van Rijn’s site, Email Vendor Selection, our very own Noam Rotem, laid out important points, including:
- Using multiple vendors balances out cost efficiency, as explained above by Steven Coufal. Rotem advises “Cost-efficiency is a critical factor to your bottom line profits, but be careful not to let your cost savings sacrifice your operational efficiency. There can be operational costs related to working with multiple platforms, so it’s important to find the correct balance and combination of email delivery solutions that will be most efficient.”
- When using multiple vendors, get a single mission control center to give you power and deliver the perfect quantity, timing, and efficiencies.
- Information is power and when using multiple vendors for email marketing, make sure you have access to KPIs beyond the ordinary open rate and CTR.
- Always test new vendors, new channels, new ideas. Rotem suggests, “For example, how about adding a SMS text message drop to your next campaign? Or maybe geotargeted content?”
Summing it up
To sum up the advice of the experts comes down to what financial advisors call “diversifying your portfolio.” You would not put your life savings in just one stock . . . and you should not send all of your emails from just one vendor. Different types of investments are good for different purposes and different email vendors also serve different goals.
There is great benefit to using multiple vendors, but what you earn in improved stats, you may sacrifice in time, energy, and frustration required to dealing with multiple platforms – and manually aggregating results from each.
For this reason, while we recommend using multiple vendors, we also recommend investing in a single management layer to manage the multiple platforms. This method gives you the best of both worlds. You can use the best vendor for each segment while getting a high level view of your entire email marketing operation.
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