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A number of different providers can help you solve your email customer communications and marketing needs.

Email Marketing Service Providers

Over the past few years a new breed of company has grown up to meet the demand for complete solutions to companies‘ email marketing needs. Providers offer a wide variety of marketing services, technical capabilities, and focus. The services these companies (the three leading players are Post Communications, Message Media, and Digital Impact) provide range from customized email marketing programs and high-volume email delivery to one-off direct email campaign execution. Naturally, prices vary considerably. Most still charge based on the old direct marketing model of cost per email sent, while others have introduced new pricing models that are based on managing the customer database and optimizing the value of the client’s customer relationships. What they have in common is that they allow you to out- source all—or at least a large part—of your email marketing solution.

Email Marketing ASPS and Product Companies

A number of companies offer both stand-alone and hosted email marketing products. If you go with the ASP or product approach, your IT organization or a third-party systems integrator will have to implement and maintain your marketing program. The ASP greatly simplifies this process, since it handles installation, hosting, and configuration. Once the product has been implemented, your marketing organization must staff and train a team or hire an outside marketing services firm to operate the product in order to run your marketing program.

Opt-in List Mailer and Brokers

Some companies, such as YesMail and NetCreations, have built lists containing millions of opt-in email addresses. Others act as list brokers and provide access to third-party opt-in lists. Opt-in mailers are focused on customer acquisition only. Because the quality of the lists these companies provide varies, it’s absolutely essential that you know how often the people on the list you select have been contacted as well as the level of opt-in permission they gave. Banner advertising networks such as have also moved into opt-in email, while MediaPlex has partnered with Post Communications and others to provide email direct marketing services. Among other things, they will subsidize newsletters for clients in exchange for the client allowing banner ads in the newsletters.

Portals

Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Excite operate new customer acquisition focused email marketing programs in conjunction with the free email service they offer on their sites. Users of Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Excite Mail, for example, can sign up to receive special offers and discounts. Increasingly, portals will combine their broad view of their members’ activities and interests with permission-based email marketing programs.

Traditional Direct Marketing Agencies

Traditional direct marketing agencies such as Impiric or Rapp Collins do not currently provide email marketing services to their clients. They have, however, taken some initial steps to develop strategic partnerships with email marketing service providers so they can recommend preferred vendors when clients request them.

Because of the challenges involved in operating online, the new rules of Internet direct marketing will take a long time to permeate the traditional direct marketing mindset.

Online Agencies

Online agencies are well positioned to incorporate email marketing into the overall marketing services they provide to clients but have only recently started to do so. These agencies already understand the new discipline of e-marketing and are accustomed to moving fast, but they’re a lot less experienced in direct marketing than the firms specializing in this field. Most online agencies are developing partnerships with email marketing service providers or technology providers as opposed to attempting to offer their own services.

System Integrators

Companies can be called upon to build (expensive) custom, one-off email marketing solutions. It is unlikely that a company will want to implement an email marketing technology from scratch. Therefore, system integrators will primarily play a supporting role in email marketing and may partner with product companies and ASPs to assist clients who decide to buy email marketing packages. Alternatively, system integrators may partner with email marketing service providers to assist them in implementing and integrating customized programs. If a company has multiple customer information databases and would like to integrate the information into a single marketing data mart, it would use a data mart to run email programs and personalize content and offers on its website. A system integrator would probably be the right choice to perform this type of work. Since most of the integration work occurs around data transfers and database development, it’s critical to make sure that they system integrators you’re evaluating have proven database expertise. Some email marketing service providers will offer specialized system integration services to support the implementation and operations of their solutions and programs.

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