Do Business Well

Whether an internal service group operates your email marketing program or you rely on an outside service provider, there’s only one way to get accountability: Define clear success criteria. Let’s take a look at some of the mechanisms you can put in place to evaluate the service organization responsible for operating your program:

1. Define and monitor success criteria.

• Clearly articulate program goals and performance expectations.
• Agree on turnaround times for new programs, campaigns, or messages.
• Ensure that the service provider can be flexible and responsive to your ever-changing needs.
• Ensure that you understand what a service provider offers and what it expects others to provide and manage.

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Level of Marketing Service

On one end of the service continuum are the broadcasters who simply merge the text copy you give them with a list of names and blast it out. Some may also provide such basic services as canned response reports to track click-through information. At the other end of the spectrum are the full-service marketing consulting and service bureaus. These companies run their clients’ marketing functions in much the same way as traditional marketing and advertising agencies do. Here are the services to look for when choosing a marketing service provider. Continue Reading »

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Evaluate Professional Email Marketing Services Capabilities

Does your provider or product vendor have a professional services group or does it rely on your internal IT group or outside system integration services to install its product or integrate its technology platform? The quality of professional services groups varies widely and the vendor’s own team is often not the one best suited to implement your email marketing solution. When evaluating professional services organizations, look for the following:

• An emphasis placed on professional services by the vendor (as opposed to your sudden realization that you need help implementing the vendor’s solution).
• Depth and breadth of services offered.
• Detailed domain experience that maps to the problem your are attempting to solve and products or technology you have chosen.

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Is email direct marketing an industry unto itself? Not at all. The principles of service-based marketing and communication are essential to the success of any online marketing initiative. And email is a mission-critical tool that plays an integral role in the e-marketing and communications mix for all online merchants. But as we’ve touched on earlier, email itself is just one of a large number of electronic communications channels that e-marketers will be using in the future. Furthermore, marketers ultimately won’t want to manage relationships with a large number of different service providers.

That may be why there have been so many industry consolidations. Netcentives acquired Post Communications in order to broaden its technology infrastructure and provide a wide range of relationship marketing services, from customer acquisition programs and customized email relationship marketing programs to loyalty programs and promotions. Continue Reading »

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Should your company build its own email marketing programs from scratch? Should you buy and install software products and hire and train your own email marketing staff? The answers may not be obvious. With the advent of a host of new Internet business models the real issue is whether or not you should outsource the entire operation to an email marketing service provider.

Traditional offline wisdom says that outsourcing happens late in an industry’s life cycle. But online, it’s just the opposite. Thanks to the Internet, there are a number of new models of technology and service outsourcing that can save your company time, resources, and money. Outsourcing critical business functions that are not part of your company’s core competence has become the accepted way to rapidly expand your infrastructure and gain access to best-of-breed technology and service. Continue Reading »

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From the delegator’s point of view, AOL operates in its industry—as an Internet service provider—in the same way that Carnival operates in its, as a vacation provider. Each preselects the destinations and puts together a package of offerings that can be bought all at once. For both, after the decision and initial arrangements are made, no further thought or maintenance is required. According to Forrester, a leading market-research firm, four out of every ten people active on the Internet in 1999 were using AOL. Furthermore, AOL retains 97 percent of its customers, the highest rate of any Internet service provider. For all of AOL’s blackouts and delays, its slow pop-up ads, and even a short-lived scheme to sell customers‘ phone numbers, only 3 percent walk away.

Part of the reason for such loyalty comes from the stickiness inherent in delegators: Once a delegator makes a decision, he or she tends to revisit it rarely. Continue Reading »

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