This document discusses four key questions to consider before upgrading from an email service provider (ESP) to marketing automation tools. It outlines the author's experience upgrading her company. The four questions are: 1) Do your efforts require real-time data fulfillment? 2) How much time can you invest in implementation and migration? 3) Are your staff correctly skilled? 4) How familiar are you with email delivery challenges and best practices? The author notes upgrading requires significant time, technical skills, and patience to rebuild email delivery reputation from scratch with the new provider.

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T h e N a v i g a t o r f o r E n t e r p r i s e S o l u t i o n s
JUNIPER NETWORKs sPECIAL
Rami Rahim,
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Hewlett-Packard
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4 Questions to Answer
Before Eradicating your ESP for
Marketing Automation tools
By Kara Douglas, Senior Manager, Marketing Communications at JustAnswer LLC
H
ow do you know if you are ready to upgrade from your ESP (Email Service
Provider) to Marketing Automation tools? First you must understand the
difference; An ESP and Marketing Automation tools are both vehicles for
sending email campaigns, most of which offer tools for creating HTML
templates, most support personalization & serving dynamic content. Most offer data
segmentation & reporting tools. Most manage the delivery, including processing
bounces and unsubscribes. Some even offer sexier features including, learning the best
time of day to send an email based upon the time of day that recipient will most likely
open an email based on previous open history. Some ESP's say they are now “cross
channel” marketing solutions, however very few actually were built that way. Most
ESP's have partnered with other solutions to become a cross-channel solution. While
this is becoming increasingly more important to send personalized relevant messaging,
Marketing Automation tools are here to help marketer’s take email marketing as well
as cross channel communications to the next level of sophistication. With some of the
Marketing Automation tools available today - the sky's the limit. There is no end to
the creativity and sophistication you can achieve. You can build personalized customer
journeys thus creating strengthened customer relationships.
My company is one of the early adopters of marketing automation tools and while
I am a strong advocate, I learned quite a bit through the process. If you think you are
outgrowing your ESP, be sure to ask yourself these questions first:
1. Do your marketing efforts require real time data fulfillment?
My company had a specific requirement to be able to access data in real time. Not just for
transactional messaging but also to send the most relevant messaging at the right time by
leveraging behavioral data points for segmentation & personalization. Most of the ESP’s
we looked at were moving away from hosted models and moving to be primarily SAAS
solutions. They may have API’s to allow you to send data back & forth. That can be a
heavy load on a database depending on how often scripts are running to make API calls
& updating back to the database. This presents delays for real time data. We needed a
solution that allowed us to host our own data. If you can live with data updating once per
day, an ESP may still be a good & more affordable option.
2. How much time are you willing to invest in the implementation of the new
tools and migration of existing campaigns from the old provider to the new
one?
It took us about three months to complete the implementation with a professional
services contractor onsite for six weeks from our vendor, a mixed bag of 12 engineers
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21CIOReview
and a team of three marketers who would be the primary users
dedicated to the implementation. It then took one full year to fully
migrate over from our old ESP solution, with a dedicated team of
three users and one DB architect and three developers. There was no
time for optimization. We were carrying two separate contracts with
each provider (old & new) during the transition. We were under the
gun to complete the migration by the next contract renewal with our
old ESP. I spoke with many references as well as other clients who
faced many of our same challenges and hearing their stories made us
feel like one of the lucky ones. It took others six months or more just
to complete implementation.
3. Are you staffed correctly?
Most Marketing Automation tools boast they are easy to use, and that
Marketers can be self-sufficient with their tools. This is true, if your
marketing team has skillsets that include: SQL, JavaScript, XML&
HTML. As well as understanding the use of conditional statements
to support serving dynamic content. Between responsive template
designs and coding CSS, to coming up with scalable solutions
to have multiple variations of templates unique to recipient data
points, marketing roles are changing. Having a team with a blend of
technical and marketing skills is the only way to effectively begin
to put those marketing automation tools to use. We quickly had to
make some adjustments and get our marketers the technical training
needed to become a self-sufficient marketing team again post
implementation. While we still rely
on a shortened list of technical
resources (DB architect,
operations and occasionally
developers) we can create
campaigns in a reasonable
turnaround time without
their help on most days.
4. How familiar are you
with the challenges of
email delivery as well
as current best prac-
tices?
Email delivery best
practices should not
be treated lightly.
Understanding
that when you
change provid-
ers means you
are basically
starting to build a sending reputation from scratch.
It doesn't matter if you had 98 percent of your
emails delivered to the inbox at your prior ESP, in
most cases you have to start over and rebuild. This
takes time & patience. It also takes having knowl-
edgeable delivery consultants who can advise on
strategy and best practices. Warming up a new IP
address is not only time consuming, but impacts
former benchmarks for open/click rates, and most
importantly ROI. It’s temporary and once you get
through the warm up process successfully - you
should see things begin to improve and shortly af-
ter see the ROI benefits of investing into Market-
ing Automation tools.
Although we faced many challenges &
learning curves by moving to Marketing
Automation tools, we now have the foundation
in place. We've recently begun to leverage the
sophistication the tools can offer, optimized many
of our old campaigns and build new campaigns we
were unable to create with our prior ESP. After a
little over one year, we are now beginning to see
the ROI and we look forward to all the exciting
things we will be able to create in 2015.
Understanding that when
you change providers
means you are basically
starting to build a sending
reputation from scratch. It
doesn't matter if you had
98 percent of your emails
delivered to the inbox at
your prior ESP, in most
cases you have to start
over and rebuild
Kara Douglas
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