The Gist:
- Functionality awareness matters. Many marketers underestimate their current email service providers’ capabilities and often use only a fraction of available features.
- Data quality issues. Switching ESPs won’t solve targeting problems if the underlying data is flawed. Focus on data management before considering a migration.
- Migration risks are high. Transitioning to a new ESP can be a lengthy process, with potential disruptions to email marketing performance. Assess the true costs and benefits carefully.
For marketers, changing email service providers (ESPs) is a time-consuming and risky endeavor, so they should be absolutely sure it’s necessary. This was the central message of a panel at the Association of National Advertisers’ Email Evolution Conference in September.
Throughout the session, I found myself constantly nodding in agreement. Here are some of the key themes of the ANA conference, along with some of my own thoughts on this high-stakes issue.
Why You Should Hesitate Before Changing Email Service Providers
Be cautious if you’re having any of the following thoughts or hearing them from your team or partners.
Our ESP Doesn’t Have the Functionality We Weed
This often turns out to not be true. After all, as Ryan Phelan, CEO of RPE Origins, said, “Ninety-five percent of ESP functionality is largely the same.” More often than not, your ESP has the functionality you’re looking for, but you’re just not aware of it. In fact, it’s very common for brands to use only half of the functionality available to them in their ESP.”
Are you attending your ESP’s annual conference? Are you reading their quarterly release announcements? Are you active in your ESP’s customer forum? Are you reading their blog posts and emails? Is your email team properly trained on your platform? Do you have at least one power user?
If your answer to most of those questions is “No,” then that’s your cue to invest more time in your partnership with your ESP.
Related Article: The Hidden Dangers of Over-Personalization in Marketing
Our ESP’s Targeting Functionality Isn’t Effective
“Some dissatisfaction comes from data issues that are on the customer side,” said Derek Harding, chief technology Officer at Little Bee Consulting. In these cases, changing email service providers won’t fix your performance issues because you’ll be taking your bad data along with you.
This is a complaint that’s likely to be heard more often as ESPs introduce more machine learning and generative AI functionality in the months and years ahead.
One of Our Agency or Tech Partners Is Pushing Us to Switch
Some agencies and other companies get kickbacks from ESPs when they bring them new business. If you’ve made it known that you’re happy with your current ESP and one of your partners is still pushing you to consider another platform, it may be the case that they’re looking out for their own interests instead of yours.
We Were Told Our Email Service Provider Transition Would Be Quick
Best case scenario, if your email program is small and simple, you could migrate in around three months. If your program is large and complex, you’re most likely looking at nine to 15 months. RPE Origins’ Phelan said he’s seen an ESP migration take up to two years — and all of that happens after completing the request for proposal (RFP) process, which can take upwards of three months itself.
All this strains the definition of the word “quick.” In fact, Jose Cebrian, EVP, Vertical Lead, Merkle, went so far as to say, “Don’t do it if someone tells you it will be quick.”
We Want to Cut Our Email Service Provider Platform Costs
Thankfully, only 15% of brands went to RFP in the hopes of lowering the total cost of their email program, according to the 2022 State of the ESP RFP. While no one wants to overpay, being overly focused on cost can distract you from the more important issue of return on investment. After all, email programs aren’t cost centers. They’re investment centers.
Moreover, when you migrate your ESP, it disrupts your email program. In the worst cases, you have failures, mistakes and misfires. But even in the best cases, you’re directing a lot of effort toward changing platforms that would otherwise be focused on improving your email program. In other words, changing your platform is a huge distraction from actually running your email marketing program, and that has a very real cost that’s rarely factored into migration costs.
Related Article: 4 Stakeholders Every Email Marketing Program Has and What They Want
Valid Reasons for Switching Your ESP
If your organization experiences any of the following challenges, a change of ESP may be not only justified but worthwhile.
We Are Running Multiple Email Marketing Platforms
In certain circumstances, it can make sense to operate more than one ESP. For instance, for businesses with both B2B and B2C divisions, it’s not unusual for each to have their own ESP, as not every platform can serve both of those well. However, if your company operates multiple B2C brands and they each have their own separate ESP — which often happens with acquisitions — that’s an opportunity to consolidate and simplify.
This was the situation that Synchrony found themselves in, said Kelly Haggard, VP of channel innovation and optimization at the financial services company. They’re currently migrating divisions onto a single platform to consolidate their tech stack and “get scale and savings.” Vendor management and platform training is also streamlined when you consolidate.
We Need Better Integration
Every vendor says their products integrate with others, but the quality of integration matters in a world where brands are moving toward real-time omnichannel orchestration and a single view of the customer. Batched and delayed data feeds aren’t enough for most brands. Limited or incomplete feeds aren’t either.
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Haggard confirmed that integration and vendor ecosystem were important factors in Synchrony’s selection process.
We’ve Outgrown Our ESP
While most ESPs have similar capabilities, scale is a major point of differentiation. Some email service providers are good for the email volumes typically sent by small store chains, for instance, and others are good for national chains. It’s only natural for successful brands to outgrow their ESP.
What’s a good sign of this? Said Merkle’s Cebrian, “Your ESP failed on Black Friday…twice.”
Related Article: 7 Factors That Determine Email Deliverability
Avoiding Major Pitfalls in ESP Migration
Failed platform migrations are known to lead to short leadership tenures — and even short leadership careers. But just as dangerous is a successful migration that was ill-considered from the start.
If you’re lucky and end up in roughly the same spot you were in before you migrated, you’ve probably only wasted a year and lots of goodwill. If you’re unlucky and are now worse off, you’ll probably have to migrate email service providers again. That’s the worst case scenario no one wants to find themselves in.
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