Who is the Best Email Marketing Service Provider?
March 10th, 2010 by XDXY eMarketing
At the end of 2009, Forrester released a report to evaluate Email Marketing Service Providers. In this report, Forrester reviewed 15 vendors against 69 criteria.
15 vendors include: Acxiom, Alterian, BlueHornet, ClickSquared, Datran Media, e-Dialog, Emailvision, Epsilon, ExactTarget, Experian Marketing Services, Lyris, Responsys, Silverpop, Yesmail, and Zeta Interactive.
69 criteria in 3 high-level buckets: Current offering, Strategy, Market presence.
I’d like to share some snapshots for you to have a look, and tell me your thinking about Who is the Best Email Marketing Service Provider?
So, Who is the Best Email Marketing Service Provider in your mind?
Download Forrester’s Report
It is interesting to find that some of the bigger email service provider is not listed in the report.
Why was Constant Contact omitted?
@PJ Naughton
PJ, Actually, I have the same concern, may be Constant Contact forgot to pay ‘co-funding’ Marketing dollar to Forrester group for this report.
I do not think Constant Contact is in the same league as many of these ESPs. Most of the low-dollar solutions are not truly competitive to these larger services. There is a lot more to an ESP than just sending out email. It would simply not be apples to apples.
What I find interesting is that “cost” doesn’t seem to have any impact on the ratings/rankings.
I have been using Constant Contact and am not enamoured with their services. I have been looking for others and recently came across Exact Target so I was glad to see this report. Cost would have been a valuable criteria to include for those of us comparing services but I guess since this is a performance report, not a value report, it was omitted.
Hey Harriet. I saw your comment and felt obliged to chime in. Our platform (Zeta Interactive) did real well in this Forrester Wave Report and we have something that none of these other providers can offer; a dedicated infrastructure (so that your emails don’t get caught in the queue due to holdups with other client mail).
We have some advantages as well, so if you’re interested, feel free to send me an email at hguzman@zetainteractive.com.
And yes, Constant Contact is not in the same league as these platforms. It’s like comparing a ripe, delicious apple to a very simple and minimal orange ; )
Yes, these are entprise level top 15 but what about small business solutions. Anyone have an opinion using same scoring but with accomodation low cost at least for entry level as a major factor?
I think SilverPop shows some good balance. Just like Harriet, I would like to have seen a cost comparison as well.
Based on the percentage of their clients on self service, paired with getting the maximum grade in management and employee base for strategy, it shows that they invest a good portion of their time in after sale support/training. Their product seems extremely solid.
I have tested a number of email deployment systems in the past but when it comes to quality of service , deliverability and the ability to get through the filters and report back features Experian cheetahmail come out on top everytime
Hi all,
In your opinion, what is the most important feature in an email marketing software?
Hi Harriet, have you looked into StreamSend? I would be happy to talk to you if you are interested.
@Harriet Mills
yeah I would like to know more about streamsend, has anyone use this before?
I am using Email-M.Com which is the best Email Marketing Service Provider.
I use Epsilon at my company daily and we deploy newsletters to approximately 100 million subscribers weekly. Constant Contact cannot handle this kind of volume from one single company. I stumbled on this site just to get an overview from other companies that deploy newsletters in the type of volume that we do. We considered Yesmail and researched it for about 2 months including demos and found that it would not be able to accommodate our needs. Epsilon may not be best but it can definitely handle high volume
Danny,
Nice note and interesting….I’m curious if your email size and volume is focused around lead-generation, or it’s all an in-house list. That’s some serious volume. Would you ever consider taking that kind of volume in-house behind your own firewall?
Another great source, and a better deep-dive review has been done by John Caldwell at http://redpillemail.com/blog/email-vendor-guide.
We at Jaymail look after some pretty huge campagins and it is interesting to see the percentage of providers offering management services.
We notice that this level of service is missing for the SME’s and that is where we fit in - adding that full service management into the mix.
Very interesting read,
Martin
Marketing Manager
Jaymail Email Marketing
In fact the creative and innovative presentation ability presents in this blog is quite awesome, tough it was the true fact that email marketing is the best way to promote and developed a business life and I found some of the best email marketing service provider here but I was still prefer the iContact email marketing service provider.
we’re looking to upgrade from constant contact and have been looking at silverpop, exact target, responsys and cheetah mail. frankly from a demo perspective we have foudn silverpop the most user friendly and give us various options. Cheetah mail was the most complicated interface tool. Any thoughts on these options?