E-commerce Link: E-mail Solutions

4. Understanding of your business. You understand your customers better than any external resource. There will be greater stewardship of your e-mail efforts as a result.

The biggest risk with an in-house solution is deliverability. Internet service providers (ISPs) are aggressively filtering e-mail, and corporations are using filters and blacklists. Many e-mail service providers work with ISPs to ensure mail coming from their domains/servers is delivered. Deliverability is their bread and butter so they dedicate many resources to this issue.

If you mail internally, your IT department must actively work with ISPs, and your mail administrator must know what to do if you’re blacklisted or blocked.

E-mail technology and delivery should be a core competence of your company. Make sure in-house system integration, support, maintenance and ongoing upgrade activity does not dilute your organizational focus.

The Outsourcing Option

Outside service bureaus provide scalable, reliable, measurable solutions derived from experience handling many clients. Most e-mail deployment solutions require no additional investment in hardware, software or bandwidth costs. With the exception of initial setup, you won’t need significant IT involvement.

You gain the advantage of the latest technology. This is a competitive space, and most major vendors continually add new features. You also can tap into best practices derived from their work with multiple clients.

The self-service ASP model is popular. Typically, the marketer handles all campaign setup through a desktop interface to the provider’s system. For a typical campaign, you create the e-mail promotion and select the list of customers who will receive it.

The full-service model requires the e-mail solutions provider to handle more of the execution. For instance, the service bureau, rather than the marketer, may load the copy and select which customers will receive a promotion based on written instructions.

The best solution is a hybrid approach. Many marketers use the full-service option while their staff becomes familiar with the procedures involved. They then move to self-service. But having full-service available is like an insurance policy; you can always draw on these resources if the need arises.

How to Select a Solution

There is no shortage of companies that provide e-mail solutions. One place to start is at ClickZ (www.clickz.com/e-mailstrategies/serv), which provides a list of registered companies. Forrester Research and Jupiter Research both have rated some of the major vendors. These reports can help you determine what the experts think is important when deciding on a solution.