There comes a time in every email marketer’s career when they have to decide on upgrading to a modern ESP or sticking it out with the entry-level system already in place.
With an entry-level email service provider, you’re leaving money on the table by missing out on valuable opportunities due to personalization, data flexibility, and scalability limitations.
But the thought of upgrading can seem daunting. And that’s why you’ve found yourself here at this moment in time.
We’re here to walk you through three key areas in which modern ESPs have improved upon entry-level providers and how your marketing strategies benefit from them.
To get a complete look at how a modern ESP can help you reach your business goals, download our guide, An Introduction to Modern ESPs: How to Prepare for Growth.
3 Key Improvements of the Modern ESP
1. Evolve Past Personalization to Achieve Individualization
To achieve higher customer retention rates, you have to humanize your messaging at the individual level.
Over 90% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that are able to remember their purchases and search history, tailor messaging to their location, and provide them with hyper-personalized promotions based on their profile information.
Modern ESPs make individualization exponentially easier by allowing for more robust user profiles that make it easier to create one-to-one conversations.
If you have more information about each customer’s unique preferences, your messaging can get that much more granular in its personalization.
2. Interact with Customers Beyond the Inbox
Email has, time and again, proven to generate the highest marketing ROI, but in the digital age, there are too many opportunities to lose if you are focusing all of your efforts into single-channel campaigns.
The average consumer picks up their smartphone 47 times a day. The fact of the matter is that people are always on their phone. You may, in fact, be reading this on your phone!
A modern ESP makes it possible to engage with every customer across any channel. Email. SMS. Push. Web push. In-app. Direct mail.
Even if you don’t have an app, you don’t have to worry. Brands like prescription skincare provider Curology are using SMS messages to engage with customers.
A modern ESP gives you the flexibility to not only A/B test the content of your messages but also the channels themselves. Optimizing by channel allows your business to determine the ideal customer journey for every subscriber.
Mobile campaigns like Curology’s SMS #CreamOn challenge provide highly personalized opportunities to engage with customers.
The fight to get your brand in front of the customer is tough enough; you can’t afford to miss an opportunity to engage with them in any way you can.
3. Grow as Rapidly as Your Audience
With a modern ESP, you can personalize to a much finer degree. You can also interact with customers through multiple channels. But what happens when your customer base grows exponentially?
Entry-level ESPs reach their limits when trying to scale. In particular, building targeted campaigns to handle an audience of millions becomes too difficult to execute when you’re trying to individualize each message.
Modern ESPs simplify the process with detailed workflows that can be tailored to any and every iteration of customer engagement, whether you’re sending transactional confirmations, highlighting your latest sale or wishing someone a happy birthday.
These workflows make it easier to utilize the data you have collected to ensure every customer is on the right journey with your brand.
Keeping up with your growth doesn’t require extensive resources either.
Marketing teams of as few as two people can send 500,000 monthly emails to hundreds of thousands of customers, A/B test all messages and more without requiring heavy engineering support.
Modern ESPs maintain campaigns with real-time data, ensuring that your customers are not receiving irrelevant information. You no longer have to worry about sending a cart abandonment email after a customer’s already purchased the item or a promotional postcard to the wrong address.
With a modern ESP, there’s no need to worry about playing catch-up to your own success.
How to Know When It’s Time to Upgrade
If you’re reading this, you’ve reached the inflection point where your brand is ready to grow, but your entry-level system is hindering your progress. Perhaps you see the breaking point on the horizon and want to prepare yourself and your team.
At the point where your brand’s growth is at stake, time is of the essence. Limitations in entry-level systems mean every day more data is slipping through the cracks. Every day, your messaging becomes less relevant and your audience tunes out.
It’s time to upgrade.
Of course, these three benefits are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the difference a modern ESP can make for your business.
For ways to unlock one-to-one personalization and questions to ask yourself when upgrading, download our full guide, An Introduction to Modern ESPs: How to Prepare for Growth.
