Email Service Provider: What is an ESP?

An email marketing service provider is a technology platform that enables you to send marketing emails to your audience.

Email marketing is still one of the most effective and popular forms of marketing, with an average ROI of $42 for every dollar spent. But you won’t be able to reap the benefits of email marketing without an effective email marketing service provider.

If you operate an e-commerce brand, you’ll likely use email marketing as one of your primary channels for engaging your audiences. If that’s the case, your email marketing service provider will need to provide a range of functionality. In this article, we’ll look at some of the use cases for email marketing and how you can integrate it into a cross-channel marketing strategy with a best-in-class email marketing service provider.

Email Marketing Use Cases

Your brand can use email marketing in a variety of ways to engage your audience. Here are a few key examples:

Customer Onboarding

When a customer first subscribes to your mailing list, you’ll want to introduce—or educate, if necessary—them to what your brand has to offer, especially if you have a product or service that has a learning curve. You can use your email marketing service provider to set up an onboarding sequence to welcome and engage new customers. It might include embedding or linking to a welcome or demonstration video, or guiding your customers to key resources on your website. You might also encourage your customers to fill out a form with more information about their shopping and subscription preferences. A successful onboarding campaign can drive high engagement, and encourage trial subscribers to make the move to your premium model.

Content Marketing

Customers will often get fatigued if you’re sending them promotional offers too frequently. One of the best ways to continually build engagement and keep your brand top of mind is to use content marketing to develop educational, informative content that will resonate with your audience, but isn’t directly sales-related. Your email newsletter can share quick facts or embedded videos or links to longer blog articles, videos, and podcasts. By engaging with your audience through content they’ll find valuable, they’ll gain trust in your brand, helping them become more loyal customers.

Promotional Offers

If you’re offering a sale, you can use your email marketing service provider to send ad creative and discount offers, linking them to your site or mobile app. While some promotional offers may be applicable to your entire audience (i.e., “take 40% off any item”), if your email marketing service provider offers deeper segmentation, you can customize the offers that you display. For example, a woman who frequently purchases leggings from your e-commerce store could receive an email featuring her favorite brand of leggings with a discount offer. This type of email personalization can help further engage your audience and deliver a one-of-a-kind experience.

Retargeting Offers

If your email marketing service provider is integrated with your website and app analytics, you can use behavioral data to retarget your users with customized offers based on their browsing history. For instance, if a customer recently clicked on a pair of boots on your website, you can send them an email featuring those boots along with similar products they may like.

Cart Abandonment Messages

If a customer placed an item in an online or in-app shopping cart and then didn’t complete the purchase, you can follow up with an email that encourages them to navigate back to their shopping cart, even offering a special promotional discount for completing their purchase.

Post-Purchase Feedback Requests

Once a customer has made a purchase, it’s the right time to solicit reviews, ratings, and testimonials. You can set up campaigns with emails requesting feedback that are triggered by customer purchases, helping you to gain valuable social proof and user data for your brand.

Email Marketing in a Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy

While all of these practices can be effective using email alone, integrating email as a channel within a more comprehensive cross-channel marketing strategy will help you provide a unified experience that connects with your customers wherever they are and however they prefer to engage with your brand.

By leveraging email alongside other channels including SMS messaging, in-app messaging, push notifications, and direct mail, you can set up consistent, sequenced messaging that reaches your customers with the right content at the right time, based on workflow event triggers. For example, if a customer doesn’t open your promotional email, your marketing workflow might send an SMS message around the same promotion several hours later, followed by an in-app push notification, giving them additional opportunities to interact with your brand and engage with your content.

Using a cross-channel marketing platform like Iterable enables your brand to go beyond what you can expect from a standalone email marketing service provider. You’ll be able to generate a complete 360-degree customer view that uses demographic data, geographic data, and behavioral data to help you develop dynamic content and personalized messaging sequences across all your marketing channels on a user-by-user basis. Creating personalized content at scale will help you to engage your audience on a deeper level, providing a superior customer experience that helps your brand drive more revenue opportunities and brand loyalty.

The combination of your marketing campaigns will be able to outperform email alone when using a cross-channel marketing platform. Forrester found that Iterable’s cross-channel marketing platform led to a 700% ROI for one brand, with a 20% increase in abandoned cart recovery and 18% year over year recurring revenue growth.

Rather than choosing a standalone email marketing service provider, choose a unified platform that will help you reach your customers with integrated content across every channel.