This week the European Email Vendor Features and Functions Guide is released, the second part of the guide that offers side-by-side comparison of in total 53 ESPs worldwide.
The first worldwide edition of John Caldwell’s guide
In a collaboration between our friend John Caldwell‘s Red Pill Email and Social Email Marketing contributor Jordie van Rijn his Emailmonday, this will be the first time there will be a world edition.
Adding the European vendors the number of included ESPs is effectively doubled, thus presenting a more complete overview of the international ESP marketplace.
Jordie van Rijn: “We see a lot of ESP’s expanding their services abroad. Sometimes with very aggressive methods and competitive pricing to get a bigger piece of the email market. We are seeing that American suppliers look at Europe for innovation and clients, and vice versa. The US version has been running for two years, now the European vendors are also included.”
Differences between European Email Service Providers
While all ESPs find it important that email marketing strategy is well thought out, 20% of the email vendors don’t offer any email strategy advice. A quarter doesn’t offer creative services.
In the email tools themselves there are also large differences. If you would like to have some more control of you data than just a simple export mechanism, it is advisable to look at all the different ESP offerings. From the questions the guide asked European ESPs about data control there where suppliers that offered 89% of all functionalities, but there were also some that only offered 20%.
A new trend is offering pre-configuered campaigns, like an abandoned cart campaign, a welcome mail and automatic resends to non-openers. With this type of e-mailings, much is gained in conversion and efficiency. But only 2 out of the 28 European Email vendors offered all types of pre-configured emailings. The majority offers less than 40% and a few don’t offer any of these campaigns.
Contents of the guide
The 2011 Email Vendor Features & Functions Guides show side-by-side comparisons of 53 email vendors ranging from small market table vendors to commercial MTAs and points in between, with over 200 essential questions asked. For the first time, a desktop application was added that helps users to identify the vendors best suited to their needs based on their own business criteria.
John Caldwell, the author of the guide has been in the email space since 1996. The Red Pill Email founder, has worked on the agency side, the client side, and as a consultant, using deployment tools that range from ESPs to in-house to home-grown email systems.
Jordie van Rijn, contributing editor of the EU Email Vendor Features and Functions guide, is an independent email marketing consultant. With his company Emailmonday he has over 8 years of hands-on experience as an e-mail marketing and loyalty marketing consultant.
StrongMail yesterday issued a press release, announcing “a significant increase in customers for its burst email delivery technology” (Email Delivery Server).