StrongMail's VP of market development outlines five factors for the right email deployment platform.
Email has forever changed the way we interact with each other in our professional lives. It's rapidly displacing traditional vehicles for communicating with customers, partners, suppliers and employees.
Naturally, enterprises are taking a hard look at how to harness the medium's enormous potential. They recognize that the benefits of email extend well beyond the cost savings of a digital medium. By leveraging email more intelligently, a company can revolutionize customer communications, strengthen brand loyalty and increase revenue. Plus, email can help streamline business processes for greater efficiency, productivity and profitability.
The conclusion is inescapable: Today's intelligent enterprises need to develop a core competence in their use of business-critical email. And those that possess the right platform for their email deployment will gain a significant competitive advantage over those that don't.
So what constitutes the right platform? Here are five factors to consider.
1. Integration. Your business should drive your email infrastructure, not the other way around. The right platform will tightly integrate with your backend databases and business processes to facilitate the relevant one-to-one communication and real-time responsiveness that your customers expect. Gone are the days when email deployment could be handled as a one-off process without a direct connection to vital customer data and the rest of your business.
2. Performance. While the right platform will be much more powerful than free-ware solutions, performance should not be judged just in terms of brute blasting capability. Today's environment demands intelligent, differentiated sending that accommodates your enterprise's different customer segments, brands or business units, and classes of mail. It also needs to take into account the rules and requirements of the various domains you send email to. Features such as virtual routing, adaptive message queuing, dynamic configuration updates, throttling and other domain controls should all be on your shopping list.
3. Visibility. Most enterprises (even those relying on outsourced solutions) are flying blind when it comes to the results of the email they send. They don't know whether or not it's been delivered, and as a result, can't cleanse their lists or default to other channels. Just as often, vital parts of the enterprise, such as the call center, don't even know an email has been sent. The right platform will provide the visibility to measure results, diagnose and correct problems, and more effectively interact with the recipients of your email.
4. Reputation. Your reputation as an email sender has a direct effect on email deliverability. Safeguarding your reputation comes down to following 'best practices,' which are often platform-dependent (dynamic content for message relevancy, throttling for traffic regulation, bounce management for list hygiene, et cetera). The right platform will provide you with the mechanisms to establish and maintain the good reputation that is vital to bottomline success.
5. Control. The right platform will put you in control. Business needs and market demands can shift unexpectedly, and your email infrastructure should provide you with the power and flexibility to accommodate those changes in real time. In doing so, it will transform how your enterprise does business, enabling it to build new revenue streams, improve customer loyalty and reduce costs.
By investing in the right email platform, enterprises can achieve better bottomline results today and future-proof them for tomorrow. The first truly email-enabled enterprises stand to win big. The last ones may lose all.
A 20-year direct marketing veteran -- both offline and online -- Dave Lewis is the vice president of market development for StrongMail Systems. He has spoken and written frequently on the challenges facing today's email marketers, and co-chairs the Email Sender & Provider Coalition (ESPC) working group that's responsible for outreach to the receiver community and the evaluation of reputation systems.