Why Use An Email Service Provider?

The GDRP has been been big news recently, in the lead up to its go live date of 25 May 2018. Businesses in the EU and around the globe have been scrambling to reconfirm the opt-in of its subscribers for all things marketing including email marketing. Most western countries have an anti spam law however the GDPR goes a lot further and teaches us to think ‘data protection’ first and foremost before we seek the opt in from subscribers. Most businesses have worked hard on their email marketing lists over many years and as countries far and wide also consider their laws on data protection, those who are already using email service providers are a step ahead of the rest.

Outsourcing Email Marketing Delivery

Outsourcing your email marketing delivery just makes sense. ESPs (email service provider) offers the automation of the subscriber opt in process and it’s usually what’s known as a double opt in. This process allows subscribers (your clients, website visitors etc subscribe via a form which has data fields that enable the business to collect and then send commercial emails targeted to your preferences. The double opt-in involves providing your data and clicking send and the ESP sends a ‘confirm’ request to your email address. Once you’ve opened and clicked on the confirmation link you’re on the business’s email marketing list. The business has what they need to prove the subscriber opt-ed in.

Preferences & Opt-Out

An ESP also has the functionality to allow the subscriber to view their ‘preferences’ – i.e. view and update the data the business has collected. This is a fundamental requirement of the data protection law in the UK and the GDPR in Europe and at any time the subscriber can also unsubscribe (opt-out) automatically, and this saves businesses a lot of time. With the auto unsubscribe feature there’s no need for the business to manually make the change to the subscriber’s record in their email list and if the email database sychronises with the business’s CMS via API then they won’t need to make any updates there either.

Delivery

Your business has invested in an marketing campaign that includes email and with the perfect eDM HTML and exit landing pages set up, getting the email to the inbox is a priority. ESPs manage this well via whitelisting their IPs. Bulk email can be delivered and ISPs allow it through. This is the starting point to getting your emails to the inbox however as your email content can be deemed too spammy and thus be blocked by the recipients’ spam filters. However managing your content is controllable and again most ESPs provide spam filter checks so you can check the spam work count in your eDMs before executing the delivery.

Measurement & Analytics

Marketing is not just the pretty and creative stuff at the front end, i.e. what you see in email messages and on landing pages etc. It’s also about measurement and analytics. This is where the data collection and review comes into it’s own. ESPs provide open and click tracking so your eDMs can measure the success of the email campaign. More data is being collected and added to the subscriber record and preferences too so once again the ESP is assisting your business with it’s compliance requirements.