4 email landscape updates you need to know

With the news that Salesforce is being pursued by at least one buyer in yet another possible round of consolidation, marketers looking for a new email services provider are facing more interesting questions than they did in the past. Questions regarding who has the best platform, best service, or the lowest CPM are being replaced by questions regarding who is going to be distracted by a merger or how a particular vendor’s business model is potentially going to change over time.

Understanding the tectonic shifts that have been occurring in the enterprise ESP space over the past couple of years — and are continuing today — is essential before beginning any RFP process. So this month we’ll take a very high-level view of the ESP landscape and how certain types of vendors approach the world of email marketing.

What’s up with all these cloud-based email solutions?

Most of the acquisition action over the past couple of years has occurred with cloud-based technology companies buying ESPs to extend their offerings for customers. Adobe acquired Neolane, Salesforce acquired ExactTarget, IBM acquired Silverpop, and finally Oracle acquired Responsys (and Eloqua). Like so many other terms in the marketing technology space, the words “cloud-based” are basically a new way of saying something is software-as-a-service. But those words are crucial in that they reflect how these companies are going to approach their email clients in the future.

Horizontal alignment of a suite of sales, service, and marketing tools is a core strategy of these companies with a focus on the technology side of the solution. Whatever the individual ESPs were before they were acquired, they are now part of larger companies that more often than not rely on a number of various partners to provide the services side of the equation. Don’t misinterpret me here; I’m not saying they are getting out of the services side of things. But it is not their focus because that’s not how technology companies think. Their partners include systems integrators as well as independent email agencies, so you will always be able to get the support you need — but it just might involve another vendor.

What about the MSP email platforms?

Before the cloud company acquisition spree of the past couple of years, back in 2003 and 2004, we saw the first acquisition spree by what are known as marketing services providers (MSPs). Back then saw Epsilon acquire Bigfoot Interactive, Acxiom purchased Digital Impact, Experian bought CheetahMail, and InfoUSA acquired Yesmail. There were other acquisitions at the time, but these were the big four.

MSPs at the time provided database marketing solutions. Because email marketing was becoming more and more data-driven, it seemed like a good fit for all these companies to add ESPs and have more things to sell to their data clients. By and large it was a good fit, as these companies all remain players in the email ecosystem to one degree or another. What sets these companies apart from the cloud-based solutions is their approach to servicing email clients. As a group, they bring a much broader service mentality to the table, with all of them offering a robust array of agency-type services for their clients. And rather than take the horizontal approach of the cloud companies (everything you need with one vendor), the MSPs continue to deploy a more vertical strategy — the data and the tools you need to deploy and analyze marketing campaigns.

What about point solutions?

One of the great things about email marketing is the constant innovation and rejuvenation in the sector. Many of the companies just acquired by the cloud-based companies rose to prominence as independent point solutions after the last round of acquisitions. And we already see a similar pattern today with a new wave of email point solutions, many with a unique approach to solving problems around greater personalization, lowered costs, cloud-based infrastructure, and much more. We reported on several of these in our 2015 Relevancy Ring Buyer’s Guide — companies like Sailthru, MessageGears, Message Systems (old company, new email solution), PostUp, and WhatCounts. They all can handle enterprise clients and are attracting more and more attention from large email marketers.

Multichannel vs. email only?

This is a bit of a trick question since most email platforms today incorporate at least some degree of multichannel capabilities. With some companies it’s through partnerships and easy integrations. With others, it’s native functionality built into the platform. Or it’s a combination. In any case, while currently the use of these multichannel capabilities by email marketers is in its early stages, the longer-term imperative to deploy will grow.

Marketers looking to use data from one channel to drive communications in another, or looking for more-accurate attribution models or even digital media optimization, will look to their email partners to provide the tools and strategies to drive these efforts. So even if you are email-only today, you’ll need to be thinking about tomorrow when it comes to partner selection. At a minimum, you’ll want to ensure that your email engagement data is easy to integrate into broader reporting and analytic tools you might be using.

Chris Marriott is the vice president of services and principal consultant at The Relevancy Group.

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4 email landscape updates you need to know