E-mail Marketing Vendor Landscape, Marketing Resource Management

The E-Mail Marketing Vendor Landscape
Jared Shusterman

Recently, ExactTarget announced they raised $30 million in new funding bringing the company’s total funding up to $208 million since inception. This comes on the heels of other announcements, such as iContact’s $40 million dollar raise last year. Clearly, the e-mail marketing industry continues to grow.

E-Mail marketing companies all differ in their core focus – it is important to size up your own requirements before jumping in.

Recently, we put together the following slide for our national brand clients. We believe it is helpful to understand a business sales channel first before approaching the e-mail marketing vendor landscape.

At SproutLoud, we think about sales channels in three categories: Direct, Dependent and Independent.

In Direct sales channels, as the category name suggests, the organization sending the e-mail owns the business or consumer relationship and therefore communicates directly. Enterprise e-mail marketing platforms like ExactTarget work really well.

In either Dependent or Independent sales channels, the organization is selling their brand’s product or service through a third party. Franchise marketing, independent agent marketing, VARs, affiliates, home-based employees, etc. The communication to the end buyer of the brand is happening through an in-direct channel (or by a local entity). In a dependent sales channel, i.e. a franchiser / franchisee, the organization has legal authority on directing how the third party advertises. With an independent sales channel, i.e. a manufacturer selling through retailers, that same legal authority doesn’t exist. Indeed, the third party may have many options on what brand’s product / services to market and how to market them.

Once these sales channels are identified, the needs for an e-mail marketing tool begin to surface. As this graphic illustrates, supporting indirect dependent and independent sales channels is complex. Whereas an e-mail marketing manager working for a centralized organization has direct access to the customer to sculpt proper e-marketing tactics, a distributed marketing organization has to rely on other channels to communicate their brand message. The customer relationship is owned by a third party. In these cases, a typical Enterprise e-mail marketing platform, and corresponding services behind the platform, doesn’t suffice.

The more independent the sales channel, the greater the risk to the brand because the marketing message is less controlled. In addition, the brand struggles with receiving proper business intelligence when the communications are being sent through a third-party. If the brand isn’t providing the proper tools, chances are that the third party is having their own dialogue with the customer in a way that isn’t necessarily brand compliant. For example, the third party is creating e-mail templates using brand assets from scratch with tools like Constant Contact.

With respect to e-mail marketing tools, the brand has to find a way to support a greater number of versions (all the requests coming from the field to customize and deploy e-mail marketing assets), even while the number of contacts per e-mail blast may be minimal (smaller business entities typically have smaller list sizes versus millions of e-mail subscribers in enterprise lists). This makes for a logistical nightmare.

In distributed marketing environments, versus centralized enterprise marketing environments, different business needs mean very different approaches to choosing the right software from the e-mail marketing landscape.