The dissatisfaction came in three major areas:

1. Lack of customer/technical support.
2. Complexity of the product for new team members to learn.
3. And, a lack of adaptation to mobile/responsive email templates.

I’d like to explore all three of these complaint areas for a few minutes. But first a disclaimer that I will compare the complaints I’ve catalogued across all email sending platforms whether they be an ESP or an MA platform. I will not get into the differences between using an ESP vs. MA. That’s for another time.

Lack of customer/technical support was the major complaint of 2017

Many email sending platforms, like IBM Watson and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (which contains both ExactTarget and Pardot), have removed the option to call in to talk to a live customer or technical support person when you have a problem. You are asked to either fill out a support ticket or interact with a community. That puts the onus on you to frame your question just right, or you’ll get a bogus answer from either. The community usually responds within 24 hours, however you could be left hanging with a big problem for several hours until someone does answer. I predict that email sending platforms that do offer live, 24/7 customer/technical support, like the relative newcomer, Adestra, will begin to steal market share from the other ESPs.

The inability to quickly onboard new email marketing team members was the second major complaint of 2017

I noticed my clients taking a critical eye to the time/complexity it takes to train new email marketing automation team members. Training time is a real cost to the company and affects the ability to quickly replace or expand staff. Some Marketing Automation platforms are so sophisticated and complex, like Oracle Responsys, that you’re almost forced to outsource the usage of it, or at least recruit very specifically for talent with experience using it — which is a limited talent pool. I see clients opting for less complex marketing automation tools, such as Pardot or Hubspot, which have reasonably good training and on-boarding programs and seem to be easier for newbies to learn. They are also more economical for those who don’t need all of the Oracle-like sophisticated features, and who need more basic campaign setup, scoring and nurturing.

I also envision more outsourcing of email marketing operations to agencies, like Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., because the labor market will become increasingly more constrained and finding talent (even worldwide) will become more difficult.

You’d think all email sending and marketing automation platforms would support mobile/responsive design. They don’t.

The third major complaint we heard was with platforms not supporting responsive design very well. We’ve re-designed most of our client’s emails to be mobile/responsive, however not all of their email systems have adapted perfectly well to the demands this places on the email sending platform. For instance for one client, their Constant Contact email system would not allow us to drop in a new two-column email template that would re-stack into one column on mobile. Constant Contact does have hard-coded templates that do re-stack, but the client didn’t like any of them. The inability to use your own email creative is very frustrating. We wound up moving the email template over to Vertical Response to test it, just to make sure it wasn’t our code. It worked perfectly there.

With 2018 there will be big changes to market share for email sending and marketing automation platforms. We envision Adestra will steal market share from IBM Watson and ExactTarget (part of IBM Marketing Cloud) because of their live 24/7 support. We project Pardot and Hubspot to supplant Marketo and Oracle for their easier training and staffing. And, tools like Constant Contact will need to up their game or be replaced by upper tier tools who fully support responsive design.

If you need helping choosing or running your Email Sending or Marketing Automation platforms, we can help. Contact us today.

Read about creating email templates here.

The post Why we are Predicting a Major Shake-up in Email Sending and Marketing Automation Platforms for 2018 appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

I’ve Come to a New Revelation. We Should Not Accept Bad Email Addresses from List Providers ANY MORE.

I’ve been researching and providing B2B and B2C lists to our clients campaigns for over 27 years. For B2B clients, I’ve used every data provider out there, including D&B, Netprospex, Discover.org, Data.com, OneSource, Lake Group, Hoovers, you name it — and they all have one thing in common: a high percentage (10-20%) of bad data, and even worse, bad email addresses. It’s as though the providers expect us to pay top dollar AND accept a certain percentage of bad email addresses as normal and acceptable. Yeah sure, they’ll replace the bad ones, but by the time you’ve figured out which are bad, the campaign may be long over and your email sending provider (ESP) is hot under the collar from your unacceptable email deliverability rate. Here’s why:

First of All, it’s Getting Harder to Fix the Bad Email Addresses Yourself

It’s become the practice of many marketers to go along with the bad data the providers supply and try to validate or “fix” it themselves by using some kind of a verification tool such as BriteVerify. However, the spam filters are catching on to these verification tools and learning to spoof them by giving false reports or throwing a higher percentage of emails into a catch all bucket, which you shouldn’t mail because they’re not really verified. So you’ve just paid a penny a name or more for validation data you increasingly cannot trust. As a result, it will increasingly bring your email sending domain reputation down by sending to bad email addresses.

Secondly, Improved Database Technology

Secondly, database technology has improved so much with AI and social media verification, that a list vendor literally has no excuse to have inaccurate contact data, let alone bad email data. If they have bad email data, they’re simply not very good at what they do, and they don’t deserve your business.

Lastly, don’t let them be lazy. Make them REALLY validate the data before they supply it to you. Ultimately, that means they have to be creative on their own dime and their own time to figure out if the email addresses are valid.

Finding the Best List Owners

I’ve known some list owners to send a mini survey out on some topic related to your campaign, to see which emails delivered (and which didn’t). This has an added bonus of giving you the response results to the survey. Others have very sophisticated email validation procedures that look at the data from 200+ data points. Bottom line, these list vendors work harder to provide you a good product, and they deserve your business more than the other guys.

You may ask who these mysterious data providers may be. I don’t make it a practice to endorse any vendors in my blog, because they may not offer everyone the same services that they offer me. I have negotiated with my vendors to go the extra mile, do the hard work, and to provide a good product the first time around. And that’s the key. You should negotiate and demand for this level of service from your vendor too.

In conclusion, the time has come for marketers to revolt and not accept bad email addresses from their B2B Data providers ANY MORE.

If you’re in need of quality B2B email lists, our pros can help you. Contact us to find out more.

Read about creating email templates here.

The post Why You Shouldn’t Accept Bad Email Addresses from Your B2B Data Provider ANY MORE appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.