技术Exchange : E-Marketing

Simplicity. Too much of the industry is focused on high-end features, but is neglecting the smaller business person who doesn't have time to learn the esoteric HTML commands, APIs, have an IT person, etc. Templates are a start, but why not offer a service (that you can outsource) to do it all for a company.

Learning. Teach people how to grow their list. Show them what works in email campaigns & opt-in forms (using the metadata from your existing clients).

Results. If users aren't getting the results from their campaigns, offer a consulting service to help them improve (again, using the metadata).

** No points sought for this response. **

自然I should let Neil answer here, but I can't help myself.

StreamSend used to have smaller account offerings (as low as 500 emails for $5.95 per month), but it seems that they are trying to go upstream a little. Given the great customer support they provide (disclosure: we are a customer), I can understand why they made this decision.

Also, StreamSend gives each individual account its own IP address for improved deliverability. I can't see how they could continue to do this for an account generating $72/year in gross revenue.

There are companies that charge hundreds of dollars extra per month for a private IP address, and you can have it with StreamSend as part of your regular service.

Just my $0.02.

Take it away, Neil!

- Paul

I see you already offer integration with Google Analytics. You could possibly expand on that with offering an integrated Google Adwords functionality so users can run full campaigns through your site. It might even be worth partnering with an online advertising distributor for even more campaign reach in one place. For example, if a customer is running a time-sensitive promotion, they could run an e-mail campaign, adwords campaign and banner ads as well as full budget control all from one interface.

Hi Neil,

I am a StreamSend International reseller partner and most of my custumers, are asking me for a more multichannel integration as, each time more and more, many and important ESP are offering.
I mean about RSS and SMS integration and also about RSS BLOG updates system such as FeedBurner, Aweber, Icontact and others are offering now.
Another little improvement would be to include an alert email comm to the account owner, each time one person is successfully subscribed. Now we have to enter several times to the app to see the new subscribers....

What do you think about this ?

Best regards

Raoul A

Neil

1. I've reported the off-topic poster you mentioned above to the mods.

2. Deliverability is one big aspect that concerns me when thinking about using outsourced mail services.

Specifically, having an e-mail go out with my company e-mail address on it that is sent from an IP address other than whatever my company's MX records resolve to, will trigger an alarm in many corporate mail filtering systems.

I'm pretty sure other corporates would also be concerned. (If they knew).

If you had a definitive response to that problem I think you would create a strong competitive advantage. You could make the advantage even stronger, by communicating the problem clearly.

Hope that helps.

ChrisB

** Disclaimer: StreamSend is a sponsor of my site **

I would love to see more handholding by ESPs for busy marketers and newcomers in the form of automated alerts when something "goes wrong". Not in a mechanical sense, but in terms of a poor metric.

So when you get an unusually low open rate based on past performance of your list, you get a red flag which you can click on and it takes you to an article on "improving open rates"...

Rather than repeat myself, I wrote about this in detail elsewhere:

https://www.email-marketing-reports.com/iland/2008/01/yahoo-deliverability-...

A couple of other examples:

1. System tags new subscribers by source and alerts you when one source under- or overperforms.

2. System looks at address domains and automatically alerts you when a particular domain has low deliverability.

Stuff that full-timers check themselves. But most people using ESPs have neither time nor expertise. Anything that automates this kind of actionable intelligence would be a great help.

Dear Neil

I hope that this is better late than never – I’m just launching a new product and a new company.

You make a very good case about the expense of handling small accounts, but with the phrase, “From tiny acorns---“, ringing in my ears, I think that you neglect this sector at your peril. Favouring the of securing of larger pieces of business through unique offerings and competitive advantage means that your search for new customers will always involve the filter of size or the scale of effort they are prepared to commit to when new to email marketing.

In other words, your new business sales people are going to get told to piss off more frequently than is good for their mental health. Personally, I think that you can overcome this barrier by an element of self service and by providing customer support at a commercially profitable rate.

To an extent, we do the same with CRM software and Forecasting solutions. We don’t want to sell a few licences for a DIY job and then be expected to service thousands of accounts with a few users each, encountering endless problems because it takes 6 months to learn Maximizer CRM practice to be able to install and configure a system in a commercially viable time-frame.

In fact, we don’t have a single success story where a one or two user licence has been self-installed and configured and blossomed into a multi-user site of happy, highly focussed and configured users!

Instead, if people won’t buy some services from us, we decline to sell. It’s the “Buy some services” bit which I think that you can replicate with StreamSend.

I accept that under your current structure that small accounts are unprofitable and to lose money on 90% of them whilst 10% turn into profitable customers over, say 3 years is probably an invitation for you to go bust.

If however you take all the aspects of a smaller email campaign and put them on a self-service website, you can overcome this. The users will inevitably hit problems, so will need to have a technical support and development resource allied to making these accounts work properly. To make my model work, you will need to charge a commercial rate for this support and make the fact that it has to be paid for an item in bold print on your contract and on your website offering. That way, if you get overwhelmed, you are being profitably overwhelmed and therefore capable of adding to your support staff.

Also, when looking at your competitive model, you must realise that on the mid-range accounts and larger accounts, you are up against us in the bespoke CRM arena where, contrary to our dislike if DIY software systems, we encourage DIY email activities!

Here are some “State Secrets”

A typical CRM system in our area costs around £400 / license / user for the software.

For a single user through to about 5 users, we can configure and install the software in a day. We can even train the users of a small system on the basics on the same day – say about £800. Support is variable, but if the users are trained and the system professionally installed, it works out at about £80 per user per year, paid monthly.

It is therefore entirely conceivable that a company can go from nothing to an in-house CRM based email marketing capability for as little as £1300. For a further days work, we can configure auto-response software to trace, track and analyse every email shot with the added advantage that positive responses are batted to the CRM system and the relevant salesperson for as many email campaigns as the user wants. When they need to add to their prospecting pool, email addresses and names, associated address and company details can be purchased and loaded onto the system.

An office with 10 users would obviously cost more, but we are still looking at about £7,000 for a CRM system which will handle as many emails as you want as often as you want and which is available to all staff, with the added value of having a conventional CRM system for all other activities, such as service, sales forecasting and so-on.

If you don’t go for these types of smaller and medium size account, you will lose them to our community, because once an organisation has started to see success from an internally generated email and see the benefits of having access to all the metrics, they have to become very large users of email marketing before they will even consider using your services. This might seem a bit bonkers, but I appear to be advising you not to neglect a sector in order that you will compete better with us!

Whoever said that we look too much after our own vested interests at MarketingProfs! In reality, we see our smaller users using CRM to do emails, medium users tend to split the burden over email service providers and their own system whilst large users farm out most New Business Development email work to a third party because they do not want to have their CRM system cluttered with email-list fodder.

Good grief – Boris Johnson, the Conservative party Candidate has just been announced the winner of the election for Mayor of London, so I’m off to celebrate as I can here the sound of the party from here!

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Xspirt