Three Questions to Ask your SMTP Service Provider Before You Buy
Getting your emails delivered to your customers is imperative if you want them to respond to your messages. While employing an outsourced SMTP email server solution is the best choice due to its ease of use and flexibility, before you make a final decision on who will take on the important task of handling your transactional email, make sure you ask the provider these three key questions.
1. How will you ensure my emails get delivered? Over the past 10 years email deliverability has slowly worked its way into the fabric of the email marketing and operations conversation. Despite the growing awareness, studies show that more than 23% of email never reaches the inbox. In fact, that is a significant dip over the previous years. Given that, dive into the providers knowledge of the email deliverability space and what measures they will take to ensure that your transactional messages reach every one of your customers each time you deploy.
2. What analytics are available to me? Before you buy, take a deep dive into the provider’s analytics. Go beyond the dashboard and review reports to understand the level of information you can truly extract from the platform. Also, if you will be sending on a shared IP, ask about their email delivery rates. Shared IPs can harbor senders with questionable reputations. You want to be sure that your own reputation won’t be unfairly tarnished by someone else’s bad acts.
3.What level of customer service can I expect? Too often, providers “check the box” when it comes to email deliverability, but don’t have expert people in place to support their customer base. The email deliverability landscape is changing all the time. You’ll need a team of qualified specialists to monitor industry trends and be available to troubleshoot and answer your questions at a moment’s notice. Make sure that should a critical delivery failure occur whether it be during normal business hours or after hours, that a specialist will not only pick up the phone, but also be able to solve our challenge at a moment’s notice.
Tags: deliverability, email delivery, ESP, smtp, SMTP service
Author: Carly Brantz
Carly Brantz is a veteran in the email deliverability space working to make email simple and easy for developers by regularly writing whitepapers, research briefs and blog posts about email, technology and industry trends.
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