Once you’ve written your processes, designed your e-commerce store, and are ready to get trading, the next thing you’ll need to do is be able to communicate with your potential and current customers effectively. One of the tried and tested methods for doing so is by using email. It is a low cost and high deliverability solution for customer marketing and communication and allows for several benefits, depending on what you’ll be using the communications for. Let’s have a look at three things you need to consider before you choose an email service provider for your business email sending needs.
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What Kind of Email Will You Be Sending?
Will your business be sending bulk email to your users and customers in the form of email marketing campaigns, specials, and newsletters, or will your email sending needs be more transactional, sending email based on your user or customer’s interactions with your company? This will have a big impact on the email service provider you end up choosing.
The complexity is added to this decision because most businesses will have the need to send both different types of email to their customers, and when you choose a service for email sending, you’ll need to make the call on whether you want one that will provide both bulk and transactional services for your business, or if you prefer to keep these separate.
What is Your Technical Capability?
Some email service providers will have incredibly powerful and strong tools for software and web developers that can take advantage of their APIs, allowing you to customize every part of your email sending process within your business software. While these features are really useful if you have the technical ability, or if you employ software developers who can leverage off these advantages, if you’re looking for something simpler, you might not consider this an advantage. Instead, you might want to opt for a user-friendly console-based implementation that makes setting up and integrating the mail service provider with your online store quick and easy.
You Need Scalability
While scalability is the example we’ll use here, what we’re really suggesting is to make a full comparison of price plans offered by different mail providers. The two big players in the market, Mailgun and SendGrid, both offer quite different pricing options and plans for their services. It might affect your decision so you should learn the difference between the two offerings by making a direct comparison. You can do this easily on the PieSync website. One might offer the ability to send more emails in total per month but might limit the number of email addresses you can send a promotional mail to, so if you’re using the service for bulk email, it might not work for you.
Now that you have the information and knowledge that you need to make the correct decision on which email provider you should choose for your needs, you’re in a position to communicate effectively with your customers – whether they need confirmation of orders from your online store or you want to run customer retention campaigns.