Lately I've been doing a comparison of email marketing providers - although it's a little unfair to focus only on email.  One of the purposes has been to identify a single platform that presents a unified communications experience for the marketer.  A platform that allows the marketer to send email, SMS text, voice broadcasts, instant messaging, etc in a single, unified campaign.  You know, message one is an email, message two is text and message three is a voice broadcast.  All automated connected and sequential from the marketers perspective so it can be set up once and let it run.  From what I can tell these are few and far between.  At least for a price that is within reach for small to mid-sized companies.

We looked at more than a dozen companies.  These included such well known providers as Vertical Response, Constant Contact, Genius, ExactTarget Lyris, Responsys, SilverPop, Alterian, Blue Hornet, Unica, Marketo and Eloqua.  As you can see there are many options in this space.

We were doing a fast look not a look that was intended to be exhaustive, say like a Forrester Wave Analysis.  We talked to several at length and others we only looked at briefly.  Some dropped out quickly due to functional limitations otherwise due to price.  We got to a short list pretty quickly.  We had specific criteria that were important to the business we're working with.  Things like cost, maximum limits on table relationships, send volume capacity, price per send, startup cost, breadth of APIs available, flexibility in the use of recommendation engines and so on.

Part of my purpose for giving the laundry list above is to express how important it is to know your own specific requirements and environment so you can find a match on the type of solution that will best fit your needs.  Every solution does not fit every company.

I won't tell you here which one we selected, but if you want to know, call me (602-692-3818) and I'm happy to tell..and to explain why we picked the one that we did.

www.iangilyeat.com