What is the best Email Marketing Program?

What requirements are necessary of an Email Service Provider's feature set in order to create a best in class B2B email marketing program?

• We are looking for a ESP that includes CRM integration (Microsoft Dynamics) and robust reporting capabilities....etc...

• Answer:

  When it comes to an email service provider for B2B, several requirements rise to the top, although there are many things to consider. Before suggesting some points to consider, it's important to realize the requirements for the "right" B2B tool is highly dependent upon your specific requirements. You'll want to consider your process, the current technologies you are using and how they need to integrate with an email service provider, the metrics important to you, etc. In any event, here are a few items you'll want to consider: CRM - are you using a CRM (e.g. Microsoft Dynamics, http://salesforce.com) and does the B2B tool integrate with it; if so, what does that integration provide? Nurturing campaign setup and tracking - in B2B, lead nurturing is key to bring those leads down the sales funnel; you'll want a tool that makes it easy to setup, manage, monitor, and report on any of a variety of drip campaigns, some of which may need to be nested Ease of creating emails - you'll want to an user interface to create and manage your actual emails that you set up in the system Form capture - you'll want to capture leads on your website and have them flow directly into your B2B tool to notify you of the form completion and to begin the nurturing sequence, in particular beginning immediately with a welcome, thank you, or other relevant transactional email Metrics and reporting - in any marketing program, it's critical that you be able to report on the important metrics - e.g. which forms are bringing in the leads most likely to convert, which incentives are working best, which campaigns are producing the best return on investment overall Testing tools - throughout any campaign, you'll want to conduct A/B split tests to determine which subject lines, what content, which incentives, etc. are resulting in a) the best response and b) the best conversion, ultimately; your B2B tool must make this easy Integration with your website analytics - many B2B tools have their own tracking and integration, but  you may want it integrated with your standard web analytics as well I hope that helps!