The latest innovation can shape how you evaluate email platforms, but it isn’t enough on its own to determine what will actually work for your business. That’s part of the challenge when making platform decisions.
Innovation can force you to reassess how you evaluate and choose technology to avoid heading in the wrong direction. I was thinking about this after talking with a fellow marketer who was considering an RFP for an email platform.
As part of the background for setting up a useful RFP, I said it’s important to understand how the email industry has evolved and how core capabilities have developed. This is where you should start if you’re considering new technology, especially before defining what you’re looking for in a platform.
Email is the cornerstone of every marketing program. It has historically delivered the highest ROI and is the most proactive channel.
Regardless of how email has evolved, you also need to think about how to future-proof it and take a realistic approach to selecting a platform.
The golden age of ESP competition
Going back 20 years or so, the email technology industry had a handful of vendors. It wasn’t like today, with market segments, tiers and classes. Marketers had just a few choices. It was like being back in the old days of television when you had only 3 channels plus public TV. (You don’t remember that? Go ask your parents. Or maybe your grandparents. Man, I’m old.)
Back then, the big battle was between the enterprise-level ESPs like ExactTarget, Responsys and CheetahMail. Those competitive battles bred rapid and aggressive innovation as each company tried to gain an edge over the others, to win more RFPs and to secure its future. Each had a vision, whether it was to attract a buyer with deep pockets or to go public and become the next big technology success story.
This benefited technology in the middle market. The innovations and new developments that emerged from the enterprise-level race for the top eventually trickled down to companies in mid-tier and lower operations, who were competing just as hard for their own share of the email tech landscape.
That’s how top-down innovation pushed our industry ahead. It had to begin there because these top companies had the resources and staff to address the challenges their enterprise clients brought to them.
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Technology comes to the masses
Not that everybody needed the innovative answers they came up with. Back then, when I was working on RFPs, either as the end user or the technology provider or as an adviser helping my clients come up with successful plans, I went by one of several 80-20 rules.
One of these rules was that 80% of the functionalities listed in the RFP were the same. Send email, report on email, track email. User experiences varied, but the tech demands remained the same.
The 20% was the cool stuff: the innovative technology we could use to greet the consumer more effectively and that would give us new ways to increase our bottom line.
But we had to consider another 80-20 rule: that customers were using only about 20% of the functionality they had just bought on their new platforms. They weren’t taking advantage of all the cool stuff that brought them to our platform. They were just using what they needed to get emails out the door on time.
Today, I’m on yet another side, helping clients develop RFPs that will lead them to the right technology for their needs. I start at a different point. We look first at whether they already have the functionality they need on the platform they’re already paying for that would make their email programs better, easier, faster and more profitable.
When innovation stalled after consolidation
I mentioned earlier that one goal for some of the most innovative email companies was acquisition. Those began to happen a few years after their innovations took hold and transformed the industry.
Experian bought CheetahMail in 2004. In 2013, Oracle bought Responsys and Salesforce bought ExactTarget.
Innovation stalled after those acquisitions. Companies lost the competitive edge that pushed them to pursue new technologies or think in new ways about reaching customers.
What happened? Enterprise ESPs retreated to reinforce their infrastructure and shut down their innovation. Companies started focusing on ease of use, platform integrations and APIs.
How innovation started creeping back
The move to cloud-based mail transfer agencies (MTAs) produced an unexpected development. We started to see companies finding new ways to handle customer data. This came out of an earlier trend away from flat files toward relational data and how marketers could use that to inject dynamic content into emails and make them even more relevant.
But technology innovation was still in a lull. The 80-20 rule shifted to 95-5, with 95% of the platform remaining the same and 5% being innovative.
Innovation, when it did happen, came from small start-ups that focused on a single challenge and developed technology to address it, such as adding real-time data to email campaigns. They faced a lower barrier to entry than the super-sized enterprise companies and then, as it always happens, they got absorbed into bigger companies.
How AI reentered the conversation
In the last three to four years, the advent and acceptance of AI have fired up the innovation engine. It began with the phrase that dominated conversations far and wide: big data.
The question became, “How do we address big data?” It was relevant because many big companies had massive databases, at least in the U.S. Having 10 million, 20 million or 30 million records was not unusual.
Further fueling the discussion was the transition from relational data to schema-less data. Now, innovation is closer to the 80-20 balance we saw at the peak of email innovation, but we’re still not seeing the same level.
I say this because I’ve always gotten internal briefings from ESPs on their latest and greatest innovations. My response is the same every time: “Focus on what you do that’s different from the others. I already know you can send email and report on it. I want to know what you’re doing differently.”
Now, with the 80-20 rule coming back into play, what is that 80%? What is that pushover? That’s not only schema-less data. It is AI, integrated at every touchpoint.
Where AI is actually driving change
Recently, Zeta announced the launch of Athena, a conversational AI agent in the Zeta Marketing Platform that uses AI so marketers can generate predictive insights, build audiences and launch campaigns through natural language prompts.
For many of us in the email space, this sounded a little like IBM’s Watson platform, which also claimed to use a precursor of today’s AI to manage and automate campaigns. That never materialized.
This time, it looks as if we are finally going to execute on that vision. I’m not endorsing Athena here, but my behind-the-scenes look at it makes me think we have opened the door to practical live applications of AI in email marketing. It could well set a standard of innovation we haven’t seen in 20 years.
Back to the RFP
Now that you have the context of history, how can you use it to build your RFP or choose a technology platform? Consider the baseline questions that you must ask: Can you do X? Can you do Y? Can you do Z? That’s the 20% of your platform where you need to focus.
I still look at AI products within ESPs with a skeptical eye. Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester is famous for cutting through the hype in her Wave reports by saying, in effect, “It’s great that you have the technology, but do customers actually use it and show an ROI?”
In the same light, Chris Marriott of Email-Connect.com has been consistent in proclaiming, “AI isn’t a feature to evaluate, it’s a layer to locate. Where it sits in the architecture determines whether it drives outcomes or just generates output.”
This is the proof test. When you’re looking at the AI capabilities on a platform, ask yourself how realistic they appear to be.
- Does the innovation work?
- Does it add value?
- Will it help you make more money?
- Will it free up time you can use to develop and refine your email strategy, add more testing or find other improvements to your program?
The more things change…
The more they stay the same. You still have to contend with lack of staff, budget and technology resources. You have to be realistic in your approach to AI acceptance and use, questioning whether you can make it work given your circumstances and other demands on your time.
Do your due diligence, too. Talk to customer or ESP references similar to your business. Seek out people who are in the same boat, technology- or resources-wise and ask for their experiences.
Be honest with yourself and in your RFP, too. You might get proposals from companies that will stand out from the others based on their platforms and innovations.
But will you end up choosing something different from those advanced companies because you get overwhelmed? Or because you realize you would rather have a simpler platform, because what really matters is getting campaigns launched?
What actually matters when choosing an email platform
You might feel like you don’t have a voice in the decision to choose a new platform. Sometimes you don’t because the decision-makers sit on a different team or an executive got a good deal from a buddy or went to Cannes with the chairman of the board.
But you still need to demand a seat at the table, even if you don’t get a vote. Your real-world, ground-level perspective is essential, especially when it comes to AI. Make your case for whether AI will actually work given your constraints, like data availability. Be the voice that asks whether you can earn back your investment.
You have lots of good choices. Make sure you use all the resources available to you to make the right one.
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