Why ESP’s and MAP’s need to be consulting more marketers
Alternate title: why ESP’s and MAP’s should be leveraging a customer evangelist to drive collective feedback from marketers into product strategy.
Answer to the alternative title: yes, I understand that teams have researchers and product teams to collect feedback, but how many of them have a direct background in your customer’s shoes?
Let me tell you about some problems I see with ESP’s and MAP’s, and how they can address them.
I am a full-time email marketer and have been sending, building, and reporting out on emails since 2016. I’ve been lucky enough to use at least 22 Email Service Providers and Marketing Automation Platforms including:
Braze
Iterable
Customer.io
Klaviyo
Mailmodo
SFMC
Pardot
Marketo
MailChimp
Active Campaign
Sendwithus
Hubspot
Autopilot
Intercom
Beehiv
Cordial
Mandrill
Postmark
Emma
Campaign Monitor
Sendgrid
Sparkpost
The only reason why I’ve been in this position is because I am obsessed with email and during COVID I had no other fun hobbies aside from helping brands migrate ESP’s, and do full audits of their program setups. Aside from email being my full-time job for the past 6 years, this meant my hobby was also exploring all of these platforms on my own time.
With marketing being high-stakes and high-pressure for those that work in it, the experience marketers have with a platform can be a make-or-break situation for the longevity of the tool at a company.
Where I started with ESP’s
I started out building emails for a company I worked on called taski - a hospitality staffing app (similar to today’s TaskRabbit) - where once a month I’d send a newsletter to our userbase outlining our top “taskers” based on who picked up the most shifts, who received the highest ratings, and some other category I’m not remembering. It was a nice newsletter, nothing fancy.
Because I had no coding background of any sort, I would use an ESP with a Drag and Drop editor, build an email, and export the email into the actual ESP tool that housed all my recipients and unsubscribe settings. I have little recollection now but I believe I was either building in MailChimp and exporting to Postmark, or vice versa. At the time it was against their guidelines I remember someone telling me, but because the tool I needed to have a builder didn’t, I did it.
When I stumbled across marketing automation in 2016, I remember thinking it was a hack that me, and me only, had discovered to trick my senders into thinking that I was actually sending them email in real-time (when in reality I was doing other things). B2B deals were getting closed on my watch!
At the time I was using Autopilot.
When I discovered that customers were receiving duplicate communication from me, I panicked and spent weeks back and forth trying to troubleshoot with customer support before I finally decided to pull the plug and try a different solution. It was frustrating to say the least and when I was already wearing 17 other hats, I didn’t have the resources to spend learning email marketing, or why my issue was occurring.
I ended up moving to Hubspot, and making the mistake of signing onto a year-long contract without a full understanding of what the experience was like. Although I don’t have any memorable red flag experiences, I again felt frustrated with the overall experience with what I believed should have been the setup, and what ended up being inside the tool itself.
I was quick to make judgments, and I was quick to leave a tool behind if it didn’t suit me when there were alternatives on the market that might. After completing and consulting on 50+ migrations now as of 2022, I am less likely to suggest moving tools than I was 6 years ago, but I still will.
Recommendation #1: Make your ESP/MAP low barrier to entry
If you’ve taken a look at emailjobs.io, you’ll know email jobs are in demand. I receive at least 5 messages a week from recruiters on LinkedIn, for email roles ranging across coordinators, strategists, specialists, managers, you name it.
Brands are realizing the value of email, and hiring directly for that position. But with so many ESP’s on the market, it’s difficult for brands to locate a jack or jill of all trades with 2-3 years of experience. How do you find someone who has been in 10+ different ESP’s while they’ve only held 1-2 past jobs? You run a huge risk of a marketer landing with your tool in their tech stack with no prior experience using it.
Here’s where the problem emerges:
New marketer starts the job
New marketer inherits ESP/MAP
New marketer is not familiar with the setup, and is biased/comfortable with their prior tool
Depending on the initial experience with your tool after they’ve been added to it, this is how the problem will play out:
New marketer either finds fantastic documentation and an onboarding program so they can get equipped with the new tool they are using OR
New marketer submits an RFP to move away from the existing tool
A low barrier to entry ESP is fantastic if you’re starting from scratch, but what does the experience look like if the marketer is inheriting the tool? It can be pretty scary depending on how old the account is, and I believe it lands on a hybrid of the ESP’s responsibility, and the company, to get the new marketer up to speed with the state of affairs.
If your ESP is easy to navigate right off the bat, you have a good chance of sticking around. However, if not, things can get pretty confusing quickly.
What I’ve noticed is that ESP’s try and set themselves apart by different names of features, different UI, UX. This is great if you're doing it well, but bad if it pigeonholes you into a situation where the marketer doesn’t agree with your terminology.
Recommendation #2: Use clear terminology and naming conventions
Why do we have 10 different names for a flow, drip campaign, automation, workflow, e-nurture?? Every company I join refers to these differently, and it 90% of the time does not match what the ESP calls it. For a new marketer, being assigned a task for: Onboarding E-nurture, when the ESP calls it Flow, can immediately either make your new marketer look stupid, or cause them frustration for not picking it up quick enough.
And why do some ESP’s blanket all one-off campaigns as “newsletters” or “broadcasts” - we’re in the age of segmentation people! Let’s not continue to let people think that sending an e-blast is appropriate.
Dylan Smith recently tweeted a thread in regards to his frustration towards how email dev terminology continues to silo itself from web dev terminology. I’m not agreeing that things need to be completely synonymous, but it raises a good point that email tool vendors are the root cause of so much differentiation in the market.
If you want your tool to be adopted, consider how you can align it with the rest of the industry, whether it be web, or email.
Recommendation #3 - Go beyond just email marketing when it comes to onboarding new team members
“Add to ___ account” is an ESP’s biggest opportunity to forge a long-term relationship and decrease customer churn. And in my opinion, no CSM is doing enough.
I currently mentor new digital marketers wanting to get into email, or those who are currently already in email and using a flashy tool like Braze/Iterable for the first time (if this sounds like you - feel free to reach out whenever and we can connect). They often have questions about strategy and find chat support isn’t human enough or that chat support doesn’t provide the same value as “talking to someone who has used the platform as a marketer”.
The biggest topic I mentor on is the day to day functionality of the tools themselves. Usually when it comes to strategy questions - there’s no right or wrong answer for how best to approach the problem. In tools like Braze, there are 10 ways to accomplish the same or a similar result. Oftentimes, these people I’m speaking with just want an ear to listen to and some reassurance that they’re on the right path.
Sure, they could get a pat on the back from chat support, and read documentation, but marketing is meant to be collaborative so why not have resources available for things like this?
Small and medium-sized companies can’t always afford big agencies. This is where room for independent consultants come in, like me.
ESP’s and MAP’s should look into resourcing New Team Member Onboarding. Beyond just linking them to the ____ 101 or 102 intro course, or emailing them a pre-recorded training webinar. Bring back building relationships that these tools advocate for. Get a CSM to connect via Zoom, to do a 30-minute dashboard training, just to put a face to the name, and then decide if that end-user is worthy of the pre-recorded webinars.
Avoid customer churn by forging these relationships with these marketers early. This new marketer most likely had no role in why your tool was chosen for your business - help them understand.
Recommendation #4 - Implement feedback that makes our processes quicker
My role as a marketer consists of a few key things:
Create relationships with customers
Make the company money
Do it as quickly as possible
Don’t skimp on quality (this is my own value)
The ESP I currently use most frequently doesn’t auto-save progress. It auto-saves nothing. I could have a 40-step automation with 40 individually hand crafted coded emails, and accidentally swipe my track pad backwards and poof, everything is lost.
I’ve been advocating for an auto-save option for years now, and for some reason there still isn’t one and I have cried more times than I can count because of the loss in work it has caused me. In response to this, I carve out a full timeslot when I do need to build in the tool, so that I run the risk of fewer distractions.
I have to move slower, because they are asking me to. A marketers nightmare.
This will primarily be a reason why I end up moving away from the tool, in search of one that has the same capabilities, at a later date (although right now I love everything else about it).
When I review the product roadmap, there are lists full of upcoming integrations, and planned new UI, but what about the core functionalities that make the tool trust worthy? Where are those and if this is truly a tool for marketers, why am I not hearing more voices advocating for those things that help us move quicker.
As a side-hustle consultant, before I ever suggest a customer move away from their ESP, I collect feedback so that I can suggest a tool that will work best for them. Why are ESP’s not doing this with their own customers before it’s too late?
Product teams should be listening to marketers and looking at their dream scenarios.
Product teams should be listening to more marketers OKR’s, and working towards solutions that help me achieve them.
Beyond the OKR’s, and back to basic functionality, as a consultant I review customer tech stacks to spot painpoints. Here are some example questions and answers I’ve recently encountered:
Why am I building my email outside of this tool?
Because there’s no drag and drop builder
Because I can’t collect feedback from colleagues inside of the tool
Because there’s no email preview function to share for QA to those that just want to glance at it
My ESP only offers Drag and Drop, and because the ESP doesn’t address accessibility concerns, so I have to hand bake in alt text, etc to my emails via HTML
Why am I not using the report builder to review metrics?
Because I can’t share this with my C-suite
Because I have to add everyone to the ___ account to see the report
Because I can only export via CSV and I don’t have the bandwidth to make the data look nice
I don’t know what to do with the data
Why am I importing lists of CSV recipients to create segments of users?
I don’t have access to segment the way I need to in the ESP
I can’t do an “and, or” conditional statements
Recommendation #5: Use content marketing to drive visibility
Some of my favorite ESP’s leverage content marketing to inspire marketers. Customer case studies, webinars with marketers, frequently how-to seminars.
My ultimate favorite ESP has a whole Slack community just for their tool.
At the end of the day, I am fully capable of building my own things in various tools - but I want to understand how others use the tool as well. What are they leveraging that I’m not?
One of the biggest areas of opportunity I see for tools, is to create visibility for themselves by inspiring their customers with how to use the tool.
Invest in creating templates. Invest in live events.
If you are providing no hand-holding with onboarding, at least provide some kind of content outside of documentation to give the marketer at least a sliver of light that things are possible with your platform.
TLDR:
Overall, I think ESP & MAP product teams need their own customers on their internal teams to consult as they grow. As someone who likes to only work for brands that I could be an advocate for myself, I can’t image working for, or marketing an experience that I don’t understand myself.
I keep finding that some enterprise tools were created for engineers and devs, and operations teams - the framework of the past. This may still be the case now for some teams, but as time progresses, you’re going to start to see more non-technical roles inside of your tool. And they are going to be as lost as I was when I started with email in 2016.
Get people who are in the trenches of marketing to work with you.
Listen to their feedback and their pain points
Do competitor research using these people
The new generation of email marketers is your biggest opportunity - these end users are being hired now and will be either putting your tool on a “never again” list, or suggesting your platform for their next jobs RFP.
If you are a platform - I’d love to help! Feel free to shoot me an email to discuss how I can help translate end-user feedback to drive product growth strategy.