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It seems that there’s an email service provider (ESP) for everyone these days, whatever your marketing goals or industry.
But this wide range of options also makes it harder for small and medium businesses to upgrade to the right advanced option. Without an enterprise’s broad budget, you need to balance your marketing needs with your costs carefully. These factors also make it important to know when it’s worth switching to a more complex platform.
We partnered with ActiveCampaign to help you solve these problems. Together, we surveyed more than 75 businesses to discover the right time for small and medium businesses to upgrade their ESPs and what features are the most impactful.
As part of this initiative, we’re also running the ActiveCampaign Benchmarks for All Industries Benchmark Group. It’s open for any ActiveCampaign user to join and anonymously compare their metrics with other email marketers.
An email service provider (ESP) is a tool for sending emails to a subscriber list. As ActiveCampaign puts it, these platforms simplify sending emails and creating email lists. Some providers also include advanced features like automations, A/B testing, and segmentation.
We surveyed more than 75 small and medium companies that use ActiveCampaign about the factors that led to them switching to it.
Most of the survey respondents belong to companies where either marketing or company leadership purchase marketing automation software. 46.15% of the companies involved in the survey have marketing leadership, such as CMOs, VPs, and Directors, buy these tools. Meanwhile, 38.46% have the founder or CEO purchase them.
Compared to other email tools, respondents overwhelmingly used Mailchimp before switching to ActiveCampaign. While 41% of these companies swapped from Mailchimp, most tools had results under 15%.
In the next part of our survey, we investigated various factors that went into the respondents’ choice to switch to ActiveCampaign, including when and why. The participating companies often upgraded to ActiveCampaign when they needed to expand capabilities like features, integrations, and automations.
These companies had many reasons for leaving their old tools, but the top two reasons were functionality (38%) and integration availability (23%). In other words, they respectively wanted features and integrations not available with their previous ESP.
You can see a similar trend in the factors respondents considered the most important when upgrading their ESPs. The two most influential factors were the availability of features and integration capabilities.
This begs the question: What features and integrations brought respondents to ActiveCampaign? The top three features these companies use are marketing automations (69.70%), email campaigns (65.15%), and the CRM (53.03%).
Casey Hill of ActiveCampaign affirms these conclusions, adding:
“The findings in the report line up very closely with the conversations that I have had with our sales teams, chiefly noting that the main two reasons that folks upgrade to ActiveCampaign are more depth of segmentation/automation and more integration capability.”
Casey Hill
Senior Growth Marketing Manager at ActiveCampaign
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In addition to the previous closed-ended questions, we also asked survey participants what feature or integration would have encouraged them to upgrade sooner. Their answers can help you in your ESP search as you figure out what capabilities you should put first.
The top features and integrations these companies mentioned fall into seven categories:
While you can personalize individual outreach emails by each message, email campaigns usually need some sort of tech to personalize at scale. So, naturally, respondents often mentioned personalization and segmentation as features they need to create campaigns that resonate.
At Balance One Supplements, James Wilkinson counts on combining personalization and segmentation to build connections with customers. Wilkinson says, “Had advanced segmentation and personalization capabilities been evident sooner, I would have opted to enhance our ESP much earlier—such features promise the customization of communications according to customer behavior, preferences, and buying patterns.”
Wilkinson continues, “By using these tools, we could strengthen connections with clients by providing niche content that is relevant for each individual; this strategy significantly increases engagement rates and improves conversion numbers – an understanding that fundamentally transforms every email into a potential intimate conversation instead of a generic broadcast.”
ParamountQuote’s Tim Connon values these features for developing a customized customer journey. “More advanced and personalized customer journeys would have persuaded me to upgrade my ESP much sooner. We want our clients to feel valued on a high level. This means delivering a more personalized experience tailored to them is something we try hard to deliver,” Connon says.
Connon adds, “The more personable and [valuable] they feel means we have a higher chance of earning referrals and their business for life. Any tool that can enable us to deliver this kind of experience is something we will research and switch to if we deem it viable.”
Adrian Hall of Pharmacist Schools points out the importance of data sources in ESP personalization tools:
“The content optimization in prior ESPs didn’t give us optimal results. It was one of the reasons for stopping using their services. Nowadays, we can’t write personalized emails based on the usual customer data. The data should be more expansive. For instance, we like to have data based on the customer’s journey toward our brand. We can identify the touch points in this way. Now, we have all these aspects with our new ESP.”
Adrian Hall
Business Development at Pharmacist Schools
On top of more advanced personalization in general, respondents also value AI-based personalization, especially when paired with other time-saving AI features like predictive analytics and automations.
Intercoastal Consulting & Life Care Planning’s Chris McDermott likes to use AI personalization with predictive analytics to get ahead on personalized content. McDermott says, “While specific needs vary, one feature that could have accelerated my ESP upgrade is predictive analytics and AI-powered personalization. Accurately anticipating customer behavior and delivering highly relevant, segmented campaigns can significantly boost engagement and revenue. Having this capability built-in would have offered a clear competitive advantage and a compelling reason to upgrade sooner.”
As part of a company that values AI, Lukas Junokas of Breezit likes to have AI in an ESP. “I’m a big fan of integrating AI and automating certain tasks, especially if they are repetitive and boring. So one thing that would have convinced me sooner as a CTO of Breezit, which is a company that’s already introducing AI into its operations, would be advanced AI-driven personalization capabilities. We are providing a personalized service, so it would be nice to have that also in the ESP. Also…AI is the coolest,” Junokas says.
You might already have customer relationship management (CRM) software with contact and customer profile information you can use for your email campaigns. But it can become a chore to link the information between both without an integration, making an ESP with a CRM integration crucial. Some ESPs, like ActiveCampaign, even have a CRM as part of their software suites.
LeadLearnLeap’s Marissa Sabrina greatly values connected CRM and ESP data. Sabrina says, “A seamless CRM integration would have prompted an earlier upgrade of my ESP. The ability to synchronize customer data effortlessly between the ESP and CRM system is crucial for personalized marketing. A unified platform enhances efficiency, allowing for targeted campaigns based on comprehensive customer insights, ultimately driving engagement and conversion.”
Reflecting on his experience, Casey Hill of ActiveCampaign adds, “In 2020, I was working for a 20 person SaaS Startup (Bonjoro) and we migrated from Mailchimp and Hubspot CRM to ActiveCampaign. One major variable was getting our marketing automation and CRM under one roof so there was more data continuity. Another factor was we constantly were hitting dead-ends with use cases we wanted to run around activations, trial conversions, onboarding and beyond with Mailchimp, and were having to do complex outside API work to get stuff to function the way we needed. When we moved to ActiveCampaign, those things all just worked out of the box. We even could integrate in Segment, that monitored all the in-app behavior and we could lead score based on that.”
Related reading: CRM KPI Dashboard: Benefits, Top Metrics, Best Practices, Examples, and More
Timing matters for email, especially when it comes to time-sensitive content like onboarding sequences and abandoned cart emails. While you could monitor these triggers yourself and send emails when needed, built-in automations save you time and lower the chance of error. Two respondents expressed their need for automations in an advanced ESP.
Kamil Bajolek from PRM puts it this way:
“If there was one thing that could have convinced me to upgrade my ESP earlier, it would be better automation features. Automation makes sending emails easier and more efficient. It can send emails based on what customers do or show interest in, which helps in sending the right message at the right time. This leads to better customer engagement and saves a lot of time, making email marketing more effective.”
Kamil Bajolek
Brand Director at PRM
BlakSheep Creative’s Clint L. Sanchez considers automations a game-changer because of their ability to act at important points in the customer journey. Sanchez says, “If I had to pinpoint one feature that would’ve made us switch to a better ESP earlier, it would be smarter automation that connects seamlessly with our sales data. Being able to automatically send out personalized emails based on what our customers are doing on our site—like if they’re hesitating on a purchase—would have been a huge advantage. It’s all about getting the right message to the right person at the right time without all the extra legwork.”
One respondent pointed out how a feature you typically see in social media management could help in an ESP: conversation management. Email is just one channel you use to interact with customers, and a full-spectrum view could offer a bigger picture when you create campaigns.
Khunshan Ahmad from EvolveDash says, “If an ESP could record and analyze the queries/responses we got over all of our communication channels, including comments on social media, I would shift in a heartbeat. It can be time-consuming to coordinate all the data, but the results [are] incredibly useful.”
At Databox, we’re big proponents of tracking and reporting your data to improve on your past work, and a few respondents were on the same page. ESP tracking and reporting features let you see how your emails perform so you can test new strategies and double down on the tactics that work. It gives you a full view of your email marketing metrics so you can check that performance on a granular level.
“The one thing that could have convinced me to upgrade my ESP would have been better tracking and reporting features,” says Perry Zheng from Pallas. “When you use an email service provider, it gives you detailed information about your emails. You can see how many emails were successfully sent and how many were opened. You can also see how many people clicked on the links in your emails. This data is essential for planning future email campaigns. It helps you identify your most engaged subscribers, so you can send them more messages.”
LinkedSelling’s Tanner Stolte values having a wide range of attribution and tracking features on hand: “If there were one feature that would get me to move faster it would be marketing attribution and tracking. ActiveCampaign currently offers a variety of attribution tools like their website tracker. If there were even more attribution options such as LinkedIn and Facebook paid media integrations that would have gotten me to move even faster.”
Even though advanced ESP features like the ones we already covered often save time, they can also lead to more moving parts to manage. This fact makes a clear user interface even more important for managing campaigns. Some companies highlighted this importance.
ActiveCampaign’s user interface was a big factor in getting 2Stallions Digital Marketing Agency to upgrade, according to Olwen van Dijk-Hildebrand:
“User-friendliness and the automation configuration definitely play the biggest part in changing our ESP. We are drawn to the visual workflow builder with conditional logic, the option to split contact for A/B testing, the ability to create a complex workflow, and more options to leverage more conditions.”
Olwen van Dijk-Hildebrand
Head of Content & Social at 2Stallions Digital Marketing Agency
Martin Gasparian from Maison Law brings up how organization and data sorting play into a good user interface. Gasparian says, “If there was one feature that could have persuaded me to upgrade my ESP sooner it would have been features related to organization and tracking. I do like to focus on integration because it’s incredibly important, but organizing all of that data takes time. I wished that an ESP would have offered exceptional outbound and inbound organization as well as contact organization as I would have switched sooner.”
Looking at the data from the more than 75 businesses we consulted, small and medium businesses tend to upgrade their ESPs when they’re ready to grow their email marketing. They need more functionality, automations, and integrations to run their email campaigns as part of a larger marketing ecosystem.
For instance, smaller ESPs like Mailchimp or Constant Contact often have a lot more limitations when it comes to field types, and make it harder to run a relative date field that touches base before a contact’s renewal date or a last activity field that monitors when someone is logged in, so you can send a check-in if a customer becomes inactive.
Growing your email marketing also requires you to know how your metrics compare to similar companies so you have a benchmark to base your performance on. We created Benchmark Groups for this exact purpose.
And fortunately, as part of our collaboration with ActiveCampaign, we have one for ActiveCampaign users to compare their metrics in. In exchange for anonymously sharing your metrics, you’ll get insights on group-wide trends. Add as many or as few of your metrics as you’d like to see where you stand.
You can join the group for free at its Benchmark Group page. You just need a Databox account (also free for the starter plan!) with ActiveCampaign connected.
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Melissa King is a freelance writer who helps B2B SaaS companies spread the word about their products through engaging content. Outside of the content marketing world, she writes about video games. Check out her work at melissakingfreelance.com.
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