Email Marketing Vendor Satisfaction Report

Introduction

Holistic Email Marketing, along with email technology provider Tripolis, set out to survey how satisfied or dissatisfied, and why, marketers were with their email service providers.

The Email Marketing Vendor Satisfaction Report found that the answers varied across the board. You can see the results below:

Medium-size to Enterprise-Level

In general, marketers who use medium-size to enterprise-level email platforms are more satisfied than those who use either platforms from small to medium-size technology providers or users of tech suites (all-inclusive platforms that bundle an email service with tools for other marketing uses such as search and social media marketing).

The charts below show stark differences in satisfaction between technology groups. Small-medium platform users praise their services’ ease of use (33%), followed by functionality and features (23%) and value (18%).

For Medium-Enterprise users, functionality and features (24%) and ease of use (22%) are clearly the top two choices. They are also the least likely to say they are not satisfied at all with their platforms (2%).

Suite users are happiest with their email platform’s functionality, but satisfaction drops off sharply after that:

Marketer dissatisfaction also varies by vendor size

Although marketers in general are satisfied with their email platforms, they do have bones to pick with specific features. Functionality and a user-unfriendly platform were the two top gripes for marketers using stand-alone email services. In contrast, customer-service issues surfaced as hot buttons for suite vendors.

Small-Medium

Small to medium-size email platforms generally don’t have the same numbers of features as their more technologically complex competitors, so we were not surprised to find functionality and the need to pay more to access advanced features at the top of user complaints.

Medium-Enterprise

Unlike users of the other two vendor types, Medium-Enterprise users are more likely to say they were not dissatisfied. However, their platforms’ user experiences took a hit, as did a lack of needed features and integration with other systems and tools.

Suite Vendors

User experience is the major complaint among Suite users, but complaints about upselling were almost as prevalent.

Conclusion

It was clear that different size businesses had different requirements from their email service provider. We did the survey in order to find out how we could best help businesses approach upgrading a current platform or moving to a new one entirely. Email platforms are far more than just a device to send emails, they become a significant partner in your email campaign’s triumphs or failures.

Download your copy of our Email Marketing Vendor Satisfaction Report for a deeper look at how marketers view their email service providers.