More businesses are finding the speedy delivery, cost savings and higher ROI of email marketing to be irresistible in these challenging economical times. As effective as email may be, unless you have the infrastructure and essential resources to fully support it, this is not a venture you want to go at alone. There are plenty of reasons to choose an email service provider as your partner, and this post will go over a few of the most important.

Deliverability and Spam

AOL and Gmail are great for keeping up with friends and family but insufficient for email marketing. It is impossible to deliver your message to the masses without having various stars aligned. Try to do it all on your own and you could easily see your campaign shut down before it even gets started. Deliverability is the name of the game and it represents the biggest reason to have an email service provider on your side.

The email marketing industry has a solid reputation as a whole, so many of the ESPs you encounter will have excellent reputations with ISPs and anti-spam organizations. With the right partner, you can rest assured that your deliverability rates are in good shape.

While an email marketing company with a trusted infrastructure and good reputation can help, deliverability ultimately falls on the shoulders of the sender. It would all be much simpler if spam wasn’t so out of control, but we all know that just isn’t the case. ISPs take spam very seriously, as evidenced by all the features they are rolling out to make identifying it a convenient task. When someone clicks the button to mark a message as spam, a report of that activity is sent to their ISP and the sender moves one step closer to the blacklist.

Reputable ESPs keep a tally of those reports and let you see how many complaints you have accumulated. To keep their reputations intact, the best companies will step in when it appears that you could potentially get yourself in trouble.

Extra Functionality

Email marketing goes beyond just sending and receiving messages; it is one of the most adaptable marketing techniques in the world. But in order to enjoy the benefits of added functionality, you need expert integration. Email service providers offer solutions that see email integrated with some of the best technology around. From HTML email templates and list management tools to advanced metrics and social sharing buttons, they provide immediate access to the features that enable you to get the most from your email marketing efforts.

The service provider you choose will play a major role in how successful you are with your email marketing. It is truly a decision that can either make or break your online campaigns. Realizing this, you should compose a checklist of your requirements, thoroughly research prospective companies and choose the firm that best suits your specific needs.