Implementing an ESP for digital products - Part one

A 3-part guide with downloadable templates, playbooks, and tools.

What will you get from this guide?

• All the questions you’ll need to ask vendors to find the right tool

• How to easily evaluate what the right tool for you is

• A starter pack to quality vendors and price points

• Framework and templates for a successful implementation

  • Lifecycle communications mapping

  • Data taxonomy

• A playbook to IP warming

• How to create an effective measurement system

Selecting and implementing a new ESP for your company is a massive undertaking. It’s often costly, time-consuming, and involves many different teams so is high visibility. 

How do you get it right?

First, who is this for? This guide is aimed at marketers but can be used by anyone who is implementing an ESP or marketing automation for a software product that has users. Most of my experience is with consumer products, so advice will skew in that direction.

My guidance is organized into three different parts: Selection, Implementation, and Launch.

Selection:

• Finding your needs

• Evaluation

• Stakeholder management

• Search

• Negotiation

• Purchase

Implementation:

• Lifecycle 

• Campaign mapping

• Event Map and Data Taxonomy

Launch:

• Domain Setup and IP Warming

• Effective measurement

Part 1: Selection

Finding your needs

• What is the impetus for the change?

  • Current platform doesn’t meet our needs?

    • Need a new channel (e.g. SMS)

    • Our business has grown to a new platform (e.g. mobile/web)

    • Hasn’t kept up with the market and tech is outdated

    • Missing desired functionality (analytics, collaboration, design tools, etc)

  • We’ve outgrown the pricing on our current platform

    • We could save significant money by switching to a product aimed at larger customers

  • Leadership wants a change

    • Someone important doesn’t like the product and wants a tool they’re familiar with

Understanding what’s causing the change (if it wasn’t your decision) will lead to a better decision being made.

Next, work to create a list of requirements based on what functionality you currently have that you need to keep, and what new functionality you’d like to gain.

Remember, you don’t have all the answers and need to get others’ perspectives for this project to be successful.

• Engineering will need to implement the tool for you

• Product decides the roadmap of technical work

• Design creates creative assets for your emails

• Customer support needs to know which customers received what message

• Finance approves your budget

• Security checks whether your tool is a risk to your organization

• Compliance verifies you’re allowed to use the tool

• Legal will get your contract signed

Don’t forget you need everyone to make this happen.

Ask all these teams what their needs are to form a list of requirements. Then ask what their “nice to haves” would be and how important these are.

You now have a list of marketing functionality needed and wanted. And you have another list of stakeholder functionality needed and wanted. 

Is anything more important than others on the list? Make it clear. Use different weighting or indicate it as a non-negotiable.

Show everyone you talked to that you have this document and will be using it to make decisions. Give them a chance to verify that this accurately captures their needs and offer feedback.

Don’t know where to get started?

• Klaviyo is very popular for eCommerce

• Customier.io is a powerful platform liked by a lot of people. Focused more on the B2B market.

• Cordial is an up-and-comer that seems to be liked by many and is easy to use. Likely better for B2C or if B2B, a larger number of customers.

• Braze and Iterable are very strong platforms and are best if you have a mobile app. If you do, these should be at the top of your list. They’re expensive but usually worth it.

  • If you're not quite at the size to spend much on a tool for your mobile app, check out OneSignal. They have very friendly pricing for smaller companies/user bases. It doesn’t have the same functionality as an enterprise-grade tool but should get the job done.

• If you’re B2B, many start with Hubspot when you’re small and move to Marketo, but neither is great for consumer marketing. Marketo is cumbersome and has an old UI, but continues to have a large market share.

• Responsys and Eloqua are now part of Oracle and are very powerful platforms, but not always the easiest to use.

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a cumbersome giant that can do anything, but nothing easily. 

  • Don’t choose Salesforce Marketing Cloud unless you use Salesforce already as a CRM. Although powerful, It’s needlessly complicated to implement and maintain.

You have multiple ways to start your search and evaluate different tools. You can create a Request for Proposal (RFP), reach out to schedule demos, research them yourself first, talk to others in the industry, and use an outside firm or consultant/agency. You should likely do some combination of a few of them.

Your requirement document will guide all of these conversations. You can use this document pretty directly to create an RFP. If you schedule calls and do demos and/or trials, this requirement document will serve as your evaluation template.

Need some help figuring out where to start? Download the ESP Evaluation Question Bank for 200+ questions across 23 categories.

Get all your questions answered you can from the salespeople, but don’t trust them 100%. Try to ask the same questions to multiple people at the vendor org. If you don’t get them answered over the phone, send follow-ups over email, so they can ask their more technical counterparts. People are less likely to stretch the truth in writing.

Use a spreadsheet to keep track of all the responses and conversations. Make a copy of this template to get started. Use your question bank from above to help brainstorm what categories and specific questions you’ll ask.

RFPs will also get your questions answered with potentially less work, but be sure to comb through them in detail and ask many follow-up questions. Vendors will do the best they can to provide satisfactory answers to all your questions, so don’t trust these answers either. 

Narrow down to your top 2-3 and get pricing.

There is usually room for negotiation, but it depends on the price point. Above $10-15k annually and you can negotiate, regardless of what they tell you. The larger the price the more room for movement.

Tactics to get a better price:

• Appeal to emotion

  • This probably won’t do much, but is worth a try 🙂

• Offer something in return

  • Case studies, reference calls, blog posts, and/or multi-year commitments are all valuable to the vendor.

• Get comparison points from others

• Use quotas or end-of-quarter sales financial incentives to get favorable pricing

  • Often these discounts can come straight from leadership because the whole department is looking to boost its impact and hit goals.

• Pit them against a competitor

  • This conversation has to be done with tact, so you’re not offending them. They’ll need to go to bat for you to get a lower price. It’s not the salesperson’s call, they need to go to their boss or their boss's boss, and they’ll need to answer the question “Why should they receive a discount?”

• Ask for concessions or offers outside of the annual contract value

  • Implementation, consulting, or migration services can all be valuable because someone will need to do it, and could save you money in the long run. 

• Dig into the contract and get a detailed cost breakdown

If you’re spending more than $50-100k annually, ask for a reference check. Would you hire someone without a reference check?

Looking for ballpark figures for several different platforms to help get started? Download this price guide for 25+ platforms. This is meant to be directional so don’t expect this to be 100% accurate as of today since prices often change/increase.

That’s it for part one! Implementation will be coming shortly. Stay Tuned.

Read part two here:

Looking for other information or would like me to go into more detail in a specific area? Let me know!