You made the decision to migrate to a new email service provider (ESP). It took countless hours of analysis and planning—involving practically everyone on the marketing team—to get to this point. And it will take months to get it done.
You explored and evaluated several ESPs, choosing the one that will provide the greatest value, selecting the right platform, and determining the best way to train people on how to use it. You’re convinced you made the smartest decision.
Or have you?
If you undertake this ESP migration without simultaneously adding an email creation platform to your marketing automation technology stack, this important initiative will take more time and cost more money than even your sharpest projections suggest.
With an email creation platform, you can make an ESP migration faster and more cost-effective because you:
- Eliminate the need to recheck or re-create all your email templates
- Reduce dependence on an external agency for email creation
- Drastically decrease email creation training time and cost
- Cut the time to migrate to a new ESP in half
Eliminate the need to recheck or re-create all your email templates
An email creation platform lets you reuse templates—as is—regardless of which ESP you’ve been using. This feature lets you avoid the development cost incurred by developers doing that work. In all likelihood, that’s time they don’t have to spare anyway. What’s more, with an email creation platform, the chance for code to break during the re-creation process is zero.
Reduce dependence on an external agency for email creation
Because an email creation platform lets non-technical people create quality, on-brand emails, there’s no need to outsource email creation to an external agency. If you opt not to handle any email creation, you can still leverage an agency by having them create emails on the platform in a fraction of the time. With fewer billable hours applied to email creation, you can use the agency for other services.
Even if the agency is miles away from your marketing operation, an email creation platform gives you visibility into the entire process, at every step, for real-time collaboration and instant feedback.
Drastically decrease email creation training time and cost
When your team is exposed to new software and faced with a new, complex system like an ESP, there’s typically training involved—and lots of it at a hefty cost. Let’s say the hourly rate of a marketer who handles email creation is $100. It generally takes at least 10 hours to get that person comfortable building emails in a new ESP. That’s a minimum of $1,000 per team member. Now multiply that amount across your entire team and it will add up fast. Beyond pure cost, there are the inevitable glitches and fumbles that occur when using a new ESP to create emails. When that happens, it creates a bottleneck that causes everything associated with the ESP to grind to a halt. And that’s an additional cost of consequence.
Cut the time to migrate to a new ESP in half
Experience has shown that it takes half the time to get marketers up to speed using a new ESP when there’s an email creation platform in place because they don’t need to be retrained on creating emails in a new deployment platform. Consider the fact that it takes two to three months to get email programs set up in a new ESP when an email creation platform isn’t in place. That makes getting a return on your investment in the new ESP that much longer and more costly as well.
If you’re looking to move to a new ESP, be sure to also look at incorporating an email creation platform into the process. Doing so will simplify, speed, and save on costs associated with the migration process. What’s more, it will make email creation far more efficient. To learn more, download the Stensul eBook, An introduction to email creation platforms.
