The acquisition of email service providers continues. Last week Deluxe (yes, the check printing people) acquired Vertical Response. This appears to be positioning themselves to improve their collection of business services to include email marketing.
Clients and random people often ask me to recommend an ESP based on “the best delivery.” I usually point out that most of the reputable ESPs are similar in terms of their delivery. There aren’t many widely used reputation services that block based on ESPs unless there is long term and ongoing problem from the ESP.
This is even more true when the ESP uses dedicated IPs for customers. ESPs that use shared IPs can have poor delivery if they don’t effectively police customers and lower the reputation of all their IP addresses.
My normal comment about ESPs is to find a price point and feature set that meets the client’s needs. Clickmail has a good post about how to evaluate an ESP for usability.
Reports today say that Salesforce is buying Exacttarget for around 2.5 billion dollars.
Read MoreToday’s question comes from Leslie J.
Just how difficult is it for a small business that runs a highly compliant mailing system to find
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their way onto whitelists at the big freemail/spam filter providers?
It seems utterly impossible meaning man hours are completely wasted messing around with subjects and content when if the same business sends the very same message through any number of well know ESPs, the message will hit the inbox like the Mafia are in charge of the shooting match.