What is ESP?

Definition

An email service provider, or ESP for short, is a company offering email services. That is the barebones of it. For the longest time, ESPs were standalone services only concerned with sending emails.  Their role has, in the last decade or so, evolved and their role is no longer limited to front-end stuff. 

Email marketing

ESP is used in reference to a company that helps in delivering email messages. These companies now offer additional email marketing tools and software. Email software is offered as a service (self). It gives you the liberty to create and send different kinds of emails from informative to promotional as well as newsletters. To woo you into buying their software, these companies will offer free versions of their software to get you to acclimatize to their platform. Once you have a feel for it and want access to more premium features, you pay a fee for an upgrade. 

Best Email Service Providers 

There are many players in the industry right now, but Gmail draws one of the largest audiences. It is used by small and medium-sized businesses with only modest email needs because they have small audiences, and are still trying in the process of establishing their brand. When searching for the best ESPs, cost, features, and scalability are the core characteristics to look for.

How many email service providers are there?

The proliferation of email has seen a lot of players join the industry. Right now there are close to 500 licensed email providers. They each try to make their services competitive by offering different packages at different price points. This abundance makes the process of selecting the ideal one rather difficult. We do have a resource for which platforms have the most compelling features that you can check out.

What does Email Marketing Software?

There are a few basic functions to expect from email marketing software. Good software should help you:

• Create templates for use in your different types of emails. If it lacks this developer mode, it should at least have a library of templates ready to customize and use. 
• Create a subscriber list that you are free to include in different marketing campaigns.
• Create and send emails to all your subscribers, or a segment of them.
• Visualize the performance of your email marketing campaigns, breaking down metrics such as open and click rates for each email sent.

Full service ESPs

Email has become the standard communication tool for business. The need for email has therefore expanded beyond simple sending and receiving. In addition to the marketing function, some providers offer consultancy, training, and other such services. These full-service ESP mostly teach the tenets of email marketing and extend aftersales support to customers that enroll with them. These agencies might have their own email marketing platform or may have selected a popular one and specialized with it. Others work with different platforms to appeal to a wider client base. They conceive and implement marketing automation to make email marketing more seamless, cost-effective and time-saving. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the biggest services offered by email service providers. The goal of marketing email is to increase sales, something that newsletters, lead nurturing and promotional emails fully support. However, ESPs can offer a few more related services including deliverability services, inbox monitoring, campaign management software, whitelisting, mail transfer agents, CRM support, survey tools, and list broking.