Why Your B2B Company Needs an Email Service Provider (ESP)

An email service provider (ESP) is a smart investment that can help your B2B company succeed in many ways. Research shows that nearly six in 10 B2B companies believe email is the most effective channel for generating revenue. By partnering with an ESP, you'll be able to generate more leads and sell more products or services to your B2B company's audience.

What Is an ESP?

Not to be confused with an inbox provider, an ESP is a provider of online email marketing services. Inbox providers are the email clients that allow you to directly send and receive email. ESPs go one step further by providing you with email marketing tools and services. You'll still need an inbox provider, but partnering with an ESP is a strategic move that can improve the effectiveness of your B2B company's efforts.

Some of the most popular ESPs include the following:

• Mailchimp
• Constant Contact
• Aweber
• HubSpot
• SendGrid

List Building

You can use an ESP to build subscriber lists. Subscriber lists, of course, are essentially email-based leads. Prospective buyers can subscribe to your B2B company's newsletter, after which their names and email addresses will be added to a list. You can then target these subscribers with lead-nurturing or other sales-related emails. ESPs make it easy to build subscriber lists. From your ESP account -- which is accessible through a web browser -- you can grab the code for a subscriber form. You can then insert this form code into your B2B company's website to build a subscriber list.

Analyze Performance

ESPs offer performance analytics. You can use them to see how well your emails perform. There are dozens of ESPs, some of which offer different features than others. Nonetheless, they all offer performance analytics. While logged in to your ESP account, you can analyze open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, bounce rates and more. All of this performance data can prove useful in optimizing your B2B company's email marketing campaigns so that they generate more sales.

Automation

One of the biggest benefits of using an ESP is automation. Without an ESP, you'll typically have to send emails manually. If you have a list with 100 prospective buyers, you'll have to send an email to each of them manually. A faster and more efficient solution is to use an ESP. ESPs offer tools that allow you to automatically send emails to some or all of the prospective buyers on a given subscriber list.