WHY DO ESPs EXIST?
I am getting sick and tired of dealing with vendors who don’t understand my business here at Topaz Man. I'm not sure who needs to hear this, but we are one of the world's leading premier men’s brands, and we offer exceptional levels of service to every one of our customers. Honestly, I expect the same level of service from everyone I deal with, from employees to vendors with whom I pay a lot of money to have our brand as one of their customers.
Let me give you an example of what happened in last week's email sent out of my email service. After setting it up on their system and sending a test out, everything looked fine in Outlook and my Earthlink accounts. However, I noticed some images were distorted and off-center when sent to my list of over 23K customers. I called my marketing manager, who runs the program, to see what the hell was going on, and all I heard out of her mouth was that the system that sent it had an issue. She told me that images in different email clients could look different, but since they appeared to be right when we sent out the test, it had to be something that the email vendor did to mess it up. Since this screw-up happened, our open rate decreased to 14%, and our revenue from that email was hideous.
I had to contact someone at my vendor to see about getting a revenue-lost refund due to the screw-up.
Support Bots. Help. Response.
I logged into my account, like I do every day, to see my open rates and noticed this tiny little icon that said help, so I clicked on it and told them about my issue. It seems like I was connected to some bot or a person who didn’t speak English well. Still, they kept telling me to go and look at some documentation about loading images when I kept telling them that this was their fault and I wanted to get a refund for my sending costs on that send. After 20 minutes of wasted time dealing with these people, I sent an email to their support team telling them about the issue, and the auto email I got back told me that I would get a response within 48 hours about my issue due to my “support level.” Say what? At Topaz Man, we always strive to get back to the customer within two hours of them reporting an issue, and this company, EmailRhino, for which I give money almost every month, is going to tell me I have to wait 2 days just to hear back from them.
I responded back to them, telling them that I send over 85,000 emails a month with them and that 48 hours was unacceptable. Four hours go by, and I hear nothing back, so at this point I am furious and pick up the phone to call them about this issue. When a representative finally answered after being on hold for over 43 minutes, all they could do was tell me that they would need to investigate my ticket and get back to me via email. I ended the call by telling them I just wanted to get a credit of at least $12,000 on my account because of the potential lost revenue on the send. The $12,000 was an estimate of lost revenue as I cannot track revenue on my emails since my marketing manager told me that is impossible with EmailRhino.
The Net Of The Net
The whole situation makes me wonder why email companies exist and question the abilities of my marketing manager, who has been here for 9 months and came here with over two years of experience. This is the fourth email company in the last 18 months, and no one seems to get it right, so I spend so much time trying to control what we send, when we send it, and who we send it with. It’s day four since my initial support ticket, and I am still waiting for a response from EmailRhino, even after sending them two follow-ups a day just to see when they will credit my account.
Topaz Man is a premium brand that deserves an elite vendor to serve us with the best technology and service when needed. I guess I need to begin a new search for an email vendor, and heard great things about Clavicko and WeaponMail.
I enjoy email marketing, but this shouldn’t be this hard….
***CORE insight from Andrew Kordek @emailnucleus***
The email service provider you chose does not guarantee a support turnaround unless you pay them for exclusivity or a different support tier. Given Topaz Man’s low yearly volume, they are likely in the lowest tier possible of support response times, and Scotty needs to understand that to get more, he needs to pay more. That said, Scotty made some critical errors when testing his email:
He tested it on email clients, which are normally not friendly to rendering images and are likely not widely used by his “customers.”
Always, and I mean always, know what email clients your audience is reading and interacting with you. This will help when you do QA of emails so that you can focus on the most important ones.
Often, when mistakes happen, the client unknowingly changes the email right before they test it. Time and time again, I have seen them work in 12-15 different tabs logged into the email provider and lose track of what they are doing, so it's best to keep things simple when working on an email.
Things change all of the time when it comes to email marketing. MaybeTopaz Man is using a custom template or just a bad image, but without investigating what happened and being able to point specifically to what happened, Scotty is going to have a hard time getting money from the vendor if there is no evidence that it was “the systems” fault.
There could have been a whole host of other things that went wrong, but I have often found that speed plays a part in creating errors. Slow down your process when setting up an important email that can affect revenue, and by all means, send an A/B test out so that if a mistake is made, you can minimize the damage by changing the issues when sending to the remaining percentages of your list.
By the way, and this has to be said, ANY ESP worth their grain of sale WILL have the ability to track revenue if you are an eTailer like Topaz Man, Scotty, or his marketing manager need to no be lazy and investigate this.
