Until now you’ve been happy with your email-automation vendor, but lately you feel as though perhaps something is missing… Email automation is a wondrous thing and I’d be lost without it — as would all of my clients — but like most relationships, both parties must maintain dialogue, work together, and compromise when necessary or you may find you’ll drift apart.
What may have started out as your dream partner, over the months or years has become less ideal and because you dread restarting the vendor search, you continue to work with a solution that no longer meets your needs and thus, hinders your progress.
Customers and vendors should be fired when the relationship no longer brings the same value to the table as it did when the engagement began. Not every company is a great fit for your business, be that one who buys from you or one who sells to you.
Many of us started out with the bare minimum — iContact, Constant Contact, or the like — but as our companies grew, so must have our software. Sometimes the software company will continue to develop new features, but those are not released at the same speed in which our demand develops or the features they release are not in the same direction as our need. It’s okay to want for more and when working with email automation, we all want more.
Spider Trainers recently outgrew their email-automation application. We had been with our vendor since they were a mere upstart, and we watched them grow to become a fine solution and start challenging the industry leaders, but they weren’t developing the features we needed. So, despite the gargantuan effort it would take to convert all of our lead-capture forms, update all of our inbound content, port our lists, and recreate our campaign workflows, in the end, we felt those efforts would be worth what we would gain in features that aligned more closely with our needs.
When I say gargantuan, it truly was — and a month in, we’re still nowhere near finished making the transition. What’s more, as an agency, it’s not just our content and assets, it’s also that of the clients we have moved with us.
Today, we marketers have hundreds (yes, it really is hundreds) of vendors from whom to choose and features numbering in nothing less than thousands. It’s not likely you would be looking for a vendor having the most features, just the vendor offering the features on which you place the most importance. That’s why hundreds of options can exist; each of us has our own set of priorities. Companies aligned with your priorities narrows the field substantially, and companies aligned with your budget narrows it even more.
Our most-important feature requirements might mean less to you, but we needed a solution providing more in-depth visibility pre-engagement, engagement depth (how were our prospects and leads using our website and content), and post-engagement. In order to get these things, we also had to give up some things, and that’s the relationship compromise.
Although we vetted more than a dozen new vendors, we did finally make a choice and one that I’m happy with. I’ve had a few fearful moments, but the new software is — for the moment — what we need and one with a roadmap aligned with our planned growth. I know there’s a good chance someday I may need to move on from this relationship too, but as in life, I’m going to get while the getting’s good.
Oh, and because I know you’re wondering, our new vendor is SharpSpring.
