Enterprise Email Marketing: Best Platforms and Use Cases

Finding your way into customers’ inboxes remains one of the trusted strategies for business growth. However, email marketing is different for enterprises compared to smaller businesses. Large organizations require reliable tools with robust capabilities and hundreds of different integrations.

Choosing the right enterprise email software can be overwhelming. There are so many acronyms: CRM, SEO, ESP, CDP, and the list goes on. These solutions can improve your marketing performance if you integrate them correctly.

In this guide, we will discuss Email Service Providers (ESP). We'll also look at Customer Data Platforms (CDP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. You will understand the value these tools offer and find out which approach aligns with your business objectives.

What is Enterprise Email Marketing, and Why is it important? 

Enterprise email marketing is a strategy that leverages email to increase brand awareness and revenue. It involves organizations with many subscribers to whom they send diverse emails. Compared to typical email marketing, enterprises usually send far more emails and process huge amounts of data.

Now that we know what enterprise email marketing is, let’s see why email solutions matter to these businesses. 

• High return on investment (ROI). Email delivers one of the highest ROI of all marketing channels. On average, brands earn $36 for every $1 spent.
• Increased sales. Enterprises need email marketing to increase sales like any other business. Whether via promotional messages or product updates, effective email marketing encourages purchases.
• Nurture leads. An enterprise email solution helps to effectively nurture leads and turn them into repeat customers.
• Automation and personalization. For large businesses, using an advanced email marketing API allows for automation. It also enables building relationships with many recipients while maintaining personalization.

Common Use Cases for Enterprise Email

Enterprise email campaigns serve different purposes. Some of the most common use cases are:

• Welcome emails. These are essential to email marketing strategies as they set the tone for further interactions. They also inform recipients of what they signed up for and highlight the services they can expect from the brand.
• Transactional emails. Customer actions such as making a purchase or changing passwords trigger these messages. They are vital for providing real-time updates and building customer trust.
• Promotional messages. Emails are key in announcing product launches, events, special offers, or discounts. No enterprise can afford to overlook promo emails. Every effort to attract customers and increase revenue is supported by promotion. 
• Abandoned cart emails. Enterprises encounter situations where a customer adds a product to a cart but leaves without taking further action. These emails are a polite nudge, encouraging them to complete the transaction.
• Newsletters. These emails keep your audience up-to-date on your company, products, and services.

Each use case benefits from the scalability enterprise email marketing platforms provide. We’ll look at this in more detail as we cover the features of enterprise email solutions.

Features of an Enterprise Email Marketing Platform

What should you look out for when choosing enterprise email marketing tools? The best platforms for large-scale businesses should have most or all of the following:

Scalability

This refers to the ease with which a tool handles increasing email volumes and subscriber lists. Enterprises deal with hundreds to thousands of emails from leads, customers, and stakeholders. They also have tons of automated emails set up in response to diverse user behavior. To meet these demands, they need a solution that scales efficiently and reliably.

Integration with Other Systems

Integration is the cornerstone of effective email marketing for enterprises. Large organizations often use different sales and marketing solutions. Seamless connectivity between email software and other business tools is vital to maximize the impact of email campaigns. Email marketing API plays an important role in integration as it allows data sharing in real time.

Personalization

Seek technologies that enable personalization in email marketing. Personalized emails go beyond adding the recipient's name to the message. It involves designing the content based on the data you have about the customer. To achieve this requires utilizing thousands of user data points like purchase histories. A good enterprise email marketing platform can effectively leverage all that information.

Advanced Segmentation

Sorting your audience according to attributes such as demographics and engagement level is vital. It ensures you send relevant content to each group. Advanced segmentation goes beyond basic data like purchase histories and location. It demands a platform that combines both dynamic and static segmentation. This approach allows real-time adjustments based on the user’s behavior.

High Deliverability Rates

Regardless of how great your content is, it’s all pointless if an email lands in the customer’s spam folder. Constantly sending messages that go to spam or fail to be delivered harms your sender reputation. Enterprise email marketing platforms should allow the monitoring of email deliverability rates. Tracking metrics like open rates can help adjust sending practices to improve the success of email campaigns.

ESP, CDP, and CRM in Email Marketing: What’s the Difference?

ESP, CDP, and CRM systems serve distinct roles. An ESP (Email Service Provider) specializes in sending emails, managing contacts, and optimizing email marketing efforts. It offers various functionalities, including email automation, in-depth analytics, and segmentation.

A CDP (Customer Data Platform), on the other hand, gathers customer data from multiple sources and unifies everything into a single profile. With these tools, you get detailed insights about customer actions in real-time. Businesses can use the data from a CDP for activities like segmentation and product recommendations.

Meanwhile, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) helps businesses manage their relationships with existing and potential users. It helps track customer actions at every stage of the sales funnel. Both CRM and CDP focus on collecting user data. However, CRM manages customer interactions, while CDP provides deeper insights into those interactions. 

How Does a CDP Enhance Enterprise Email Marketing?

A CDP enables you to create more personalized email campaigns. By leveraging insights from a CDP to inform your strategies, you can boost engagement and customer satisfaction.

Email marketing traditionally depends on segmentation to deliver relevant content to audiences. But with CDP, marketers can take their campaigns further with tailored messages based on real-time behavior data. 

For example, Bloomreach CDP merges offline and online activities to create a precise customer profile. It enhances email marketing for enterprises through user-centric analytics, recommendations, and predictions. These capabilities help maximize the ROI of your campaigns by revealing actionable insights.

How does a CRM Contribute to Email Marketing Success?

Customer relationship management systems play a vital role in email marketing. They allow marketing professionals to store all customer information in one place. When a customer makes an inquiry or engages with your site, the CRM tool records this data. 

With this information, you can send more valuable messages to enhance customer experience. For instance, a CRM can help track where a customer left off in their buying journey. You can send personalized emails to push the user to the next stage in the sales funnel.

Moreover, personalized messages make the recipient feel less like a random contact in your database and more like a valued member. By sending tailored emails, you also build relationships with customers, resulting in higher sales.

Benefits of Integrating a CRM with an ESP

Combining a CRM with an email service provider like UniOne means seamless data exchange between both platforms. CRM-ESP integration offers powerful benefits, including:

• Audience segmentation: You'll be able to categorize your subscriber list beyond basic elements like age. Integrating a CRM with your ESP allows you to micro-segment your prospects into more detailed groups. An example is people who have browsed through your website or booked a demo. On its own, ESP breaks down your audience based on how they open or click your emails.
• Increased productivity: CRM-ESP integration saves time and increases productivity. Imagine the amount of effort an enterprise dealing with thousands of leads would save by creating a sync between both platforms. You could do all the work with one system instead of multiple tools.
• Effective communication: It will be difficult to succeed if you don't understand your audience. The customer insights from a CRM help you craft effective messages. Combining this with an ESP's automated email flow can boost success rate.

How does Bloomreach Integrate with Email Providers?

Bloomreach offers smooth integration with major email service providers like UniOne and Mailgun. Businesses can leverage this powerful CDP while maintaining their preferred email provider.

The integration process varies for each email provider, depending on specific requirements. Bloomreach supports multiple connection methods. These include using REST API and webhooks for seamless communication between systems.

By integrating with ESPs, Bloomreach enables enterprises to execute highly targeted email campaigns. Marketers can automate email delivery, track engagement, and optimize campaigns based on insights.

Key differences between Email Service Providers

Enterprise email platforms differ in features, pricing, and email limits. Understanding these differences is essential in choosing a tool that meets your business needs. Below is a comparison of some well-known email service providers.

Twilio SendGrid: SendGrid is one of the leading ESPs known for delivering large volumes of emails. It provides a cloud-based infrastructure for businesses to deliver emails at scale.

Features

• Email automation 
• List management and segmentation
• Intuitive tools for creating unique email designs
• Detailed email statistics, including open rates and click-through rates

Pricing

• Free 100 emails per day
• $249/month for 300,000 emails
• $499/month for 700,000 emails

Mandrill: Also called Mailchimp Transactional, Mandrill is an API-driven email delivery service. It’s currently offered as an add-on for Mailchimp clients. You need to have an active Mailchimp account to use this service.

Features

• Manage multiple sending domains with one account
• Access A/B testing functionality
• Track email activity, such as link clicks through webhooks
• Review recipient behavior with analytics tools

Pricing

Mandrill offers blocks of transactional emails, where each block is a credit for 25,000 emails.

• 1 - 20 blocks: $20 per block for to 500k emails monthly
• 21 - 40 blocks: $18 per block for up to 1 million emails monthly 
• 41 - 80 blocks: $16 per block for up to 2 million emails monthly

Mailgun: Founded in 2010 as an API-based SaaS, Mailgun is one of the leading email delivery services for developers. This enterprise email marketing software offers the flexibility needed to send campaigns of any size.

Features

• Real-time email validation API
• Inbox placement testing across major inbox providers
• Email delivery metrics like open rates and click tracking
• Detailed email logs for troubleshooting delivery issues

Pricing

• Free 100 emails per day
• Basic plan starts at $35 per month for 50,000 emails

EmailLabs: An enterprise email marketing platform designed to handle all your email content needs. This tool focuses on providing hassle-free integration, swift delivery, and enhanced customization.

Features

• Real-time notifications with webhooks
• Transactional email templates
• Blacklist management to reduce bounce rates

Pricing

• 115 EUR per month for 100,000 emails. New users pay 90 EUR for the first 3 months.
• 409 EUR per month for 500,000 emails. New users pay 365 EUR for the first 3 months.

UniOne: The ideal choice for businesses seeking cost-effective enterprise email platforms. UniOne offers SMTP and Web APIs for transactional and marketing emails, with an impressive 99.88% delivery rate.

Features

• Robust, scalable infrastructure for sending transactional and marketing emails
• Detailed reporting and analytics on campaign performance and engagement
• High-volume email distribution with an impressive deliverability rate
• Seamless integration with CRM, CDP, and other marketing platforms
• Rich transactional email templates and AI-powered email editor

Pricing

4 months’ free trial with 6,000 monthly emails. After the trial expires, the plan will cost $4 for 6,000 emails.

Conclusion 

Choosing the right enterprise email marketing platform is crucial for brands looking to maximize their ROI. The best enterprise software supports integration, automated workflows, and customization, among others.

Many businesses are clamoring for the attention of your existing and potential customers. One way to stand out is to craft personalized and data-driven messages.

ESPs, CDPs, and CRM systems play valuable roles in email marketing success. The distinctions between these solutions are not about choosing one over the other. Instead, understand how to integrate them for more effective, targeted campaigns.

FAQ

What is the difference between an ESP, CDP, and CRM?

An ESP focuses primarily on delivering emails, a CDP unifies customer data from multiple sources, while a CRM tracks and manages interactions with customers. Each plays a unique part in optimizing email marketing efforts.

Why is integrating a CRM with an ESP beneficial?

A CRM-ESP integration allows businesses to sync customer data and personalize emails based on user behavior. This can improve engagement and conversion rates. 

What factors should enterprises consider when choosing an ESP?

When selecting an email provider, consider deliverability rate, scalability, and automation features. Also, look for platforms that offer real-time analytics and seamless integration with other tools.