Virtually all Email Service Providers (ESPs) gleam with the promise of innovation and ease when you first encounter them. But what happens when you delve deeper, behind the polished facade, and uncover the uncomfortable truths?
Join us as we pull back the curtain on some lesser-known facts about your favorite email vendors. Here are four ghastly secrets no ESP ever wants you to discover.
1. ESPs Often Borrow Inspiration (or More) From Each Other
Imagine a scenario: “Wow, this looks amazing!” This isn’t just you admiring an ESP’s sleek homepage; it’s an entire sales team from a competing vendor huddled around a monitor. “We need to surpass this!” exclaims the CEO. “Let’s do it!” echoes the manager. All eyes turn to the designer in the back.
“Wait, how am I supposed to…”
“Don’t worry, just use their site as reference.”
“You mean, as a starting point? For something new, I guess.”
“No, make it look the same – but nicer.”
“The same?”
“Yeah, but nicer.”
“Better-looking, you mean?”
“No, just the same, but different.”
“How different?”
“Just the same.”
“The same?”
“But nicer.”
Should You Be Horrified?
Unless you’re a web designer, probably not. Companies have drawn inspiration from competitors since the dawn of entrepreneurship. With over 400 email vendors crowding the market, a certain degree of similarity in their websites and offerings is inevitable.
You’ll notice common claims of “superior,” “best,” “world-class,” or “industry-leading” across many platforms. Their sites often share similar layouts, pricing structures, feature sets, and prominent images of computer monitors showcasing beautiful newsletters and drag-and-drop editors – perhaps with a touch of animation (remember, “same, but nicer”).
The truth is, all ESPs diligently monitor their rivals. Each vendor maintains a roster of competitor ESPs they track across the web. They subscribe to newsletters, follow on social media, request quotes as prospective clients, and scour the internet for mentions. Whenever a rival launches a new feature, competitors scrutinize it, experiment with it, and often attempt to replicate it—but nicer.
Is this merely corporate pettiness? Not entirely. It often boils down to business strategy. When an ESP introduces a new, popular feature, their users will inevitably ask, “Can we have this too? Please? Or we’ll consider switching!” This pressure often leads developers to fast-track similar features with minimal planning, resulting in something that closely mirrors the original.
Ultimately, this competitive drive can be beneficial. It makes it easier for users to migrate between vendors (reducing the learning curve) and pushes ESPs to continuously innovate. Anything that brings you cutting-edge features at an affordable price is generally a good thing.
So, no need for horror just yet. Unless, of course, a critical system failure occurs…
2. ESPs Experience Crashes More Often Than You Might Think
Server crashes are universally loathed. If users find them frustrating, email vendors outright abhor them. Their entire business, their very existence, can vanish down the “Page not available” rabbit hole. If you believe this is a rare occurrence, think again.
Every ESP has endured at least one catastrophic crash in its lifetime – and most will experience several. This isn’t speculation; it’s an inevitability. Email marketing servers push hard drives to their absolute limits. A drive constantly reading and writing data 24/7, all year round, will eventually fail. If system administrators are lucky, the hard drive might provide a subtle warning with scan errors. More often, it simply dies without warning—perhaps within a RAID array struggling to switch to redundancy drives, at the exact moment hundreds of thousands of users are logged in, or right when you’re sending that crucial campaign.
Should You Be Horrified?
You absolutely should be if and when it happens to you, which depends entirely on your usage frequency.
Many vendors proudly advertise 99% uptime in their Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This seemingly high figure translates into more than 3 days per year where the vendor acknowledges their entire service might be down. If you only log in weekly to design and send your newsletter, you might rarely notice an issue. However, if that ESP powers a complex sales funnel crucial to your entire business, you’ll undoubtedly notice even the briefest outage—likely while expressing your frustration loudly.
The truly unsettling part? When disaster strikes, the ESP staff usually have no immediate idea when the system will be back online. Their first task is to assess the problem: Was it disk failure? A connection loss at the data center? A DDoS attack? A mischievous critter chewing through a cable? A particularly nasty critter intent on ruining your day?
Whatever the cause, repairs take time. While you’re on the phone, unleashing a torrent of complaints on the ESP’s support staff, their system administrators are either frantically contacting everyone at the affected data center or are deep inside the data center itself, perhaps 30 meters underground, navigating a tangled mess of cables with no mobile signal and limited contact with the outside world.
So, yes, it will take time.
Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are even more severe. It’s astonishingly easy for malicious actors to launch a script that can knock a website offline for days. Just a few years ago, a DDoS assault plunged some major ESPs into the digital dark ages for a full two weeks.
Two. Holy-Freaking-Crap. Weeks.
But at least your data is safe, right?
3. ESPs Offer Limited Guarantees for Backups or Refunds
Did you read that fine print? The “Terms of Use” you blissfully agreed to when you signed up for your favorite email vendor? Chances are, you’ve implicitly accepted being left to fend for yourself if something goes wrong. This includes the potential loss of all your data – subscribers, campaigns, reports, the whole lot.
If you pore over any ESP’s terms of service, you’ll likely find a section titled “limitation of liability” (often in uppercase, bold, or both; bad news tends to be emphasized). This is where the vendor, much like a parent explaining why a highly anticipated gift isn’t coming, outlines the boundaries of their responsibility and where you stand alone.
- If they crash mid-operation, tough luck.
- If they can’t recover your lost data, tough luck.
- If they provide incorrect analytics, tough luck.
- If they screw up anything at all, tough luck.
- Indemnity? Even worse luck.
Should You Be Horrified?
You probably don’t know the half of it. Hidden within the convoluted labyrinth of an email vendor’s Terms and Conditions, you might stumble upon unsettling clauses such as service termination at the vendor’s discretion (with no explanation required) and pricing changes without prior warning.
In some instances, payment terms for monthly plans can be downright draconian. Did your credit card expire unnoticed? You might still be charged (with interest). Want to update your card? You could incur a late payment fee. Would you prefer to simply cancel and move on? You might be required to do so in writing, specifically.
Fortunately, these money-mongering terms are not universal. Most ESPs are generally reasonable and will do everything in their power to assist you if they make a mistake. However, they simply cannot afford to offer extremely costly compensation if their service fails to perform—which it inevitably will, even if only momentarily.
And speaking of their service…
4. ESPs Have Limited Control Over Their Core Function
Imagine holding an important letter. Would you send it via postal mail, or would you place it in a bottle and hope it drifts across the ocean to its destination?
When you use an ESP, you effectively choose the bottle every time.
Should You Be Horrified?
If you’re new to email marketing, this might come as a surprise, but there’s a reason no reputable vendor boasts “guaranteed delivery.” They simply cannot ensure it. While they will diligently prepare your message and launch it into the digital ocean towards its destination, that’s often the last they truly “see” of it. From that point on, your email is in the hands of the “local Coast Guard” (i.e., inbox providers like Gmail), who will salvage it and process it as they deem fit. This includes the possibility of not delivering it at all.
All the while, your ESP will remain largely unaware of these critical details:
- Inbox delivery? They’re in the dark.
- Spam folder delivery? Same.
- Trashed email? Same, same.
- Bounces and spam complaints? Only if the inbox providers report those back.
- Opens? Depends on subscribers loading the email’s images or clicking through.
So, the very thing an ESP is designed to do – deliver emails – is the one thing it can never truly guarantee has been accomplished.
This is inherent to how email technology works, and it’s unlikely to change significantly. This limitation is why a growing number of ESPs are expanding into multichannel offerings (SMS, push notifications, social media, etc.), aiming for greater control over the entire messaging process: sending, delivery, and comprehensive reporting.
Does this mean email is becoming obsolete? Not at all. It remains the marketing channel offering the best return on investment. And as long as you adhere to best practices, there’s a very good chance your emails will reach the inbox, regardless of which ESP you choose.
You’re still buying the ultimate message in a bottle, though.