The Marketer Quarterly

THE MARKETER QUARTERLY WINTER 2015 10 | MQ

4. TAKE A LONG WEEKEND. No one makes his or her best decisions when stressed-out or tired. Let’s face it, even the best-executed holiday season will take its toll. If you hit some rough email patches during December, it’s never a bad idea to get away from everything for a few days in January or February to clear your head. Things might just look a little different when you get back. Even if they don’t, at least you had a nice little mini-vacation!

5. GO TO AN EMAIL CONFERENCE. If you were really smart, you might have planned ahead and booked yourself a reservation for something like the Email Experience Council’s Email Evolution Conference, which is typically held in winter. You always have the opportunity to meet with lots of other email marketers at these conferences. Maybe you’ll come across someone with holiday war stories that make your issues seem trivial. Nothing beats a little perspective. Or you may be the one with the worst stories! Let’s hope not.

6. UPGRADE TO THE LATEST VERSION OF YOUR ESP’S PLATFORM. Finally, while it’s not true that every ESP has clients on different platforms, there are a lot of marketers who are not using the latest version of their ESP’s platform. If you’ve been putting off the migration to the latest version, a bad holiday season might be just the thing to finally motivate you to make the move. Why don’t marketers and ESPs always move to a new platform when it is rolled out? For the marketer, it can feel like switching ESPs. For the ESP, it might lead a client to consider an RFP. But a bad holiday season might just make everyone see the value in a move.

None of these six hacks are a guarantee that you’ll be able to fix a poor relationship with your email partner. These ideas are more or less simple ways to repair any strains between you and your ESP if things haven’t broken down irrevocably. If you do decide that it’s time to do an RFP, give us a call. We will manage your RFP in a timely process, guide you to making the right decision, and save you a great deal of money in your new contract. Given the importance of email marketing to your bottom line, “good enough” is never an acceptable state of affairs. You need to have a great relationship with your ESP—one way or another. MQ

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