Email Provider – What is an ESP?

An email provider, also known as ESP (Email service provider), is a company that takes care of the technical aspects necessary for sending and receiving emails. Therefore, it is the company that offers the process automation service and the necessary technical infrastructure so that you can send and receive emails from your account.

Having a good email service provider is essential for a company’s email marketing strategy. Sending newsletters, promotions and mass mailing continues to be a profitable technique for all types of businesses.    

 

    

Índice

  1. Differences between supplier, client and account
  2. Basic Email Provider Features
  3. Essential Email Provider Features
  4. Advantages of using an email provider

Differences between email provider, email client and email account

The provider creates and makes available to companies and individuals the necessary technology to send and receive emails automatically. Some examples of providers are:

  • Acumbamail

  • MailChimp

  • Aweber

  • Sendgrid

  • Sendinblue

The client (also called Mailboz provider or inbox provider) is the application, program or web address with which you access your email. It may match the supplier or it may be different. This occurs mainly in companies that hire a specific provider for their institutional addresses but access it through a different website or application, with greater popularity or usability. Some of the most common are:  

  • Gmail

  • Outlook

  • Thunderbird

  • Opera Mail

The email account is the personal and unique address that a user has to send and receive electronic communications. Its structure consists of three parts: the name chosen by the user, the at sign (@) and the address of the email client, which can end in .com, .net, .es, etc.

Basic Email Provider Features

The main functions that an email provider performs are the following:

  • It offers clients different types of templates to create their emails.

  • Provides tools to create and automate subscription lists and update them.

  • Send emails to specified subscriber lists.

  • Allows you to schedule the sending of email.

  • It has metric tools to analyze the results of an email marketing campaign

Essential Features of Email Provider

A good email provider must have the following characteristics:

  • Offer an advisory service to clients.

  • Offer training tools to clients such as ebooks, webinars or video tutorials.

  • Ensure the security of personal data.

  • Comply with current legislation.

  • Deliver mass emails quickly.

  • Support high speed browsing.

  • Have a variety of templates, including drag and drop, in which you can include multimedia and HTML content.

  • Allow A/B testing. 

  • Efficiently update new subscriptions, cancellations or address changes.

  • Have complete statistics that can be discriminated with demographic criteria.

  • Allow clients to create responsive campaigns, adapted to different devices.  

  • Create a preview of emails before they are sent.

  • Integrate social media to facilitate the dissemination of the campaign.

Advantages of using an email provider

Using an email provider offers several advantages for your email marketing campaigns:

  • Improve productivity: thanks to the automation of processes and the use of templates.

  • Faster and more accurate data analysis: thanks to the different metrics, you can know at a glance the email opening rate, the number of conversions, etc. in a personalized way.  

  • Security: company and customer data are treated using security protocols and following current legislation.