Email Service Provider (ESP) is a business technology that enables enterprises to send out and manage email campaigns for promotional and administrative purposes. It is an integral part of any online marketing enterprise and is often used by both marketing agencies and in-house marketing teams within big corporations.
The ESP is typically hosted on servers on premises or on cloud storage, depending on the setup utilized by the user. Email Providers have a broad range of capabilities, but the most basic feature of every ESP is the management capability for email lists, including storage and management of opt-in users. The ESP sends email communications to these users.
Some more advanced Email Providers can divide the email addresses lists into sub-lists for different streams of communication. They can also help users create email templates. The most advanced Email Providers even help users track the results of their email campaigns and analyze them.
Email Providers allow enterprises to manage their email streams at a scale much larger than what consumer-level email services such as Gmail and Outlook can handle. In addition to enabling the use of much more data than typically possible, they come with email cloud storage and spam filters that improve the quality of the workflow. Email Providers currently on the market differ mainly depending on whether their target users are small to mid-size businesses (SMBs) or large enterprises.
For instance, Constant Contact targets SMBs from the Business2Customer category, while HubSpot caters to the Business2Business small-to-mid-size sector. Enterprise-oriented Email Providers include Adobe Campaign and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The features that come with the software may vary depending on the specific tasks they are required to carry out. Naturally, the enterprise-level software may have more customization features, as well as data-management models. SMBs-oriented Internet Providers on the other hand are more likely to have a free-account version that offers basic functionality at no cost.