4 replies to this topic

[grooveitgolf_com]

Our company's owner wants to upsell a niche insurance provider we do IM work for on an email marketing package. I'm pushing to find a provider to handle this for us because this is by no means our area of expertise (and we're a little outgunned at the moment), but we still need to do some initial scoping.

Any advice on some general questions to ask when scoping an email marketing contract?

What I have so far is

• How many newsletters sent
• How often is each newsletter sent
• Size of list for each newsletter
• What system do you currently use to manage emails? (we're assuming they need new software to handle it)
• Who would be responsible for content creation
• Who would be responsible for graphics creation

Any other suggestions?

[Scottie]

What is the source of the list? Double opt in? Purchased from a shady "list dealer"?

You can get in trouble quickly sending out emails to people who haven't opted in AND confirmed and end up with a blacklisted mail server. Proceed carefully!

[grooveitgolf_com]

The source of the list is their opt-in list - roughly 50,000 members from various military and government agencies. They've been running an in-house email campaign since there has been email as a viable commercial communication tool but hadn't been seeing results.

This is not a shady company, but a quasi-government funded non profit.

Now that we have that out of the way... ideas about scoping questions?

What is the source of the list? Double opt in? Purchased from a shady "list dealer"?

You can get in trouble quickly sending out emails to people who haven't opted in AND confirmed and end up with a blacklisted mail server. Proceed carefully!

[YajR]

You'd definitely want to know about their list confidentiality policy.
Make sure that even though you use their services, the names on the list belong to you and you only. Ask them if they will resell or keep the names in their own databases for their own purposes, or if it's exclusively yours.

[Zishan Ahmed]

And why not about the technical difficulties that would arise during the business course.
Who will the technical contact point.

Make sure all the basic thing is in placed, handle the thing that u are very much sure off and the rest can be handle by the expertise, but also check and keep a update on this.