Last week, I was talking to an entrepreneur who was contemplating a major business change. The conversation reminded me of the early days of Pardot. Back then, the product was primarily forms and landing pages with CRM integration. Anything related to email marketing was done through API calls to other systems like MailChimp or Constant Contact. Products that we take for granted today, like Twilio, to abstract out the email component of a system, did not exist.
We had a large number of debates around whether or not we should become an email service provider. To be an email service provider would require a major business change, whereby we allocated our limited resources to things like managing email servers, working with different email infrastructure and inbox companies like Gmail and Outlook on deliverability, and adding more complexity to our onboarding program with customers as they now had more technical changes to make. It wasn’t a decision to be taken lightly.
After going back and forth and thinking about it from first principles around delivering the best solution to our customers, delivering a solution that was the most seamless, and delivering a solution that helped customers generate the best return on investment, we made the decision to become an email service provider. While it was painful in a few areas, especially around deliverability and reaching inboxes, overall, it was an incredibly important and valuable change to the business. We could now deliver a better solution, both triggering emails instantly as well as sending bulk emails like company newsletters natively within the software.
In terms of customers, they already had budgets for email marketing platforms, and so it also made it easier in the sales cycle because we could now replace their email marketing product with our marketing automation system. Business marketers wanted to run more advanced online marketing campaigns, and now they could do it in a more dynamic and productive way.
Contemplating a major business model change that involves more staffing, more technology, and more unknowns can be unnerving. For us, while it added more complexity to become a full email service provider, it was one of the best decisions we ever made. We made it through the learning curve and ultimately delivered a much better solution to customers.
Entrepreneur
via https://www.aiupnow.com
David Cummings, Khareem Sudlow
