You're a Partnerships professional looking to grow your email marketing. What are the best services to use?

Whenever I started to build a partner initiative for a startup in my career, I had to cover marketing tasks myself as the marketing team was usually not ready to support me, yet. Having said that, if you are looking into using an email marketing service, your partner program has already reached some relevant size - and so should you company's marketing team. Hence, a strong recommendation is to align with the marketing team to see which tool they are using for the email marketing (to prospects and customers). The best recommendation is to evaluate if you can use the same tool for your marketing campaigns! If the use cases are too different, explore options provided by integrated partner tools like PRM solutions!

As mentioned above, before exploring a separated tool for your partner email marketing needs, try to use one of the following options: 1) Use the email marketing tool your company is using already (e.g. for emails to prospects and customers). Ideally, your marketing team can support you with setting up, copywriting and designing emails that resonate (as they are the marketing experts...) 2) Check if you can utilize email capabilities of a PRM (Partner Relationship Management) tool. Most provider will offer these capabilities, with the additional benefit of having partner life cycle flows prepared - meaning the emails are sent based on the progress / status a partner has, often with role-based content enabled.

In my experience, using a PRM / Partner Management tool for sending out emails, you can personalize emails based on the partner (persona/user) context, progress and requirements - e.g. having a user/role-specific onboarding flow for employees of your partner. The onboarding for an employee of your partner differs significantly whether this person is working in sales (and should pitch your product to the partner's prospects and clients) or if it's someone who will implement your solution for mutual clients. Being able to provide this role-specific personalization makes a huge difference in ensuring relevance and value in your email campaigns.

When choosing a service, be mindful of your region and the region where you're partners are based. All the services suggested are US based, and may have challenges or even limitations when used in other regions. Thinks like native language support (British English is different than American English, Swiss German is different than German etc.), legal requirements (think privacy laws like GDPR), or simply delivery quotas may be different from local / regional solutions.

Be mindful of introducing "yet another tool" - explore using solutions which are used in your company, first. This will reduce the costs for software, the maintenance costs, and will enable alignment and collaboration with other teams. Keep in mind that your main job is not writing compelling emails or design great automatic campaigns - there are most likely marketing experts in your company who can do that better (and faster) than you. ;)