The Forrester Wave: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q4 2009

Forrester has released its Wave report for ESPs in Q4 2009 and of course it’s making for a great deal of buzz and twittering. I’ve included links to each of the ESPs in the report – those in bold are offering downloads of the Forrester report. Forresters reviewed 15 ESPs against 69 criteria and tagged Responsys and ExactTarget as leaders.

Excerpt from the report:

Forrester surveyed 218 clients of the vendors in this wave on how the current economic situation is altering their email programs, very few marketers cited budget cuts. Instead, clients are more demanding of their email service providers because:

· Marketers are increasing the relevance of their programs. Forty-eight percent of marketers surveyed indicated that they are attempting to make their communications more relevant. These increases in relevancy will drive the need for data integration and increased adoption of relevancy-empowering tactics — like dynamic content and testing — as well as strategic and tactical services.

· Email marketing frequency is growing. Marketers increasingly choose email over more expensive channels creating marketing clutter. This inflation in messaging volume and soaring sending sizes drive even more price compression in the market — further encouraging marketers to adopt relevancy empowering tactics.

· Marketers look to ESPs to offset staffing losses. While 20% of marketers surveyed indicated that they lost staff, Forrester finds that they are leveraging production services of the ESPs to offset their downsized marketing organizations.

Acxiom
Alterian
BlueHornet
Experian Marketing Services
ClickSquared
Datran Media
e-Dialog
Emailvision
Epsilon
ExactTarget
Lyris
Responsys
Silverpop
Yesmail
Zeta Interactive