Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

I think you may want to start viewing your software as a service as it clearly achieves a service in outcome. If you can help your customers achieve their business goals then they are going to repay you with further business, positive word of mouth and ultimately expansion of your business.

As someone who works for an Email marketing service, the answer is *absolutely* yes. We have a branded reseller program and a good portion of those in it provide full service email marketing services.

We provide the web-based service, server facility, Internet connections, etc., but our service is pretty much self-service for our clients. We cannot do both the technical and the full-service part well so we have chosen to provide a largely self-service email marketing service and let our resellers provide full service email marketing.

Every reseller gets a dedicated account manager so they have someone to help get set up, answer questions, and so on.

Please go to StreamSend Email Marketing service and click on our "Resell/Partner" link for more information. Feel free to email sales (at) streamsend.com and one of our sales people can answer questions about the program or use the contact form provided there to submit questions. Thanks.

Josh:

In a previous life I did a lot of consulting to technology companies vis-a-vis starting up prof'l services ("PS" to save me some typing ;). By what I've read so far I'm not sure what you are after - the nickels and dimes or the more strategic stuff?

Tech service, support, etc. are the price to play nowadays, so I wouldn't consider that part of the PS package. Nor would I consider execution - you'll be crowded out by the agencies.

On the low end you can do program enhancements. This could be a part of the upfront cost, or better as a separate revenue stream (pay as you go).

On the high end, you can be more proactive and strategic. Rather than make campaigns run better your angle would be to better campaigns. This requires maybe a different skill set than you have in-house.

The funny thing is that SOMEONE is going to get this business, because clients need help upfront as well as downstream. Which seems more appealing ? more likely for your company?

Josh

1. Yes, you have to properly support your product or service to have credibility. Otherwise customers will use you once, fail and leave. That help has to be easy to access, fast and it must make itself very accountable for actually solving a problem - not just responding.

2. Absolutely - by adding services, you are adding depth to the offer. I would feel far more confident buying a software package, if I knew the supplier would help me to get more out of it when I reach the limits of self-discovery and self-customisation.

By adding services, you also add valuable layers to the customer relationships you create, that will enable you to feed back a huge amount of intelligence into the ongoing product development process.

Which means your future product/service offerings will be better, better targeted, and more competitive. Where's the downside?

Good luck.

ChrisB

I think you may have answered your own question in your very first sentence. You called yourself "an established email marketing service provider."

Every added service you can offer only makes you more valuable to your customers and potential customers. Just because someone is using an in-house solution today doesn't mean they will do so forever, and vice versa. The new customer you bring in by offering services may eventually feel equipped do it themselves with your software. You want to be able to keep customers as long as possible. Everyone knows that keeping existing customers is a lot better proposition than finding new ones.

The only caveat is that you should probably define how the software and services will be handled internally. You don't want anyone to feel as if they aren't getting the service they require because their rep is a software guy and they need services. Their rep has to be able to steer their needs to the right department without the customer feeling as if they are either being neglected or getting bounced around. It could be a difficult balance, but it isn't insurmountable.