PostUp: the top Email Service Provider for big senders

5 minute read

Upland Admin

Publishers send a lot of email newsletters.

Media brands like The Onion offer a choice between daily and weekly updates. Fast Company offers a dozen or so newsletters of varying topics and frequencies. And then there are email behemoths like The Washington Post, who send over 70 newsletters covering everything from business to books to basketball.

Why do publishers send so much email? Simple: because email works.

But to send email that works, you need an ESP that works. Creating, curating, and circulating so many newsletters requires technology that can help you scale your email program while keeping things running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

So when brands have a lot of email to send, what technology do they turn to?

Notablist, a competitive intelligence platform, set out to see for themselves. They analyzed 500,000 brands to see which tools are favored by high-frequency emailers, and they found that PostUp is the top Email Service Provider by campaign frequency.

[Check out MediaPost’s coverage of Notablist’s findings here.]

A Bit of Background

Notablist maintains a corpus of nearly 30MM unique email campaigns sent by 500k brands from the past four years. Their analysis engine can detect more than 350 different technologies in email campaigns, including ESPs, CRMs, dynamic content providers, and more.

They used this data to analyze sending frequency, seeking to find whether there exists a relationship between how many email campaigns a brand sends and what technology they use to power those campaigns.

Step 1: How much email does the average brand send?

First, Notablist needed to determine the average number of campaigns brands send per month, keeping in mind that sending frequency changes throughout the year. You can view the monthly campaign frequency distribution in the chart below, capped at 30 campaigns per month for clarity.

Notablist found that the average brand sends 5 email campaigns per month.

Step 2: What technology do high-frequency brands use to send email?

With a baseline sending frequency established, Notablist could examine correlations between frequency and technology. The chart below shows the top 15 technologies behind the emailers with the highest monthly sending frequencies.

According to Notablist, brands using the email technologies listed in this chart send campaigns at a rate two to four times higher than average.

Okay, let’s go a little further. What happens when you take Notablist’s data and isolate the ESPs? Well, this. The following table ranks ESPs by their clients’ average campaign frequency per month:

PostUp’s clients average 19 unique mailings per month, making us the top email service provider by average campaign frequency. Not only is that more than any other ESP, that’s 5 more campaigns per month than the runner-up ESP.

Neat. What does all of this mean?

It could mean a few things.

1) First of all, as you might be aware (perhaps from the introduction of a certain blog post you might be skimming right now), publishers tend to send a lot of email. Because of this, ESPs with strong publisher solutions might be expected to have clients with higher campaign frequencies. PostUp’s email and audience development tools power some of the top publishing & media companies in the business, suggesting that we might see a spot at the top of this list.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Why would high-frequency emailers converge around certain ESPs in the first place? That brings us to another point.

2) Second, you could also conclude from these findings that some technologies are more suited overall to the needs of high-frequency emailers than others. When high-frequency emailers search for an ESP, they need to find a platform that can not only handle their output, but allow them to output that email more efficiently. The ESPs they choose might have automation solutions, deliverability services, and other features that help brands scale their email programs without getting bogged down in execution.

Because publishers send so much email, they need an email platform that frees them up to focus on content. Among other things, PostUp’s newsletter automation, CMS integration, audience development, and email monetization tools allow publishers to drive more revenue with their email programs in less time.

3) Finally, the availability of these high-efficiency solutions might encourage an ESP’s lower-frequency clients to roll out more email campaigns. Even if the ability to send more email wasn’t what brought a brand to a certain ESP, why not capitalize on the technology that’s available? It would seem to follow that ESPs with the capacity to scale email programs would increase their clients’ campaign output over time, bumping up the ESP’s average output.

PostUp’s automation and integration capabilities help publishers increase their email output and easily develop additional newsletter products in their email programs. Then, our audience development solutions help publishers build relationships with their audiences through the inbox.

By offering more newsletters and connecting audiences with these additional newsletters, publishers gain additional opportunities to reach, engage, and monetize their audiences. In today’s publishing climate, this quality is invaluable.

With over 200 billion emails delivered, we know how to help media brands scale email output, email audiences, and email revenue. Ready to start sending more email campaigns with less manual effort? Check out the PostUp platform to see why high-frequency senders choose us, then take a peek at our Automation Solution Guide to see how we do it.

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