Feedback wanted: ContactHub, a tool for email marketers to switch ESPs
As I worked on email marketing as a part time job a few weeks ago, I found that people who run email marketing or newsletters campaign have a big chance to switch to new ESP (email service provider) after awhile for some reasons. I realize that the contact related data (subscribes/unsubscribes, activity data) might not easy to tracking and migrate. So based on my assumption I want to create a tool (coding name ContactHub) that can bring up the following three major features:
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ContactHub is going to keep running beside your current ESP to auto sync your contact data. As you want to switch to new ESP, you just need connect ContactHub to it, and all the contact data will auto migrated, and also, keep tracking unsubscribes from the old one.
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ContactHub provides a central place for you track and monitor whole life time activity data (open, click etc) for each contact across different ESPs.
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ContactHub can be used as a central repository for all your contacts across different ESPs -- auto sync/track/merge contact data with multiple ESPs.
I don't know how this sounds to you, and appreciate for any feedbacks!
Here is the landing page: http://stevesuncanada.wixsite.com/contacthub
Hey Steve,
Here are a few more ideas on how you could validate this:
There's an online community called The Foundation which teaches you how to research and solve other people's problems with software. This sounds similar to the approach you're taking, so I'd read some of the posts there: https://thefoundation.com/blog/carl-story
The tl;dr of the approach is to cold contact a bunch of people in the industry you're targeting, set up calls with them, and ask them lots of questions with a focus on surfacing pain points rather than solutions. After the call, you basically take what you've heard and think of a software solution that could solve their pain points. Then you try to sell it to them and get an upfront financial commitment that finances the actual building of the product.
I personally hate cold calling but if you're brave enough to do it, it could be an approach worth exploring.
Hey tashicorp,
Great suggestion. For the first validation method, I didn't run it as freelancer job manually, but I found few online consulting companies which they are doing this kind of service. Do you think this still a validation?
I don't like cold call too. Tried few times before for other ideas, but I still believe this is the right way to go. lol
Hey Steve, I think it's a hint that it might be a problem, but probably not validation in its own right. I think providing the service personally for just a small handful of people would teach you so much about whether this is actually a pain point, and what the best solution will be.
Also, I came across this blog post in which popular blogger Pat Flynn describes his experiences using (and migrating between) 3 different ESPs. List migration is frequently described as a pain-point. Hope it's useful! http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/why-i-switched-from-aweber-to-infusionsoft-to-convertkit/
Thanks for the blog, this is the third blog about ESP migration story. :-)
Please keep us updated if you try to tackle this idea :)
I see the value in ContactHub, and agree about the inevitability and pain of switching ESPs. In my experience, the pain of switching ESPs scales as the size of the list increases.
In concept, ContactHub sounds like a focused/microservice of a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM). Some businesses rely on their ESPs to serve as an ad hoc CRM. I suspect that this happens for a couple common reasons:
When a marketer exhausts the use of data available within their ESP (i.e. email-centric data such as subscription source and date, opens, clicks, etc.), the next step often involves utilizing features traditionally offered by a CRM (i.e. transactional data, customer lifecycle, product interest, etc). MailChimp doesn't claim to be a CRM[1] but they undoubtedly see the value of a holistic customer model when marketing via email, and encourage integration with many CRMs and other types of platforms.
As you suggest, manually switching between ESPs via CSV exports is a painful process, but it's also quite easy to leave arcane transactional metadata behind. Larger companies with large sales teams or manual sales processes probably already have a CRM which integrates with or serves as their ESP. For businesses without a CRM, ContactHub could serve as central repository for ESPs and other third party integrations, ensuring that all data is retained even if the new ESP doesn't utilize a datapoint.
Good luck!
[1] http://kb.mailchimp.com/integrations/salesforce/mailchimp-and-crms
Wow! This is a great feedback I have ever got so far. The thorough information of how marketer/sales use ESP and CRM makes me have a more clearly idea of how ContactHub should be shaped.
Thanks so much!
What are some examples of ESPs? Are you talking about companies like MailChimp, SendGrid, Mailgun, ConvertKit, etc? Does Amazon SES fit in there? Just trying to get a handle on the terminology.
I think there's a lot of value in tools that help people move their data between services, although I'm not sure I would feel this way if I hadn't interviewed Stamp (https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/stamp). The thing about Stamp is that, without their tool, it's incredibly painful to switch between music services.
Is the same true of ESPs? What does the process currently look like without ContactHub? For example, I use MailChimp for Indie Hackers, and I'm kind of interested in trying out ConvertKit to see if I get better open/click rates there. How would I go about that today, and how would ContactHub tool make that faster/easier?
ESP stands for Email Service Provider, you are right about the examples except SES :-)
Actually, I got inspired after I read the stamp interview, but, I really don't know if the same issue happened to ESP world.
Currently, I found that ESP provide export/import functions which works through CSV file. There also some ESPs do programatically import from others.
With ContactHub, you can easily move contact data between ESPs, for example, you want to try ConvertKit, then, you simply connect ContactHub to it, and select the contacts you want to export, and all the rest works will be handled by ContactHub. The more import thing is that, all the changes now happened to both MailChimp and ConvertKit will be automatically synced and tracked by ContactHub.
Yeah I think the fact that these tools already have import/export to/from CSV files is rough. It's hard for your ContactHub to make it easier, because now the equation becomes:
That's very different than the opportunity Stamp seized, where option 1 (manually transferring songs by hand) was so hard that Stamp's solution was 50x better.
Given that fact, I think the strongest part of your idea are the other parts you mentioned besides the transfer.
If it's possible, I want to improve import/export part by making it's more automatic and seamless if there is a long contact list need to migrate.
Yep, I think you quite understand the strength part of ContactHub. lol.
Cool, keep us updated with how things go!