Business is full of many milestones and evolution, you set yearly goals, hopes and dreams for your small business or maybe even for your large organization. No matter what size you are there is always a good and a better. Something that you know in the end, that is where you want to be.

A topic that often comes up in our daily tasks is when is it a good time to move from the free mail provider to a paid service, or are the free providers really that effective. Really, in the grand scheme of things, there is nothing wrong with a free service just as there is nothing wrong with the paid services. What is comes down to, just as we discussed in the DIY vs Paid Web Designer post is that your business must be ready, or you have found a feature that is missing from the free service provider.

When we decided to really start list building, we started with the basics, a free plan through MailChimp. It worked just the way we wanted, it collected emails, organized the contacts into specific lists for our needs and connected well with our website opt-in forms. The problem was, we were expanding and growing as a business, it was a great solution in the beginning, but then we came to the cornerstone where we needed more capabilities, more features.

So back to the first topic – when is it the right time to move?

There is a simple theory I follow with anything related to moving from a free service to a paid service, or a more sophisticated service that has many more features then the existing one:

Features just aren’t there

You will know it’s time, when you are looking for different features in your current provider but they don’t support it, or it requires many work arounds to get things working the way you want such as payment processing, membership based access or landing page hosting.

List or Plan Constraints

Your current provider may have limits on the amount of emails that can go out monthly, or a certain number of subscribers supported by your plan. The cost of upgrading your plan, versus the new providers plan and features may determine when it’s time to move on.

System / Platform Compatibility

This one is rare, but sometimes will happen. Each system operates in a different way, or just like any business changes for the better due to security or feature additions. This can cause compatibility issues with your existing web platform, again rare, but is a possibility. This usually means it’s time to switch if your current provider can’t find a solution that works for you both.

DrakeCo’s move and Beyond

Recently, we moved from MailChimp to Constant Contact. This was a milestone in a sense as we could now expand to a point where our email marketing needed more features, better manageability and more compatibility with custom API’s which are used for custom connections to specific web applications and such…

What we foresee is at least one more move again, which is to a platform called OntraPort, this is a heavy system, because of its power and capabilities but also comes at a high price point. For these reasons we need both time, as well as funding to support such a system. Our business is not quite there, but will be one day. This is the example of a business growing into a new system or requiring a new system due to growth and capabilities.

Is it time for your business to move?

DrakeCo helps you manage your e-mail systems, we have moved many lists and setup new systems for multiple businesses. All mail providers have the fundamental features which allows for cross compatibility which allows businesses to move between them, or at lease move their lists around so they don’t miss out on communications. If you have any questions or need more information, please don’t hesitate to ask!