Heads of technology, IT directors, and marketing leaders around the world are confronted with the decision to move to the cloud or manage their bulk and transactional email infrastructure on-premises. While I’m biased working for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), these five areas and subsequent questions can make the decision to buy or build a lot easier, based on my experience in the email industry working with large and small customers for 15+ years.

Development, infrastructure, and staffing

The starting point often comes here, where savings both in cost and resources are easily found. Consider the following questions and internal talking points:

  • Is infrastructure your core competency?

  • Do you have the resources necessary to develop a high-performing email delivery application and manage a highly available infrastructure, which includes crucial security updates, patching, and so on?

  • What’s required to process and store sent mail logs, bounces, opens, and clicks?

  • Is managing everything the best use of your (likely) already overallocated resources?

  • How much does it cost to run your on-premises service versus outsourcing to the cloud?

Maintaining your on-premises infrastructure for email delivery is costly and complicated, especially when you add in the need for expert personnel to manage it. What happens if one of those people leaves?

Mailbox provider management

Each mailbox provider operates differently, and email service providers like OCI Email Delivery provider operates differently, and email service providers like OCI Email Delivery have decades of experience behind the scenes in understanding how to get the most email to the inbox for reputable senders. Our skills include custom configurations by provider, IP pool management, strategies for major and minor providers, how to minimize queuing and deferment, and more.

Considering the following questions and talking points:

  • Is your team prepared to invest the time to learn from scratch or simply roll the dice and hope everything goes well?

  • Is either choice preferable to using a cloud provider who has already figured it all out?

  • When revenue and customer communications are on the line, do you want to cross your fingers and hope that all is well?

Email deliverability management

Don’t underestimate the importance of dedicated deliverability resources with email service providers. They can answer the following questions:

  • Is your mail reaching the inbox? How do you know?

  • How can you increase your inbox percentage?

  • Where are you running into trouble spots?

  • Are you having an issue with certain providers, and how do you work through it?

Reputable email delivery providers have dedicated teams to continuously monitor all these issues and more. Deliverability isn’t static and requires close attention. How do you build that knowledge set internally?

Support

If something goes wrong, who do you call? Customers are saying that they’re not getting your emails, so what do you do? What if a server goes down at your location? Who troubleshoots?

These tasks can be a distraction if the proper teams aren’t in place. Wouldn’t you rather have your support team deal with customers on questions related to your products and services?

Scalability

If you don’t grow, your business can suffer. How do you monitor your system capacity as you scale? Shouldn’t that be someone else’s problem?

Final thoughts

As a cloud-based service, the total cost of ownership with OCI Email Delivery is lower than buying hardware, hiring deliverability experts, and operating your own email sending servers. Setting up and managing an on-premises email platform and network is costly from both a capital and operating expense (CAPEX and OPEX) perspective with physical hardware, staging, rack space, and training.

Investing in experts to stay on top of ever-changing deliverability guidelines can also be both challenging and expensive because the rules for what’s considered spam vary from one mailbox provider to the next, such as Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, and Comcast.

Outsourcing email delivery to a trusted provider such as OCI not only reduces overall costs, but significantly improves inbox success and provides greater stability. Whether you’re sending 10,000 messages per month or 1 billion, OCI Email Delivery has the right solution for you with the ability to customize and direct your mail through one or more of our worldwide regions.

If email is critical to your revenue generation, ensure that it’s done right with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Email Delivery. Get started with a free trial now.