Email Marketing RFP: How To Write One

Lydia Ume

on Jan 17, 2025

QUICK SUMMARY

A bad-fit email marketing software can derail your entire email marketing strategy, and that’s before thinking about the cost of its acquisition. This article guides you on how to write RFPs to help you pick the best email software vendor for your business.

TABLE OF CONTENTS What's an Email Marketing RFP? Key Components How To Write One Common Mistakes To Avoid

Choosing the right email marketing vendor can feel daunting considering the countless options on the market. Without a structured buying process, you're likely to get overwhelmed.

The result? Picking an email solution based on incomplete information or the need to get done with haphazard and stressful buying process. Enter the email marketing RFP (Request for Proposal).

Your RFP is as a roadmap. It helps you articulate your needs, compare vendors on an even playing field, and make a more informed choice.

This article will guide you through the necessary things you need to know about an email marketing RFP, from what it is and why it’s essential, to the key components and steps for writing one.

What Is An Email Marketing RFP?

An email marketing RFP is a document organizations use to point out their needs when selecting an email service provider (ESP) or email marketing agency. A request for proposal serves as a roadmap for vendors to submit tailored proposals, outlining how their solution aligns with the your requirements, timeline, and budget.

Creating an RFP forces you to:

Clarify your objectives
Define your ‘must-haves’ versus ‘nice-to-haves’
Establish your criteria for evaluating potential partners early in the procurement cycle for evaluating potential partners.

These ensure you focus on finding a solution that suits your goals, rather than being swayed by flashy features or vague promises. An RFP is a vital tool in aligning your business goals with the right ESP, making vendor selection more objective, transparent, and efficient.

Why Do You Need an Email Marketing RFP?

Here are three reasons...

Simplifies Vendor Evaluation: One of the biggest upsides to an RFP is it simplifies vendor selection. By creating a standardized process, you can evaluate proposals from different email marketing platforms side by side. Vendors are required to address the same criteria, making it easier to compare services, costs, and timelines. This eliminates confusion and ensures you’re not left guessing about which provider can truly meet your needs.
Prevents Budget Overrun: A clear RFP outlines your project scope, technical requirements, and budget from the start, reducing the likelihood of unexpected expenses. This proactive approach ensures you choose a provider who can deliver results within your financial parameters, reinforcing the RFP's value in maintaining control over procurement.
Facilitates Vendor Alignment: An RFP communicates your company’s objectives, technical expectations, and budget constraints in detail. This clarity ensures that potential partners propose email marketing solutions that align with your business goals. An RFP not only helps you find a capable vendor but also one that shares your vision, ensuring a productive and seamless collaboration with the selected email marketing platforms.

Key Components Of An Effective Email Marketing RFP

An effective RFP has the following key components:

Company Overview: The company overview is your chance to introduce your business and set the stage for potential vendors. Think of it as a quick snapshot of who you are and what you do. Share a bit about your company’s background, including company name, when you were founded, your mission, and what makes your products or services unique. Highlight your target audience, the customers you serve, and any marketing goals you’re aiming to achieve. Don’t forget to mention your current digital marketing efforts and any past experiences with email marketing services or agencies. This context helps vendors understand your needs and tailor their proposals to fit your business perfectly.
Project Objectives and Scope: This section is where you clearly outline what you want to accomplish and what you’re expecting from a vendor. Describe the specific outcomes you’re aiming for or the sort of email marketing campaigns you run, like boosting engagement or retention, improving conversions, or increasing brand awareness. Include details about the scope of work, such as the services you’re looking for (e.g., email campaign management or real-time analytics). This reduces the chances of scope creep and helps vendors understand your priorities and tailor their email marketing proposals to your needs.
Technical and Functional Requirements: Functional requirements spell out exactly what the tool needs to do. Think features like email list segmentation, A/B testing, and performance tracking. On the other hand, technical requirements focus on how the software will work within your existing systems. This means detailing security protocols, integration capabilities, hardware compatibility, and performance standards. The key is to be clear and specific, giving potential vendors a precise understanding so they know whether they can meet your business needs.
List must-have features: This section is where you outline the features the email marketing software must have. To do this accurately, you need to have a good grasp of the email marketing activities you’d be carrying out with the software. Typically, you want email marketing software that meets your compliance needs and has automation, CRM integration, and segmentation.
Budget and Timeline: The section of an RFP is all about setting expectations and ensuring transparency between you and potential vendors. By sharing your timeline and financial parameters upfront, you give vendors a clear understanding of what’s possible within your constraints. This helps them propose realistic solutions that align with your timing and resources.
Vendor Qualifications and Experience: This section allows you to detail your selection criteria and rank them accordingly. These criteria will include factors such as expertise, niche experience, budget alignment, and a portfolio of past successes. By doing this, you give yourself a better chance of attracting vendors with the best qualifications and experience.

6 Steps To Writing An Effective Email Marketing RFP

Step 1: Define Your Goals and Requirements

Before jumping to put words to paper, you need to first define your RFP goals. Your goals could be anything from reduced cart abandonment and increased personalization to omnichannel integration and better targeting and segmentation.

Without clear goals, it’s nearly impossible to measure results down the line. Plus, it influences the kind of companies you attract for partnership.

The CEO at Rockway, Matt Kleinrock, who’s usually at the end of company RFPs, gives a lot of weight to clearly defined goals. “I think I’m really looking for people to have goals and objectives. What are you looking to accomplish? Don’t just say our goal is to increase sales. It’s not definitive enough, not exact enough. That just tells me you’re not really serious about your goals.”

So, you want to use the SMART approach to define your goals and objectives. Here are some short and sweet examples:

Increase our email open rates by 15 per cent within the next four months.
Reduce cart abandonment by 5 per cent in the next six months.
Achieve a 7 per cent conversion rate on our email marketing campaigns within the next quarter.

When this is done, specify your email program requirements next. This is where you outline features the email marketing software must have (and some nice-to-haves) to meet your business needs. Use specific language to illustrate those requirements through use cases. Here’s a use case example on A/B testing:

Requirement: The platform should support robust A/B testing for targeted email marketing strategies - subject lines, content, design, and call-to-action buttons, with easy-to-interpret performance reports.
Use Case: We want to test different versions of emails to determine what resonates best with our target audience. For example:

Testing whether subject lines with personalization outperform generic ones.
Analyzing engagement when offering a downloadable guide vs. a free trial in the email.
Comparing visual designs (plain text vs. HTML-heavy) to see which drives higher click-through rates.

The system must automatically determine statistically significant winners and provide actionable recommendations for optimization.

Step 2: Engage Stakeholders Early

After defining your goals and objectives, you want to involve other teams as early as possible so you can get the necessary stakeholder input to move forward. You should do this in a meeting to enable you to get it over with quickly. Attendees of this meeting will differ based on the organization and its structure. But you should typically have the following teams represented:

Marketing Teams: Marketing specifies campaign goals, content needs, personalization features, and other email marketing requirements.
IT Departments: This department highlights integration requirements with existing tools like CRMs (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot).
Compliance Teams: The compliance team provides input on security, data privacy (e.g., GDPR, CAN-SPAM), and accessibility needs.

Contributions from respective department heads enable internal alignment, which is crucial in helping you acquire software that works for your organization.

Step 3: Draft Technical and Functional Requirements

Specify both technical and functional requirements in line with your email marketing strategy and business goals. Requirements in this section may vary, but typically include:

Must-Have Features: The software must have email automation, segmentation, personalization, reporting, template design, analytics, and A/B testing.
Integration Needs: The software must integrate with systems such as CRM (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot), e-commerce platforms (e.g., Shopify, WooCommerce), and analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics).
Scalability: The software should have the ability to handle growing subscriber lists and high-volume campaigns without system lags.
Compliance Features: The platform must comply with data protection regulations such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM, ensuring secure handling of subscriber data.
Customer Support Services: The vendor must provide ongoing support options such as live chat, email support, and access to a knowledge base or user community.

However, Helen Winter, Founder at Business Bullet, notes that non-functional requirements are really, really important, because sometimes functionality wise, all the vendors might do the same thing, but it’s usually your non-functional that will really differentiate people and what services that you actually want.

Also, remember to make it clear which features are a must-have and which ones are nice-to-haves. This allows responding companies to know whether they can meet all of your needs or just the core ones.

Step 4: Set a Realistic Budget and Timeline

With different pricing tiers, not every company falls within your ballpark. So, you want to set a clear budget that helps vendors gauge if they are a good fit for your needs. Here’s an example:

“Our budget for email marketing software is $25,000–$50,000 annually.”

In instances where you’re not sure, you can ask prospective partners to give you a range in the invitation. “Sometimes people don't know what the budget should be, and it's okay if you don't,” says Matt. “Just say, ‘Hey, I have an idea of what this should be but I probably need some help with this. I need some help creating a range, I need some help understanding what's the low, the middle, and the top here?’ Just don't put a bs budget.”

The same applies to your timeline. Define a timeline with key RFP milestones, such as:

Proposal Submission Deadline: 3-4 weeks after issuing the RFP.
Vendor Presentations: 1-2 weeks after proposal submission.
Selection and contract Finalization: Within one month of final presentations.

However, there may be situations where you’re in a hurry and need to rush through the email marketing RFP process so you can get the software up and running in a short space of time. In such cases, don’t just slap your timeline on it without consideration. You still want to attract quality partners.

Mollie Stahl, Senior Account Executive at Rockway, recommends being upfront: “It’s okay if it’s last minute. Just say, ‘Hey, we’re last minute. Let’s just work through this as fast as we can. We understand we’re last minute. When you kind of play that game and are upfront and honest about it then it’s a different game. But when you just put it out there without thinking twice and also have procurement running it [instead of marketing], it’s extremely difficult. It’s like you’re setting up failure for the companies and also setting up failure for yourself.”

Step 5: Develop Evaluation Criteria to Compare Vendors

When you’re done receiving RFP responses, you’ll need to do a vendor comparison to determine which vendor is best for you. Your evaluation criteria are key here.

“It’s about context,” says Nick Constantino, Vice President of Business Development at 680 The Fan. “When you send the RFP, are you giving people a fair chance to put their best foot forward? And do you know how to rate their best foot forward? If so, that leads to success almost every time.”

To increase your chances of success, create an RFP scoring system and objectively evaluate each vendor’s proposal based on the following criteria:

Cost Effectiveness: Alignment with your budget.
Feature Fit: How well their platform meets your technical and functional requirements.
Scalability: The ability to grow with your organization.
Customer Support: Availability of training, technical support, and onboarding resources.
Case Studies and References: Proven success with similar B2B SaaS organizations.

Each criterion will have an assigned weight to reflect its importance. For email marketing software, you want to give more weight to technical fit and scalability than to cost alone. And be sure to include your evaluation criteria in your RFP and stand by them.

Nick recommends being transparent if you’re not exactly going to be using the evaluating criteria. He suggests saying something like, “Hey, this is probably going to someone else, but I’m giving you a shot.” Nick believes that this encourages the vendors to take more risks, knowing that it’s probably going to go to someone else.

Step 6: Draft and Review the RFP Document

By now you should have a well-structured email marketing RFP document including all the components I’ve highlighted in the previous sections.

Ensure you have an introduction, project scope and objectives, technical and functional requirements, must-have and nice-to-have features, budget and timeline, vendor evaluation criteria, submission instructions, and a point of contact for queries.

If all the components are in place, this is where you dot the i's and cross the t's. Review the document to ensure it’s written in clear, simple, and concise language to minimize any chances of misunderstandings. Before sending, review the document with key stakeholders to ensure all requirements are covered.

3 Common Mistakes To Avoid When Creating An Email Marketing RFP

Avoid the following vendor selection pitfalls:

Mistake 1: Underestimating Time Requirements

The RFP process requires a lot of moving parts, which makes the RFP timeline a bit tricky to nail down. “So another common scenario I’ve come across is that you get companies say they will do it by these really aggressive dates,” says Helen Winter. “But then they can’t because they haven’t taken into account that their key decision makers have got away for two weeks.”

A realistic timeline is somewhere between six to twelve months, and the key to getting it right is planning. Be sure that you’re ready to decide once the invited vendors respond.

Helen recommends that “if you’re writing an RFP, decide to your evaluation teams who are going to make that decision on who gets who to pick. Make sure you get the evaluation team organized in advance meetings set up in advance so that they can actually run with it.”

One more thing: have a clear migration plan to enable the process to move quickly from there.

Mistake 2: Overloading Feature Lists

It is a mistake to include every email marketing software feature you can think of on your list. This is because you’re not going to use every feature, and you’d struggle to find a vendor with all those features.

Software vendors typically build a collection of features that give them a competitive advantage, with a specific target audience in mind. So it makes sense that every vendor has a slightly different collection of features.

When building your requirement list, constrain yourself to only the necessary features. These are the features that allow you to meet your immediate business needs and also scale in the future. Anything else is surplus to requirement, and will only bug down your ESP selection.

Mistake 3: Ignoring Stakeholder Input

It’s common for marketing to ignore other relevant stakeholders because the software only concerns email marketing anyway. But every organization exists in a wider context.

This means that there’s almost always an overlap between different departments. For example, procurement might come in at later stages of the acquisition to negotiate cost and finance is responsible for providing a budget.

So, you want to carry these stakeholders along to ensure internal alignment. However, only involve stakeholders who are relevant to the acquisition. Too many stakeholders can cause decision paralysis.

Find Your Perfect Email Marketing Software Partner With Confidence

A structured RFP process transforms what could be an overwhelming task into a clear, systematic journey. This allows you to be methodical in communicating your specific business goals and requirements and comparing vendors’ capabilities against those requirements.

With this, you mitigate mistakes, giving yourself the best chance of partnering with a vendor that truly understands and can support your unique marketing objectives. All within your budget.

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