Why Building Homegrown Email Platforms Is So Out of Favor

Build or buy? When it comes to email marketing platforms, it’s a question that brands rarely bother to ask themselves anymore because nearly everyone buys. And when brands do seriously ask themselves this question, it’s exceedingly rare for them to actually choose to go down the build road.

According to Litmus’s State of Email Survey of thousands of marketers worldwide, the percentage of brands using custom, homegrown email platforms to send marketing emails fell to just 6.1% in 2018, down from 10.9% in 2016.

Most of these homegrown email platforms are only used to send transactional emails, with traditional email service providers used to send the promotional emails that make up the vast, vast majority of their email volume. Only 34% of brands rely exclusively on a homegrown email platform to send all of their marketing emails, according to Litmus. That means that just 2% of brands use in-house email platforms to support all their email needs.

As you might expect, many of the companies that do choose to go this route are tech giants like Amazon and Uber. In fact, it’s become a not-so-funny joke that if you hire an email marketer from Amazon that they’ll want to build their own email platform. Since most companies don’t have Amazon’s scale, resources, and culture, this is a recipe for plenty of pain and suffering, if not disaster.

Let’s better understand why homegrown email platforms are dwindling and becoming the exclusive pet projects of unicorn companies by looking at the major dangers associated with homegrown email platforms…

>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog