- Will you be on your own dedicated IP? This is extremely important when it comes to your reputation and how it will affect deliverability. You want to be on your own isolated IP address so that your reputation is not shared across multiple companies

– otherwise if they perform any bad practices, it will be reflected in your deliverability.

- Are authentication methods such as SPF, Sender ID and DKIM available through the sending engine? This again can help with deliverability, but will also assist in verifying you are who you say you are.

- What kind of reporting is exposed? Look to make sure that the high level metrics such as messages delivered, open, read, clicked, bounced, unsubscribed, etc. are available, but also make sure that you are able to drill down on this information to the core data so that you can work with the actual lists of contact that fall into these metrics.

- Is the email service provider registered with known feedback loops and are they automatically removing abuse complaints? When a contact on your list clicks the “this is spam” button in the email client, this information should be shared with you and the contact should be automatically removed from your list.

- Will inactive address hard bounces be automatically removed from your list? In order to both cleanse your list and to assist with your deliverability, this should be an automatic process.

- What kind of advanced segmentation / profiling options are available? Email marketing is all about relevancy and targeting you message to the individual contacts on your list. The only way to do this is to use segmentation to talk to different groups of contacts in a different way. Advanced features like dynamic content and dynamic profiling can help you speak to your audience as individuals rather than a large group.

There are many other questions to ask of course, but these are a few that are important that often are skipped in initial research for email service providers.