The marketing automation industry continues to proliferate with new vendors and solutions. It’s difficult keeping track of who’s who, and which vendors support which functionality. In fact, I find that businesses invest too much time trying to decipher the differences among the vendors.

When it comes to marketing automation, the 80/20 rule is very much in effect. In fact, it’s probably the 90/10 rule. That is, 90% of the marketplace needs and will use only about 10% of the functionality that marketing automation solutions offer. So, unless you’re in that special 10% category that has super-special, highly advanced and unique needs, just about any platform will do the trick.

To me, the much more important evaluation criteria to use in selecting an automation solution involve the service provider, the service, support, uptime etc. Remember, these are almost entirely hosted solution, so you’ll be outsourcing many key marketing business processes to a third-party, shouldn’t you be sure you’re choosing the best one? Here’s a list of key factors to consider, outside of marketing automation speeds and feeds, when choosing a provider:

1) Email Deliverability – Email deliverability refers to the marketing automation solution’s ability to deliver your email to your customers’ and prospects’ mailboxes in a timely manner. If the provider’s systems are underpowered, they may be very slow in delivering your email. If the provider doesn’t actively manage IP reputation, spam lists and other security issues, it may have difficulty getting your emails to their intended recipients all together. With the critical role email plays in marketing automation, strong email deliverability is more important than almost any other marketing automation feature.

2) Support – In a hosted environment, things will go wrong. The question is how does the service provider manage those problems? Is support provided in real-time 24 x 7? Is support telephone based or via email? Where is the support team located, and how equipped are they to resolve your issues right away?

3) Hosting Infrastructure – For marketing automation to be effective, it must be up and running…all the time. But hosted software is only as reliable as the infrastructure it runs on. Before selecting a provider, you need to understand what their hosting infrastructure looks like. What levels of redundancy and high availability does it have. Can it accommodate unexpected spikes in your web site activity? Can another customer’s environment affect yours? Before selecting a marketing automation solution be sure that environment on which it is hosted will provide you the performance and reliability you need.

4) SLAs -A marketing automation vendor’s service level agreement can tell you a great deal about the service. What type of of promises does it make about the services uptime, performance, email deliverability and data protection? What remedies does it offer for failing to keep these promises? An SLA that fails to impose penalties on the service provider for breaking its SLA commitments is useless. Ask the providers to provide you copies of their SLA as well as a history of performance against those SLAs for the last six months.

Remember, when you’re buying marketing automation as a service (or any SaaS product for that matter), the service is just as important as the product. Your evaluation of these solutions must include the underlying service to be able to properly distinguish among the different providers and choose the best fit for your company.