Enterprise Email Requires Agency Specialists
Jay Oram, head of dev at ActionRocket, on intra-agency collaboration on email
The ESP mix tells where complex email work, and budget, concentrate. Braze and Salesforce usually show up when a company has many teams, many data sources, and enough scale that email is tied to CRM, apps, push, and APIs rather than simple newsletter sends. That fits ActionRocket’s shift from pure email production into broader CRM execution, where clients need outside specialists to build templates, interactive experiences, and data driven campaigns their in house teams cannot finish alone.
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At ActionRocket, enterprise clients also tend to have small in house email teams that know Salesforce and basic HTML, but still outsource harder work like interactive email, reusable templates, and large campaign systems. The bottleneck is usually specialist execution time, not access to an ESP license.
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The split lines up with how the market segments. Salesforce sits at the center of sales led and enterprise stacks, while Braze is grouped with newer customer engagement tools tied to product and lifecycle messaging. Klaviyo is more associated with ecommerce brands that need strong personalization without the same enterprise workflow complexity.
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From the agency side, the actual email code is often similar across platforms. What changes is how easy it is to pull in customer data, API content, and approvals. That makes enterprise ESPs valuable less because they send email, and more because they connect email to the rest of the company’s systems.
The market is heading toward fewer standalone email programs and more customer engagement stacks. That favors agencies and tools that can bridge design, code, data, and deployment across Braze, Salesforce, and adjacent systems, because the hardest work is moving from making emails look right to making them operate inside bigger customer data workflows.