An email marketing agency is a firm or company that specializes in the development, execution, and management of email marketing campaigns.
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels today. The channel has an extremely good ROI of around 3800%, according to DMA. That essentially means that for every £1 ($1.27) spent on email marketing, you can expect to get back £38.33 ($48).
However, your strategy must be spot-on for you to get those results. You’ll need the expertise to design and write engaging newsletters. You must also leverage email marketing techniques like segmentation and A/B testing to optimize your results.
That’s where an email marketing agency comes in handy. For a good number of organizations, hiring an email marketing agency makes more sense than hiring an in-house team.
Read on to see how partnering with an agency can benefit your company and whether you’re better off with an agency or doing it in-house.
An email marketing agency brings a lot to the table. Here are some of the top benefits of outsourcing your email marketing:
The case for outsourcing email marketing is strong, but you must know exactly what you want and do your homework when hiring an agency.
You’ve seen what are email marketing agencies and the potential benefits of hiring one. Let’s now look at the services you can expect from them.
Email marketing agencies will help you create an effective campaign strategy that aligns with your business goals. Now, you must first work together on a strategy call where you’ll explain what exactly your business hopes to achieve from email marketing campaigns.
The agency will then use that to develop a strategy that aligns with those goals. They’ll determine what email campaigns are right for your specific needs. For example, if the aim is to build customer loyalty, newsletters may take priority over promotional emails.
On the other hand, if your primary goal is to increase sales, promotional emails will likely be the focus.
Besides deciding what emails to use, the agency will also work on the type of content, timing, and frequency of sending those emails. They might also create unique campaigns for specific seasons like holidays, black Friday, cyber Monday, etc.
You can’t run successful email campaigns without effective list management. You have to get your email list right first! An agency can help you with that.
The agency will start by auditing your email list. They’ll pinpoint inactive or invalid email addresses that could affect your email deliverability and sender reputation. Next, they’ll look at how you’re capturing those email addresses. This is really important because if you’re collecting emails of the wrong people, converting them will be next to impossible.
Therefore, the agency will audit your email collection strategy and make the necessary changes to ensure you only capture the emails of folks who could benefit from your services. For example, they may change the lead magnets you use if they don’t align with your service offerings.
Next, they must segment your list to deliver tailored messages. They’ll come up with the relevant segmentation criteria and create a unique content strategy for each group.
For instance, they may create a separate segment for the contacts in your digital address book that you acquired through digital business cards. You can even create several segments from this book depending on how they interact with your digital business card.
The agency can also segment subscribers based on behavioral traits like purchase history.
Even more important, they’ll monitor the segments regularly to ensure they remain relevant.
Finally, the agency will make sure the email list-building strategy is compliant with the latest data protection laws like GDPR and CAN-SPAM.
The only way to capture your subscribers' attention is through effective email design and content. A great design and compelling content will ensure email recipients read through your email and get to your calls to action (CTAs).
An email marketing agency will take care of this because they typically have expert email designers, content strategists, and copywriters.
In addition to increasing your email engagement rates, they’ll ensure subscribers are always looking forward to your emails, which will drive higher open rates and click-through rates for future campaigns.
Modern email marketing requires automation. This is the only way to ensure you reach subscribers at the right time with the right message.
The agency you partner with will set up the necessary triggers to ensure the right campaigns are deployed at the correct time.
For example, they’ll create a welcome email workflow and set up the trigger for when new users sign up to your email list.
They can also set up cart abandonment triggers for eCommerce stores or free trial workflows and triggers for SaaS brands.
Every business will require several automation workflows for different campaigns. Agency email marketing firms will identify the right ones for your company and set them up for you.
Finally, you have analytics and reporting, which is where email marketing experts determine whether the strategy is working. The agency will analyze this data and create an easy-to-understand report for you.
The report should show how the email marketing strategy performs and whether it brings you closer to your business goals.
Now for the most important bit: how do you hire an email marketing agency? What items should you keep in mind when hiring an agency email marketing firm to ensure you’re getting the best experts for your company?
Follow this 5-step guide:
You can’t pick the right partner for any function of your business if you’re not sure what you want or hope to achieve from the partnership. That’s why the first and perhaps most important step of hiring an email marketing agency is determining your goals.
What do you want to achieve with your email campaigns? Do you want to boost all aspects of your business, from increasing customer loyalty to driving more sales and getting more customer referrals? Or perhaps you’re only focused on one aspect, like reducing the cart abandonment rate or boosting customer lifetime value (CLV)?
Whatever the case, make sure the goal is clear before contacting any email marketing agencies. It also helps if you can have specific KPIs in mind.
These details will help you pick the right partner that aligns with your business goals. Clear goals will also make it easier to determine whether the partnership works or not. For starters, knowing the goal helps you identify the relevant metric to track.
Secondly, you can come back several quarters after outsourcing your email marketing to determine whether the strategy is hitting its mark.
After writing down your goal (or goals), it’s time to create a short list of potential email marketing agencies. You can find these agencies by simply searching them on Google. You can also find relevant firms on business directories like Clutch.
With that list ready, go through every agency looking at the services they provide. Most of the time, you’ll find agencies provide end-to-end email services. That means they’ll help with everything from email list building and segmentation to strategy development, execution, and reporting. Those are full-service email marketing agencies.
Still, just make sure they provide the specific services you’re most interested in.
Next, ask important questions like what industries they specialize in, how they build an email marketing strategy, can they share examples of strategies they’ve executed in the past, and how they ensure compliance with GDPR and the CAN-SPAM act.
You also want to know what tools they use, the reports and insights they’ll be providing, and how the process works (will they need to integrate their solutions with any of your company’s systems). For example, will they need access to your Google Analytics 4 or an integration to your CRM?
It’s not enough to hear from the agency. You must do your own due diligence to confirm their expertise and capabilities. That means reviewing both the case studies published on their site and reaching out to past clients.
This should give you an idea of what it’s like working with the agency and the results you can expect. To get accurate insights, try to find clients in the same industry as you. That’s because email marketing campaigns can take different forms depending on the industry and target audience.
For example, B2B email marketing tends to be very different from DTC and B2C email marketing. Similarly, you can expect eCommerce email marketing to be quite different from SaaS email marketing.
Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs of any marketing channel. However, you’ll only realize that ROI if you make data-informed decisions. This is why picking an agency with advanced reporting and analytics capabilities is critical.
Go beyond the basic metrics like open and click rates. Granular reports with insights on things like heatmaps, scroll-depth, and ROI attribution will be essential for your success.
You also want to know how the agency uses the insights to create actionable recommendations. How do they interpret the data, and how do they use those insights to tweak your strategy? You can ask how they did this in a real-life scenario involving their past or existing clients.
Also, just because you’re asking about reports and analytics doesn’t mean they should confuse you with industry jargon or share confusing reports. The best email marketing agency will explain things in a way that you can understand and share informative data visualizations.
Finally, go through the contract terms and make sure it’s something you can work with.
Here, you want to know how long the contract runs and the termination procedure.
Like any other marketing strategy, email takes time to produce results. Still, the contract should provide a way out in case the agency fails to hit the agreed KPIs.
It’s also important to consider things like who owns the audience data, email templates, and content. Also, look at the scope of services, transparency on pricing, and communication and collaboration procedures (how often should you expect progress reports and what do they need from your end).
You should consider hiring an email marketing agency when you don’t have the right expertise in-house or don’t have enough time to execute an effective strategy. You can also hire an agency if your current strategy isn’t producing any results or when you want to scale quickly.
Growing companies that lack in-house experts should hire an email marketing agency. Also, companies with low conversion rates and marketing teams with heavy workloads can benefit from partnering with agency email marketing firms.
Email marketing agency is right for organizations that want comprehensive and scalable email services. Freelancers are ideal for small businesses with a limited budget. In-house employees are ideal for companies that want direct control over their email campaigns and have enough budget.
You can find a reliable email marketing agency from business directories like Clutch. You can also simply search on Google. But make sure to vet the agencies thoroughly before signing on the dotted line.
To collaborate with an email marketing agency effectively, communicate your goals clearly and share enough background information. You should also maintain open lines of communication with the agency and be receptive to their recommendations. Avoid micromanaging, too.
An email marketing agency is a firm that provides outsourced email campaign services to businesses that cannot run in-house email campaigns. Partnering with this agency gives you access to their expertise and can be more cost-effective than hiring the experts in-house.
To partner with the right agency, determine your email marketing goals, vet the agencies you’ll shortlist, review client testimonials, assess their reporting skills, and analyze the contract terms.
If you’re too busy to run email campaigns or have been seeing poor results from your strategy, partner with an agency to get expert help. Good luck!
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