Hiring Email Marketing Experts (What to Consider First!)
Email marketing remains one of the most popular and effective digital marketing strategies there is – it’s a reliable strategy that continues to be important for online business growth. Which is why hiring an agency is such a tempting option for a ton of online brands.
But why does it make sense to hire email marketing experts? What does it involve? And what should a business look out for to make sure they get what they need?
If you’re looking to hire a professional team you’ll want to make sure that email marketing is right for your business, and you’ll want to know what to ask about to ensure it fits with your specific business goals.
Email outreach marketing is one of the most successful online marketing strategies there is – and it’s one of the highest ROI driving strategies available. It claims the best median ROI for many business marketers out of all digital marketing strategies: as much as 124% (more than SEO and PPC). Its perceived value is great among many businesses, with close to 1-in-3 claiming it delivers them the best ROI overall! Email marketing experts claim that it can drive as much as $44 dollars in returns, for every $1 invested. And some data claims that email is 40x more effective at customer acquisition than Facebook and Twitter combined – and that shoppers spend more than 13% extra when contacted through email, plus nearly 60% of people claim to check their email first in the morning!
Nearly 8 in 10 companies use email driven marketing now, and it accounts for more than $350 million in advertising in just the U.S. alone. Hiring email marketing experts can help brands take advantage of huuuge opportunities for untapped revenue – and for expanding their existing marketing content.
Here’s what consider to get the best in expert email marketing:
The benefits of email marketing
One of the biggest advantages to email prospecting is that it’s a huge part of a multi-channel marketing strategy. In addition to content marketing, paid ads – and other well-known strategies – email marketing is one of the biggest and most successful strategies there is.
The numbers above already paint a picture of how much ROI email outreach offers online businesses, but email marketing offers tons of opportunities for all types of companies, with 80% of B2C businesses believing that it increases customer retention, and 31% of B2B companies saying email newsletters are the best way of generating leads. Finally, marketers that use segmented email marketing campaigns can see as much as a 760% increase in revenue!
Here are the benefits that hiring email marketing experts can get you:
- Reach important customers directly, one-to-one, with customized emails.
- Expert list building for audiences that match your ideal customer profile (ICP).
- A/B style testing for improved results over time.
- Data analysis and analytics to monitor results.
- Inbox management so that a response will never go unattended.
- Extending the reach of the content you already have.
- Lead generation with a strategy that boasts as much as 40X higher average conversion rates.
- Re-engagement with current and previous customers to improve their journey through the online sales funnel.
- Greater brand loyalty and brand recognition.
- More direct communication with your target audiences.
- Reduced cart abandonments.
- Greater brand visibility, straight to inboxes.
- Immediate sales and revenue as soon as campaigns go live.
- Better advertising budget efficiency and less wasted money.
- Increased website traffic.
- Competitiveness with larger, established brands.
- Both long term & short term business growth.
- Promoted sales, seasonal events, and new product lines for faster results in shorter time windows.
Expert email marketing strategy
What does email marketing involve exactly?
As a overall strategy it means contacting potential customers by sending them emails. This strategy differs from other “push” styles of digital marketing since it relies on using the existing contact info of individuals to push your brand to customers, and also because it’s totally different from the “pay-per-click” strategies of paid advertising – but is also not passive the way that SEO or social media is.
In its most basic form it means:
- List building or collecting email addresses for prospective customers.
- Writing and optimizing email content for the highest open rates and CTR.
- Automating email sends.
- Following up on responses.
There’s more to it than just that – but that’s the essence of it. There are multiple different strategies for generating leads through email. Expert email marketers can use email blasts, drip campaigns, newsletters, and more to try to engage with target audiences in the most effective ways possible.
A lot of email campaign types include: automated “welcome” emails for new customers, newsletters, seasonal campaigns, drip campaigns, “triggered” email responses for certain actions (like downloading something or filling out a form), abandoned cart follow ups, short-term sales, general re-engagement, and more.
Email marketing experts will create a customized campaign based on the specific needs of your business – whether that’s generating business-to-business leads, direct-to-consumer growth, account creation, brand recognition, eCommerce sales, or whatever – and they can align custom key-performance-indicators (KPIs) with the above strategies for the best results. Not all businesses are the same, but these engagement-focused expert email marketing strategies hinge on combining content with a target audience’s needs/interests for better results.
This sort of customer interaction is super effective for catching customers in the middle or the bottom of the sales funnel. About 47% of recipients will open emails based solely on the subject line. Email subscribers are 3.9X more likely to share brand content on social media, and visitors via email have a higher conversion rate than other channels.
Hiring email marketing experts can help your business access these results!
Full creative design
Professionals can offer businesses resources that they might struggle to keep up with themselves – that is the skill to create content, design graphics, write email copy and more.
If you hire email marketing experts then you can take advantage of full-creative design services including expertly written email content that focuses on your services and engages with readers, tested and data driven email subject lines, and professionally created graphic design elements, branding, photos and more that can give emails far better ROI.
For businesses that are looking to hire an email marketing agency, ask them about what sort of creative strategies they use, and how they can creatively adjust to your business’s goals. Ask about how they can utilize a multi-channel approach, and how they can coordinate an email campaign with a brand’s existing content marketing approach, their social media and more.
List management and segmentation
A key advantage to hiring email marketing experts for your outreach – instead of doing it in-house – is the “management” part of things.
For most online business owners, the time, resources, money, and sheer work involved in digital marketing is the single biggest inhibitor to being able to expand to new strategies and to being able to get the most out of existing channels. Hiring email marketing experts means passing over the process of building out an email campaign to a professional agency/team.
An agency or a freelance campaign manager will be able to do all the leg work involved in creating audience segments, list management, regulatory compliance, data analysis, and more. Plus they’ll be able to provide your brand/business with regular reporting and data on how the campaign is helping your business growth. Finally, professionals will have experience in your industry, with similar clients, and will be able to bring that experience into the campaign.
And they’ll have the ability to feedback analytics data straight into the campaign for even more fine-tuned results!
Any business thinking about hiring email marketing experts will want to consider the following needs:
- Can they create audiences that match your ICP? Do they address this in their proposal?
- Do they offer regular testing on campaign characteristics? What exactly do they plan on doing/adjusting after the initial launch?
- How do they manage inboxes and responses?
- What kind of timeline do they offer for creating campaigns, targeting audience, supplying work, etc.?
- What will you need to give them? How involved will you need to be?
Legal compliance
This is a key concept to understand when looking to begin email marketing, and it’s one of the reasons why hiring email marketing experts via a marketing company or an agency may be more tempting then doing it in-house or hiring a random freelancer.
Making a mistake could be a huge headache.
Email marketing agencies can help your business navigate the regulations, laws and compliance requirements required for email marketing.
When looking to hire professional email services, make sure to verify with the company how they are able to help your business comply with CAN-SPAM rules, CASL laws, how they include opt-out options in your campaigns, and more. Many laws place the legal responsibility on the business – even if they hire an agency – meaning businesses can’t “contract away” the legal responsibilities to the agency itself. Legally managing an email campaign means working with email marketing experts who can co-ordinate with your brand, who are established as legitimate, and who can help you navigate compliance.
You’ll want to be very careful to make sure you know what the requirements are, and to make sure your campaign goals don’t transgress any laws. Every business owner should research the laws regarding email marketing before they set out to hire a marketing service.
Get pro experience and industry insights
Experts bring with them years of experience in email marketing as well as experience with a wide range of businesses, platforms, product niches, and more.
Account-based email prospecting provides a lot of value, and when you hire email marketing experts you should seek out professionals that can demonstrate what sort of experience they can offer – especially for your specific business goals. Professionals will have worked with clients similar to your business – and good ones can even provide case studies and data from previous campaigns to show you how they did it.
Working with a professional team means your business won’t have to struggle with learning the ropes, understanding concepts, or stumbling your way through new software/platforms. Experts will have the tools they need, and will know how to use them.
If you’re looking to hire a professional service, here are some additional things to consider:
- Are they willing to share case studies and reviews from other clients? Can they give detailed numbers on successful campaigns?
- Can they point to previous clients they’ve worked with that are similar to yours?
- How much of the data will you have access too? What sort of reports do they promise? Can they create custom reports for your KPIs?
- How often will they be in touch with you?
- How much experience do they have in compliance?
- How long does it take to see results? (Be wary about outrageous guarantees.)
- What sort of questions do they ask you about your existing campaigns?
Questions like these are key to finding the email marketing “experts” out of a sea of options that might just be over-confident amateurs.
Are you looking for B2C, B2B, D2C strategies?
The good news is regardless of what your business model is – email outreach is famously effective for any of them. But of course the strategies involved with business-to-business (B2B) are different than business-to-consumer (B2C) or even direct-to-consumer (D2C).
This is another reason why hiring email marketing experts might be the right choice.
And it’s another aspect businesses should question when talking to agencies.
Consider how a marketing service can build a specific strategy for your business’s customers whether they’re commercial/professional businesses, niche customers, or a general audience of everyday consumers. What strategies can they use to specifically target these types of audiences, build lists, and segment your campaign content? What sort of past experiences can they point to in these areas? How do they plan on matching your existing content with their email campaign content?
Email is super effective for B2B businesses, since it’s the third most influential source of information for commercial audiences (behind word of mouth and industry luminaries)! Nearly 9 out of 10 business professionals prefer email for business communication, and more than half think email is their most effective channel.
Retail and consumer-focused brands can see the benefits too! 1/4th of all small and medium sized businesses use email marketing for brand-building (and these audiences are 138% more likely to share a brand on social-media, making email a big SMB advertising opportunity). For consumer retail, on average, email audiences are more likely to convert, spend more money, and are more likely to become loyal return customers.
And for direct-to-consumer brands these numbers make even more sense considering the need for an independent, internet driving sales approach. D2C marketing is reliant on strategies that don’t include brick-and-mortar stores, 3rd party retailers, department store sales, or vendors. D2C brands rely on producing, distributing, selling, and shipping product directly to consumers – all within their own brand-built supply chain. For that reason direct-to-consumer brands can benefit a ton from hiring email marketing experts to help them take advantage of one of the biggest ROI driving channels.
Last year alone, 78% of D2C brands indicated an intent to increase their marketing budget. Email is one of the best ways of engaging with eCommerce shoppers at the middle/end of the sales funnel which is why it’s so perfect for capturing new leads, based on existing audiences.
Avoid wasting time and money
Choosing to hire email marketing experts will save businesses the time and money that they might otherwise waste on low-quality work.
There are many businesses who might prefer to do their marketing in-house, and who can manage it. Likewise, a downside to hiring an expert/agency is of course the fees that come with pay professionals to manage the legwork, monitor campaigns, and run the channel top to bottom.
But for everyone else, getting expert help makes sense.
List building and audience targeting alone are complicated tasks, and without the right know-how businesses could accidentally end-up spending too much time and money chasing down audiences that are low-value and low-converting. No one wants to get stuck in a quagmire of confusing tools, complex platforms, and convoluted campaigns that amount to nothing. Data driven expertise will help improve open-rate, CTR, and online driven revenue. In fact email marketing’s famously good ROI alone is enough to justify the cost of hiring email advertising experts for many companies.
Look for professionals that can co-ordinate a complete multi-channel strategy
When looking for an email marketing agency, look for an agency that can do more than just that. Think about a company that can help your brand across all major strategies, including SEO, PPC, social-media marketing, and more.
Why?
Businesses that decided to hire email marketing experts can save time and money by getting an agency that can handle it all at once. It’s easier and more effective to get an agency that can coordinate branding, brand language, design, and content across all of your platforms, than it is to co-ordinate with tons of 3rd parties. And, content, email, search optimization, and paid ads can all work together to get the best traction across each and every one.
Plus it’s more affordable.
Outsourcing all of these strategies to an all-in-one marketing company is definitely better than paying multiple monthly fees for multiple specialized services. Hiring an email marketing agency that also does all of these can help businesses succeed further buy killing multiple birds with one stone.
Search optimization, and search engine pay-per-click advertising are two of the most successful forms of traffic-driving marketing strategies there is – and with as much as 53% of all internet traffic coming through search engines, they are good ways of building brand recognition and capturing customers at the top of the internet sales funnel. With key “top-of-the-funnel” strategies like this, expert email marketers can co-ordinate their campaign to squeeze even more ROI out of these audiences later on in the funnel.
This reasoning applies to social media content, multi-media content, and on-site content marketing as well. Co-ordinated campaigns by expert digital marketing agencies means businesses can use an email marketing campaign to drive social media interactions, sign-ups, gain followers, encourage shares, and more.
Learn More
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