Introduction
Email marketing is a direct digital marketing approach that uses emails to communicate with a company's target audience. It entails sending promotional or educational content.
Email marketing is commonly used to increase product or brand awareness and produce leads or sales, and is critical for organizations looking to promote, build relationships, and drive customer action.
Table of Contents
1. Why is Email Marketing important for your Business?
Email marketing has shown to be a great tool to build and maintain relationships with your new customers as well as drive leads and sales.
As one of the most established digital marketing channels, email marketing was introduced in the 1970s and managed to stay relevant up to today.
It has gained in complexity over the years, which makes it increasingly more difficult for non-professionals to keep up with all the options and strategies.
Understanding how to build an email list, when to use drips, or managing the timing for sending out your messages are only some of the aspects that you need to master.
As this is often a time-consuming process, businesses outsource their email marketing tasks more often than not.
Therefore, read on to see why it is more beneficial to hire an email marketing agency rather than doing it yourself.
2. Expertise in All Types of Emails
It is very important to differentiate your emails based on your goals and target audience.
Your customers should receive more than just generic promotional emails, otherwise, they will get bored or annoyed quickly and unsubscribe from your email list.
Here is a short list of the most common types of emails that brands send out to their customers:
a. Welcome Emails
This type of email lets your customers know that you are pleased to have them as a members of your subscriber list.
Welcome emails are usually short and brief in order to avoid scaring new customers with long walls of text.
The welcome email should include information regarding the reason why the customer subscribed to your email list (e.g. for the newsletter sign-up, to get more information about new products, to receive exclusive discounts, and more).
You may discuss the product or service directly in the email or give a link that will send consumers to your website to learn more.
b. Cart Abandonment Emails
These emails are crucial to potentially finish a customer lifecycle that will lead you to a sale.
The idea of this email type is to give your customers a convenient way to return to their shopping cart with a click of a button.
c. Promotional Emails
The best way to design your promotional email is to use appealing images and include an enticing discount.
The goal is to get your customers excited about your new product releases and to give them an attractive offer.
It is easy to overdo these messages and send them out for every new discount you have, however, it is better to use customer data to suggest special offers that are likely to attract your customer’s attention and to leave the unnecessary promotional emails out.
d. Reminder Emails
In case you haven’t heard from specific customers in a while you can remind them that they have shopped at your store before with these emails.
There are many reasons why people haven’t interacted with your brand recently.
However, most commonly they have just forgotten about your business, they didn’t need to come by or they live too far from your store.
These emails are effective because they are tailored to your recipient and demonstrate that your customer is important to you.
You can combine these emails with special deals to welcome them back.
e. Newsletters
Weekly or monthly newsletters are a popular method to remain in touch with your customers.
These emails make it simple for you to keep people up to date on the latest developments at your brand regarding new goods or upcoming events.
They're an excellent method to keep your subscribers informed while also being top of mind at your customer base.
3. Expertise in List Management, Creative Design and More
An email marketing agency can handle all the work needed for segmenting your audience, maintaining your audience list, analyzing your data, and many other things.
Hiring specialists ensure that your email newsletters are designed in a way that reflects your business.
This means that every email type you send to your recipients is branded with your brand’s logo, font, and other characteristic visuals in a professional and consistent manner.
Furthermore, the emails your partner agency develops in collaboration with you use best practices for email deliverability, open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
They will make sure that the content from your emails has a varied mix and may include relevant blogs, case studies, upcoming events, and more.
Another benefit of collaborating with an email marketing agency is that they will share frequent reports and statistics with you on how the campaign is helping your business to grow according to your marketing objectives.
Additionally, look out for an agency that also performs routine list maintenance.
This means that they will regularly inspect for inactive subscribers who will be removed from your email list.
Disengaged subscribers will negatively impact your email deliverability. In other words, if your email list is seen as consisting of many inactive users, this will hurt your overall email performance.
Email servers will look at your overall sender score which records if your emails get flagged as spam, and people unsubscribe quickly, among other things.
In the end, a low sender score can cause your email to be blocked by email servers and not arrive at your recipient’s inbox.
Therefore, a good email marketing agency will consistently monitor your customers’ engagement to ensure that you have an active email list.
Finally, professional marketers will surely have prior experience in your sector working with similar clientele and they will be able to apply that knowledge to your campaigns.
If you are unsure about their specific industry acumen, ask for case studies that show how proficient they are in your industry.
Hiring an email marketing agency will spare you the costs and time of training your staff to learn the whole process of designing, developing, and measuring an email marketing campaign.
Professionals also use specific tools that make their work much easier and efficient.
This expertise will be immediately translated into fast and professional work, which will save you time and money.
4. Defining SMART Goals
a. Specific
This means that your goals should address one specific issue, such as increasing the number of subscribers or improving your conversion rate in order to increase the purchases from your business.
Instead of saying that you want to increase your income or get more clients via email marketing, you should narrow down your objectives so that it is easier to analyze the results.
b. Measurable
An objective that can be clearly quantified gives you a more accurate picture of your results.
Maybe it's a precise figure, a higher percentage, or a range of growth you'd like to achieve month after month.
By tracking your progress, you will stay motivated and focused on your objectives.
c. Actionable
Actionable objectives are goals that are realistic and attainable given a specific timeframe.
The advantage of focusing on how you can achieve your goal is that you might anticipate possible barriers sooner and therefore react faster to them.
d. Relevant
Your email marketing goals should also be important to you and relevant in relation to other objectives.
This is an important aspect to boost your motivation because if you don’t have an intrinsic desire to achieve your goals, then it will be much more difficult to work towards them.
The same goes for your team, if they don’t see the value in the actions they take for a specific task, then it is difficult to get the best results.
e. Time-Bound
Having a deadline for your goals also helps you to stay focused and motivated to work harder than if you have a vague or no timeframe to work with.
Different activities also vary with the amount of time that they require to be accomplished.
For example, long-running campaigns and promotional activities can take from weeks up to months before you can see the results of your work.
5. Email Lead Generation
A great email marketing agency ensures that your email conversion rate is above the industry standard.
They will do this by developing so-called lead magnets which are emails offering incentives to people to get their email addresses in return.
For example, a lead magnet can consist of emails including free guides, checklists, quizzes, and eBooks among other things.
Another method that email marketing agencies use to convert more prospects into paying customers is through lead scoring.
By using customer data, businesses can use that knowledge, for example, to select people who have viewed one item on your website and send them an email with a discount code for that item in order to influence their purchasing behavior.
For other prospects who are not on your email list yet, you can use that knowledge and target these leads by giving them a chance to sign up for it when they reach the end of your page or when they plan to leave your website.
Conclusion
Hiring an agency for your email marketing can be a time and cost saver if you don’t have the internal resources to develop the strategy accordingly.
Your partner agency should be aligned with your company’s core values to bring out the best of the collaboration.