Why to Use an Email Marketing Agency

If you’ve been following us for a while, you may have already seen some of our articles about email marketing. We’ve touched on plenty of topics related to this popular marketing channel, and we’re nowhere near the end of our informational rope! I still have plenty more to teach you about email marketing services, so join us as we explore another popular question that many companies have.

Why should I use an email marketing agency?

There are plenty of benefits to hiring a dedicated email marketing agency, and I’ll dig into them soon. However, before we do, let’s start by doing a quick overview of the topic.

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The Basics of Email Marketing

What is Email Marketing?

The first thing to know before we dive headfirst into this pool is what email marketing is. We’ve already covered the topic before, so we’ll keep this short and sweet.

In the simplest terms, email marketing is the practice of using email to promote your business. While the first marketing email was sent in 1978, its usefulness really took off in the 1990s, when home internet services became commercially available.

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Different Types of Email Campaigns

Obviously, a lot has changed since those first emails.

Now, nearly everyone has an email, which is constantly being used to drive sales and fuel business growth. Simple text messages aren’t enough anymore, and plenty of newer formats have emerged to draw email subscribers to your website.

I’m not going to list every type of email campaign out here, because that would take forever. Instead, I’ve picked out and highlighted some of the most important and effective options.

Automated Email Campaigns

Thanks to technology, plenty of email marketing services utilize automated marketing campaigns. This subset of email marketing covers a broad variety of targeted messaging, but the core of this approach is automation. In this approach, customers are send personalized emails based on certain conditions. Empty cart reminders and the classic welcome email are common types of automated email campaigns, but any type of email marketing campaign can be automated.

Drip Marketing Campaigns

We’ve discussed this topic on our blog, so I won’t go into too much depth here.

To summarize a somewhat complex topic: drip marketing campaigns are email campaigns that focus on a steady stream of emails, which are spread out over a predetermined amount of time. In other words, it’s a “steady drip” of brand promotions.

Interactive Emails

Interactive email marketing is one of the many exciting frontiers of promotional emails. Unlike traditional marketing messages, these campaigns are designed to draw new customers in by offering an interactive element. With some smart coding, strategists give customers the ability to hover, swipe, and tap on a variety of elements within the email message.

One of the biggest advantages of interactive email marketing services is the boost in reported engagement metrics that they offer.

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Why Email Marketing is Still an Effective Marketing Channel

Now that I’ve covered what email marketing is, I want to quickly explain why email marketing is so important.

These days, everyone and their cat seems to be running email marketing campaigns. People’s inboxes are being flooded with drip campaigns and targeted messages.

That doesn’t mean that you should give up on email marketing!

There’s still plenty of value in well-planned and expertly executed email marketing campaigns. Even with the massive boom in digital marketing, and an effective email marketing strategy can give your business a massive boost. It may even be what propels your brand to true success!

There Are Plenty of Potential Customers

Let’s clear something up: plenty people still use emails, and 4 billion people use their email on a daily basis. Across those 4 billion (not million) people, a whopping 360 billion messages are sent out every 24 hours. That’s a lot of potential customers that you can be reaching, but it’s also a daunting challenge.

Email Marketing Encourages Greater Spending

As one of the many marketing channels available, email marketing keeps on giving when customers visit your website Studies have shown that email marketing messages offer triple the income per customer when compared to social media platforms.

It’s One of Many Marketing Channels

Finally, I’ll wrap up this little aside by noting one of the most important parts of email marketing: it doesn’t have to be your only option. The best and wisest companies study their target audience well, and they understand where they should invest their marketing budget. They know that putting all of their trust into a single platform is a bad idea, and they spread their efforts out.

Email marketing is just one of the many forms of advertising that a marketing agency can help you with. It’s another tool on your belt, but it shouldn’t be the only one you’ve got!

That’s all to say that email marketing services are just one part of a robust business strategy.

I’m not trying to downplay its importance. Email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing options out there, and its sales funnel is unrivaled. But that means you should always be looking at other platforms to invest in, like SMS marketing.

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What Is an Email Marketing Agency?

With all of that out of the way, it’s time to talk about the main topic: the importance of a well-versed team of email marketing specialists. These skilled creatives are just part of an email marketing agency’s roster, but they’re the people that will ultimately help you turn email messaging into your most effective marketing channel.

So, what is an email marketing agency? How does it differ from a larger online marketing agency?

Both of these are pretty complex questions, but, if you’re looking for a simple answer, then here it is: an email marketing agency is a group dedicated to producing, sending, and tracking promotional emails to your email subscribers.

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The Different Types of Email Marketing Services

Of course, nothing is actually that simple. Sure, email marketing companies provide you with targeted email marketing services, but that’s not where this story ends! There’s a lot more information behind the curtain, and it all starts when we start investigating who is providing the plans.

Like most things, no two email marketing companies are the same. There are different business strategies and providers, and all of them have their own pros, cons, and beneficiaries.

Email Service Providers (ESP)

The most basic level of email marketing is the humble email service provider. Also known as an ESP, this is not an actual marketing agency. Instead, it’s a tool. An ESP is email marketing software, and individual employees can use it to create email campaigns.

What Does an ESP Do?

I can’t stress this enough, so I’ll say it again! An ESP does not actually provide a service. However, that doesn’t mean it’s useless. Many marketers use email service providers to plan and execute their campaigns. In fact, robust email marketing providers power the most effective email marketing services and agencies.

An email service provider is a tool, and it’s an extremely powerful one in the right hands.

So, to cut straight to the point, a more appropriate question for this section would be, “What does an ESP offer?”

The answer to that question is that these handy email marketing tools have plenty of functionality. A skilled team of email marketing consultants can use an ESP to:

• Create personalized messages
• Engage with qualified leads
• Manage subscriber lists and segmentations
• Monitor metrics, such as click through rates
• Plan and execute successful email campaigns
• Reach new customers
• See and organize information about existing customers
• See results from existing campaigns
• Track brand loyalty
• Understand if the right message is being sent

Some email service providers will also offer email strategy guides and tips on integrating your emails into other marketing channels. This isn’t a universal standard, though, and it’s generally locked behind certain subscription tiers.

In-House Email Marketing

A step up from the basic email service provider is the in-house email marketing team.

In this approach, a company uses their own internal marketing team to create and execute their campaigns. These internal employees will be responsible for every step of the email marketing process, which we’ll get into in just a minute.

Who Benefits From an In-House Email Marketing Strategy?

This option generally isn’t feasible unless you’re running an established and sizeable company.

In addition to the expertise and manpower that it requires, it also opens companies up to legal consequences if a message goes awry. Brands must also contend with their own customer service problems if an email is received poorly.

Nonetheless, for established brands, an in-house email marketing service offers a sense of immediate availability and infinite flexibility. Campaigns can be tweaked and modified at any moment, and brands never need to worry about waiting for an edit to be sent.

The Digital Marketing Agency

Because of the expense and headaches associated with maintaining an internal email marketing team, most brands prefer to use outsource their email marketing services. To do this, many companies will turn to digital marketing agencies.

What Do Digital Marketing Agencies Do?

A full online marketing agency serves as a one-stop shop for all of a brand’s modern marketing efforts. These companies can provide a full online marketing framework for any brand. Its services may include:

• Chatbot creation and maintenance
• Creation and maintenance of a blog and website
• Creation and maintenance of a marketing automation platform
• Digital customer support
• Email marketing efforts
• Negotiating online brand promotions with relevant individuals
• Pay-per-click advertisements
• Social media brand promotions
• Website maintenance

Who Benefits From Digital Marketing Agencies?

All of these services are generally provided as part of a massive package, which offers companies plenty of room to grow alongside their marketing agency of choice. Moreover, because a single company handles all of these components of a brand’s digital footprint, it’s easy to maintain a stable network of integrations.

What are the Drawbacks of a Digital Marketing Agency?

It may seem like an online marketing agency is the perfect way to get your brand online, but this all-encompassing service comes with plenty of drawbacks. In general, these agencies are extremely expensive. Their bundles may be used to push companies into buying unnecessary options and services, which become particularly cumbersome as a brand grows. Depending on which company you pick, you may also find yourself being told to use marketing channels that won’t benefit your brand.

However, this article is about email marketing, isn’t it!? That’s what we’re interested in, and it turns out that these agencies often neglect this essential marketing channel. While you may find an agency with a truly remarkable team of email marketing specialists, you’re not always guaranteed that perk.

As amazing as these companies may be, their employees are often working in multiple roles. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does open the door for some sloppy work. The people who ultimately work on your email marketing may not have any experience doing so. They may not have even worked with copywriting before!

Full-Service Email Marketing Teams

The solution to all of these drawbacks is to hire a team of email marketing specialists.

With an email marketing company, brands can get exactly what is needed. There are no extraneous add-ons, no unnecessary “bonus” packages, and no fretting about overlapping services. Instead, brands are given exactly what it says on the tin: a dedicated email marketing service, which they can tap into as needed.

A full-service email marketing company is dedicated to one thing and one thing only: email marketing. Employees of these amazing marketing services are skilled copywriters and creatives, and they have the experience to make sure every email campaign that you run will reach and resonate with your target audience.

Who Benefits from Full-Service Email Marketing Companies?

Any brand can amplify its profit potential by hiring an email marketing agency, and I can’t possible explain all of the reasons for this.

I can try to sit down and show you how many ways a company can boost its online marketing efforts with an email marketing service, but that will take too long!

Instead, I’m going to explain what these companies do, how they do it, and how all of that translates into profit.

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What Do Full-Service Email Marketing Companies Do?

This is my favorite part of today’s post! I am in love with email marketing. It’s such an amazing and effective marketing strategy, and its ability to reach customers has never waned. I can go on and on about how amazing full-service email marketing services are, or I can show you.

Join me! Let’s take a journey through the process of creating an effective email marketing strategy, and I think you’ll see why having a dedicated email marketing agency at your disposal is so important.

Market Research

The first step of content creation is research.

Every email marketing agency knows this.

That’s why, when you first meet with an email marketing group, you’ll be tossed directly into the interrogation room! If you want to get amazing results from your email marketing service, then you’ll need to tell them everything!

I’m not going to get into all of the details of client-side work, but I want to touch on the many moving variables that an agency has to track. When an email marketing agency is performing its market research, it’s looking for a lot of information. Some of the big topics are:

• How can customer retention be improved?
• How do customers talk about the brand?
• How does the brand present itself?
• How have previous campaigns performed?
• Is there an existing sales team to work with?
• Is there any existing customer data?
• What is the best use for the campaign monitor?
• What is the brand’s target audience?
• What kind of voice does a brand have?
• Where can marketing automation be implemented?

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Planning Email Marketing Campaigns

After the research has been done, an email marketing agency will move to the planning stage. During this phase of the email marketing process, the marketing agency must work closely with its clients.

We’ve already discussed how many different types of email campaigns there are, so I won’t waste your time by repeating them all. Instead, I want to point out how an email marketing agency will usually approach the planning process.

Knowing what messages to send is just part of the puzzle. An email marketing agency also needs to know when to send the messages.

The Importance of Timing

I’ve talked about this topic before, but it’s something that email marketers are constantly thinking about. When you work in marketing, you know that there’s a fine line between an effective marketing campaign and being a massive nuisance.

The last thing you want is for your email campaigns to spawn spam complaints. Unfortunately, without the right message and proper expertise, you will start to annoy your existing customers.

Knowing how to run a proper drip marketing campaign is one of the many amazing skills that a truly fantastic email marketer will have. It’s also not something that you’re guaranteed to find at a standard online marketing agency.

Super Sorting

While most email marketing tools offer the ability to create segments, skillful segmentation is rare. You’re not guaranteed a segmentation expert at a massive digital firm, but you’ll definitely find one at a specialized full-service marketing agency.

Why is that so important?

I’ve spoken about segmentation before, so I’ll keep my explanation brief. With segments, you can sort existing customers into groups. These may be based on something as broad as gender or as specific as clothing taste. These groups of contacts can then be sent targeted messages, which are tailored specifically for members of their segment.

This form of marketing automation is incredibly powerful, and it’s an amazing way to provide the next part of the planning puzzle, which is…

A Touch of Humanity

Most email marketing tools offer the ability to send personalized messages, and most marketers know how to implement this. Often, they’ll use these features to add an email subscriber’s name to a subject line.

Most email marketing specialists, however, know how to take full advantage of personalized emails. This often means that certain customers are sent emails for products that are likely to appeal to them, but that’s not the only use for personalization.

In addition to making your welcome email stand out, skillful personalized emails can make customers feel seen. By engaging with people on an individual level, — as opposed to the widespread generalizations — companies can dramatically boost customer retention.

Content Creation

Once the marketing team has laid out the groundwork for an email campaign, it’s time to let the creativity to flow.

It may seem like a simple copy-and-paste process, but creating engaging subject lines and ensuring that customers are sent relevant messages is hard!

It takes an extremely skilled team of individuals to produce a successful email campaign, and that’s part of the magic of full-service email marketing agencies. It takes plenty of practice to create effective targeted email marketing. Fortunately, a good email marketing agency will be packed with experienced copywriters, and those amazing writers will be able to make sure your email marketing campaign is able to generate revenue growth.

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Campaign Implementation

After the planning and the content creation, you may think that the job of the email marketer is done. Nope! There are still a few more items on the email marketing checklist, and implementation is the next.

In order to implement a campaign, marketers need to consider their marketing automation as a whole. A campaign needs to have a way to track its results, and you’ll need to be able to see how many people have actually seen your message. After all, an email that is delivered and left unread isn’t very useful.

This is where a marketing agency needs to implement funnels and landing pages. Without these essential anchors, the campaign monitor won’t be able to track the data it needs.

It may be fairly easy to create a simple campaign, but fully utilizing a platform’s marketing automation capabilities is a difficult task. Fortunately, email marketing companies know how to do it. Using its email marketing software of choice, an agency can create complex funnels and design amazing landing pages for your brand’s marketing campaigns. All of these will feed back into…

The Mighty Metrics

Here’s the real meat of any email marketing campaign. If a campaign isn’t opened and viewed, it doesn’t matter how creative or eye-catching the subject line was.

You can find analytic capabilities in any email marketing tool, but do you know how to use them? A skilled campaign monitor can, and that’s why it’s so important to hire a knowledgeable email marketing agency.

With the right insight, every marketing email becomes a learning experience. You can begin to see which subject lines worked, how users interacted with your content, and where users are most likely to go on your website. When paired with Google Analytics, this data is fantastically powerful.

A good team of email marketers can also integrate their data into other platforms. Users can be directed to your blog or social media accounts as easily as they can be sent to your sales landing pages. Likewise, they can be encouraged to share emails with friends, which can boost your overall reach.

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Why Everyone Needs a Team of Email Marketing Experts

So, what does all of this mean?

All of this was a long way of saying that everyone needs to have a skilled email marketers in their corner.

Where Do I Find a Full-Service Email Marketing Agency?

There are plenty of amazing email marketing companies out there. I’ve talked about it before, so I’m not going to bore you with another list.

What I will say is that one of my favorite agencies is The Email Marketers. I know! I may be biased, but there’s no agency that’s as skilled as we are. Our services are fully customizable, and we provide plenty of opportunities for you to really dig into our plans. We provide a truly collaborative email marketing experience, and our success depends on yours!

What’s the Bottom Line?

The ability to outsource your email marketing services is an unprecedented opportunity. You’ll gain all of the advantages of email marketing without the associated hassle. You won’t have to worry about paying for email marketing software, nor will you have to fret about maintaining a team to produce content.

It may seem obvious, but it always pays to focus on the experts. As great as a generalized digital agency may be, they’re not going to be experts on drip marketing. That massive online marketing agency won’t know the ins and outs of your email marketing software of choice. Moreover, depending on who you opt to work with, they may even ask you to bring your own email marketing software.

Full-service email marketing services solve these problems, and many of them are much more efficient uses of your business’ funds. That’s why I’m so vocal about making sure every business owner knows their options.

You don’t need a massive agency to succeed. In fact, a successful email campaign may just be the exact push your company needs to flourish, and you can get that from a full-service email marketing agency.