Struggling to balance email marketing with everything else on your plate? Hiring an agency could be the smartest move for your business. But is it right for you?
Discover the real benefits and potential risks of outsourcing your email marketing—before you make a decision. This quick read has all the insights you need to ensure your next move is a success.
Email marketing is the most essential tactic for businesses in some industries. Even for those who don’t consider it the most essential tactic, it’s still a very valuable one. Consumers will even tell you so.
Hubspot surveyed consumers asking about promotional preferences. Of the respondents, 86% said they would like to receive emails to learn about sales, news or updates.
And while email marketing is one of the most affordable tactics with the greatest ROI, it is time-consuming and requires specialized skills, including development and design.
When you don’t have those skills in-house or it requires too much time from your team, you start evaluating outsourcing your email marketing to an agency. Before you shop agencies and get an idea of pricing, learn the benefits and risks you might experience once you outsource your email marketing.
First, let’s establish what email is when it’s a marketing tactic. Most people use email daily to communicate. So, understanding its role and use cases can help guide you in outlining what you’re contemplating outsourcing and what those duties will look like.
Email marketing is any email designed to promote your business, generate sales or improve customer engagement. That doesn’t always mean advertising your company’s sales and products. Email marketing campaigns can take the form of any of the following.
Your relationship with the email marketing agency and the contracts you both signed for the work will dictate the specifics of how outsourcing the service works. However, as you consider the relationship, evaluate whether you want your agency to complete the following services on your behalf.
Some businesses retain the strategy portions of their campaigns. Others want control over everything. It’s truly up to you how you handle your campaigns and what parts of email marketing and development you want your agency doing.
Now let’s evaluate the benefits companies can experience from outsourcing their email marketing to an agency. Since it all depends on the contract you and the agency enter into, the benefits can vary. But this list will help give you an idea of what to expect from your partnership.
Smaller businesses tend to have a catch-all marketing team. That means those professionals have to do it all. And while that means they’ll know each marketing tactic and can build cohesive campaigns; it can also mean they have to know a little about a lot of things instead of a lot about a specialized area of marketing.
Bringing in an agency allows a company to expand its expertise quickly without hiring or paying a full-time salary to an expert.
The side effect can also be that your existing team members experience less burnout and have time to do things they enjoy, like considering your audience and their needs. In these scenarios, outsourcing email marketing can have an impact on other areas of your marketing.
Meanwhile, your emails are getting a makeover to be more on brand, include greater personalization because your team now has the time to do so and engagement is increasing because of click-through rate optimization tactics.
Working with an agency gives you the freedom to ramp up your email marketing campaigns quickly. You don’t have to go through the lengthy hiring process to find experts in your area who can do the job full-time and complete paperwork and onboarding. Instead, you jump right in with having the agency help with your strategy.
That’s because the team you’re hiring has the skills and expertise. Even if you don’t have an email marketing or automation system yet, the team can advise on the best and help you provision it properly to see the greatest return on your investment.
And now you also have the bandwidth to handle heavier promotion periods, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday or other seasonality that businesses experience. Whether you run a landscaping company that does the most business between May and October or you’re a CPA whose business is extra crazy during the spring for tax season, an agency can be the key to managing the ebbs and flows of a proper promotion plan.
When marketing teams get busy, the thing that falls by the wayside is also the thing that is the most important in achieving big email results: reporting. If you never look at what worked in the past, you can’t build a good blueprint for what to do moving forward. This can have negative impacts on your business and lead to poor results for future campaigns.
Agencies use the best reporting systems and tools. They can afford such tools because they work with a variety of businesses just like yours and can stretch the expense across multiple clients while justifying the need to have a person dedicated to reporting and insights.
Many companies don’t understand why marketers love email so much. They get started and do their best to manage campaigns effectively, but they just don’t see the return on investment that all the blogs and experts say they should.
Then they work with an agency and they finally start seeing how the dollars and cents add up.
Good email strategy makes all the difference. Bringing in an agency can help your business experience greater ROI despite the fact that you’re now paying for a team to manage this for your business.
While working with an email marketing agency offers many great benefits, you should be aware of the risks as well. The higher quality agency you hire, the less risks you’ll likely experience, so keep that in mind as you review the list.
As you call upon an agency to help you build and implement your strategy, you’ll also lose some control over the process. In many cases, that’s a good thing. But it might feel like a big adjustment for your team at the beginning.
Clear communication, goals and expectations will make the change in control easier to manage.
Marketing moves fast. And because of that, your communication needs to move just as fast if not faster. Constant, open communication is critical for outsourced email marketing.
Additionally, you might have time zone differences to consider when communicating, which can impact your collaboration. And never having met face-to-face can make the relationship feel distant.
Setting a clear communication cadence can help overcome this risk.
As you lean heavily on your outside resources, you might understand your marketing programs less. This can be a risk if you suddenly lose funding to pay for your outsourcing or the relationship with your agency sours and you exit the contract.
Avoiding this involves staying up to date on what’s happening with your email marketing and engaging in clear communication as described above.
During the getting to know you phase, an agency might claim they can do big things for you. But once you sign the contract and get rolling, you discover they can’t do as much as they promised.
To avoid this risk, read online reviews from the agency and select your partner very carefully to ensure you’re getting someone with the experience and know-how they are claiming to have.
New Light Digital is your resource for outsourcing email marketing reliably. We’ve worked with many companies in a variety of industries and are prepared to elevate your business through strategic communication with your target audience. Schedule your free consultation now to get started.
Further reading:
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