A complete guide for outsourcing email marketing

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Nothing beats email marketing for growing your brand, selling your products, or connecting with prospects and customers equally. Email marketing is among the most popular and efficient marketing techniques. Email is also one of the most widely used ways of corporate communication. Every day, around 105 billion emails are sent worldwide.

With email marketing, you can employ a flexible, quick, and cost-effective way of reaching out to potential customers and maintaining existing consumers by driving repeat website visits with the right strategies.

This article contains:

(click on a link to read a specific section)

• What Email Services Can be Outsourced
• Can Email Marketing Outsourcing bring results?
• How to Choose to Outsource Email Marketing for Your Company
• Choosing an Agency That Works for You
• 3 Excellent Email Marketing Service Providers

What are the email marketing tasks you can outsource?

There are plenty of reasons to opt for outsourcing email marketing services, primarily the ease of your functional operations. Employing a third-party marketing company or a marketing expert to handle your marketing operations is known as outsourcing marketing, and it can make a big difference.

If they are experienced and understand the market well, you’ll be able to align your products and communicate according to the same trends they provide you with. Your job becomes simpler, and you’re able to work according to what the market requires and not the other way around. 

The work is performed for you by an external entity when you outsource. As a result, instead of handling your marketing obligations on your own, you can concentrate on your main expertise.

What email marketing services can be outsourced?

Here are four basic marketing activities that are often outsourced:

A. Market analysis

Market research is a comprehensive examination of your company’s market, rivals, and consumers. It assists you in determining your brand’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition), as well as understanding what your consumers require and assessing what your rivals are doing. In email marketing, it can help you precisely understand where your target audience lies and how you can reach out to them via email.

However, when done in-house because it entails a great deal of research and analysis, it may be incredibly laborious and time-consuming. You can ask agencies to give you the data you seek and use the same to sharpen your emailer strategy to make it simpler.

B. Planning and strategy

You may establish or even rebuild your brand image by developing an email marketing plan. It also aids in determining how and when your brand should be introduced to the market.

Marketing firms create your market image and produce leads via strategy and planning, all done with emails.

A digital marketing company may help you develop your brand’s marketing strategy by doing the following tasks:

• Your brand’s positioning
• Developing unique value propositions
• Developing development plans
• They determine the most effective venues for marketing your company and may even do keyword research for SEO purposes.

You can use this information to then create strong email campaigns that tie back to your original branding and strategies.

C. Creative projects

Marketing materials that communicate your brand’s narrative and image to your target market via the web, social media, and/or email campaigns are examples of creative initiatives.

These include branding, promotion, communication, awareness, and lead generation logos, websites, applications, emails, newsletters, and marketing campaigns. You can outsource the entire design of the email to an agency as they could have expert designers to breathe life into your campaigns!

D. Marketing and sales operations

From planning and implementation to measurement, report creation, and attribution, email marketing operations entails managing and improving your whole marketing process.

A market analyst in an agency is responsible for a variety of responsibilities, including:

• Planning a project
• Management of the Creative Process
• Management of Marketing Technology
• Check for Brand Consistency
• Measurement of Marketing Results

Outsourcing email marketing is significantly superior to having your operations handled by in-house marketing staff. This would require you to fully outsource your emails, but always keep an eye out for the trends you want to see in your newsletters.

Can email marketing outsourcing actually bring the results you seek?

Outsourcing your marketing efforts is straightforward and straightforward to start up, making it accessible to small businesses. Begin by including a newsletter sign-up option on your app and website. You could use this to send newsletters to your subscriber list. Customers can be directed to the newsletter using your social media profile. The most significant advantages of email marketing are the low cost and ease of use.

A regular newsletter is a simple method to send out information about your firm, special deals, and forthcoming events. Offering them special bargains on their birthday is an effective method to convert them to buyers. This type of personalization aids in the development of the business, relationship with a consumer and increases chances of loyal customers.

There are, however, plenty of techniques and reasons that an external agency can employ, owing to their expertise on the topic. It’s crucial that you consider outsourcing it if you’re looking to make money out of the same. 

If you’re debating whether or not to outsource email marketing, here are some reasons why you should:

A. The effort and expertise

Outsourcing marketing can burden your scarce resources unless you already have a committed in-house marketing department.

A quarterly or even weekly or monthly newsletter is manageable for most firms. But if that’s all you’re doing, you’re passing up a vast potential to increase leads and conversions, and revenue through email drastically.

To deploy successfully, a proper campaign via email marketing software needs hours of work and multiple touchpoints. More significantly, it necessitates a specific set of talents.

HTML code, GIFs, custom-designed pictures, and an original copy can all be found in today’s email messages.

As a result, even funny emails may necessitate complicated assets like bespoke CTA buttons or automated processes based on if/then logic.

If your email marketing strategy is part of a larger inbound marketing one, you should include analytics. Knowing what your analytics are showing you also necessitates a specific set of skills. For example, you must understand why one email was read while another was ignored and why some email was clicked while another was disregarded. This type of data will tell you what’s functioning and how to change what isn’t.

Some of the talents required for an email marketing campaign are as follows:

• Graphic Design 
• Coding
• Copywriting
• Data Examination
• Marketing Strategy A/B Testing

In reality, an effective email marketing strategy may necessitate the participation of three to five persons. Additional tools may be required if you wish to use automated emails.

B. Leveraging data

Data is the foundation of successful email campaigns.

If you know exactly how many leads open and engage with your emails, you can utilize that information to create better campaigns in the future. For example, if your previous email had a poor open rate, you can alter the subject, preview text, and the sender’s identity to see whether you get more openings the next time.

If your most recent email has a low click-through rate, you may want to reconsider its contents. What is the email’s overarching goal? Are you sure you’re sending it to the proper people?

If you’re attempting to persuade people to sign up for a webinar, don’t clog it up with links to your blog entries. You don’t want to write an email to all of your blog readers if you’re offering an offer to your existing customers.

It would be best if you kept an eye on the following metrics:

• Opening Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate Click-through Rate
• Soft and Hard Bounces
• Email Deliverability Rate
• Rate of churn (Contact List Growth Over Time)

If you find yourself losing contacts quicker than you can replace them, it may be time to reconsider how you organize your email marketing campaigns and how you acquire new connections.

By outsourcing your emails, you can gain access to some data that an agency has access to. Since it is their specialty, they can provide the exact metrics you’re looking for without you having to sift through the noise. The data they provide is much more valuable as they understand your brand and the market in general, making it simpler for you to create pure data-driven campaigns. 

C. Ease of working with automation

Automated emails and newsletters, and other one-time email marketing campaigns are sent to those contacts based on data and user activity. For example, if a customer completes a form online to download a useful guide, you may immediately send them an email with the guidebook attached.

Automation also creates new options for lead nurturing and generation. If a newsletter user opens a few of your messages and converts them, you may add them to a separate process with unique content. You may offer a free consultation, a demo, or a bit of bottom-of-the-funnel content like a white paper, for example, at the end of the workflow. 

There are numerous email automation systems available, but they can be costly, but some of the most recent platforms may well have a learning curve. Furthermore, establishing automated workflows can be difficult and time-consuming.

An excellent outsourced team can help you effectively create these email campaigns without worrying about the various technicalities that go into making them.

A good email service provider can make marketing automation easier, allowing you to smartly create a robust database with which you can move forward. With the right sort of inputs from your end, they’ll be able to create automated workflows that trigger emails based on customer actions. 

The need for less intervention makes it easier for you to focus on more marketing-related tasks without worrying about the emailers.

Outsourcing email marketing can successfully provide your mails with the bonus they need to thrive because many outsourced marketers already have access to many email marketing technologies, including a CRM. Furthermore, if your outsourcing team works with a provider, they may be able to obtain you a deal on the tools you require.

Your outsourced staff will take over your email campaigns and do all of the assigned tasks.

D. Track campaigns you put out

The efficacy of any email marketing campaign is closely related to the use of the most recent campaign-specific metrics to evaluate the progress of an email campaign. When it comes to choosing the correct analytics, marketers need to think beyond mere open rates. 

Instead, highly skilled marketers consider particular indicators such as unique click rates, open rates, open and click rates, spam report rates, hard and soft bounce rates, and many more forms of participation.

As a result, you should expect your email marketing team to build comprehensive, well-written, well-planned, and well-designed campaigns to increase your programs’ success rate when they are launched. This same standard of expertise is required for an action plan, determining where to go and what to do depending on specific ad performance criteria.

How to choose to outsource for your company? Also, do you need it?

Many businesses must pay additional expenses to develop efficient in-house email marketing initiatives. An in-house team will require specific training, hiring, and supervision for the many talents needed to generate efficient email campaigns rather than outsourcing email services. 

Business strategy planning, email writing, email designing, programming and web development, database management, and program management are all required talents for this job. This is why talent costs for organizations running email campaigns can be substantially higher. Instead, evaluate the costs involved with outsourcing or contracting the process.

With a slew of CEO chores requiring your attention, the logical next step is outsourcing email marketing to a trained freelancer. Fortunately, there are now freelance markets where you can hire email marketing specialists to do the job for you.

However, before you begin recruiting individuals, you must make the required arrangements to ensure the proper transition.

Making the right moves – Choosing an agency that works for you

The following are some of the steps you must follow in order to choose the right marketing agency. Discuss these pointers with them before you take a call:

A. Determine the tasks they need to do

As previously stated, launching a campaign is not as easy as it seems. It necessitates extensive research and a solid strategy designed to engage your audience (email recipients) sufficiently for them to make a purchasing decision.

There’s also the task of creating an email list. You must ascertain the freelancer’s engagement as soon as feasible.

Will they be involved in collecting emails, creating an email list, and the segmentation of the list that present email systems allow?

Will they be responsible for most of these tasks, or will you or somebody else be responsible for some of them?

Another factor to consider is the type of email marketing. Though you are primarily responsible for making such selections, it may be beneficial to offer the email marketing expert the flexibility to advise what is ideal for your brand/company.

Any outside expertise is only as valuable as the internal insights that serve as a foundation. In other terms, what you will get will only be as excellent as what you are willing to give. Enhanced and consistent inputs will invariably result in more effective and improved outcomes. 

To support and complement the mutually beneficial relationship between your team and the external agency you have hired, you must be present at all stages—from the brief in the beginning to the launch and beyond.

The idea is to be extremely clear about which responsibilities you want to delegate early on to minimize misunderstandings once the contractor has been onboarded.

B. Expectations require your clarity

Once you’re willing to hire your preferred freelancer, it’s time to pay attention to the work you’re ready to do with the contractor. Having a clear vision with this team is the best way to get started. If it is the initial experience with an outsourced contractor, make sure to record everything and allow them to develop their ideas.

This phase aims to ensure that you are on the same page in terms of the objectives that must be met. One goal to strive for is to generate a good ROI. Other areas of email marketing, on the other hand, require greater specificity.

Here are a set of questions you can answer before hiring: 

• How often will you be sending emails each month?
• When and to which sections of the mailing list will they be sent?
• Is it necessary for you to provide the freelancer your permission on the newsletter design?
• When do you need the ideas to be “on your desk” to review and approve them?
• Do you have a target click and open rate?
• When would you want to get metrics reports, and what is the information it has to include?
• Other factors to consider depending on your brand’s requirements.

Set up a meeting with the contractor to go over the details. This is to ensure that you are all on the same page. An one-on-one meeting minimizes the chances of any form of miscommunication

C. Establish effective guidelines of growth

You must also ensure that working hours, and deliverables are clearly defined, along with the guidelines. This is particularly true if the freelancer works irregular hours. Whenever you start working together, you must explicitly convey your preferences.

Will you allow them to work during their desired hours? Do they have to be online at the same time as you? Would you be choosing an email marketing platform for the agency that you collaborate with? If you wish to create a weekly budget, now is the moment to tell the agency about it.

Starting the project on the correct foot may make or break it. Make sure to get everything organized beforehand and arrange everything so that your email marketing runs on autopilot.

3 excellent marketing service providers

A. Accenture

Accenture is a global professional services firm that specializes in sophisticated digital marketing for companies in the automobile, finance, retail, and other industries.

Important Marketing Services:

• Brand awareness and identity
• Marketing strategy and content medium.
• Development and strategy for the creative industry.
• Customer conversion and engagement.
• Development of the customer experience.

B. Concentrix

Concentrix, a worldwide business services firm, improves total corporate performance by providing marketing, technology, and innovation services.

Important Marketing Services:

• Management of marketing campaigns.
• Designing with imagination.
• Website creation and maintenance.
• Lead generation: Marketing that generates leads.
• Management of digital advertisements.

C. SendX

SendX is a multinational marketing firm that focuses on email marketing. You’ll be able to take advantage of a 360-degree integration of some of the industry’s most powerful technologies, ensuring that your email campaigns stand out from the crowd.

• Among the services provided are:
• A/B testing of email marketing campaigns
• Observations from an infographic
• 24×7 Support

To conclude

Email marketing organizations that have been launching and managing email marketing programs for years can create, deploy, and organize a huge spectrum of email campaigns for various sectors and consumer groups. 

They have become seasoned specialists, knowing when and how to employ the strategies and tools required to operate successful campaigns. 

More significantly, these specialists have a one-of-a-kind command on their email marketing platform. With the capacity to identify which tools overweight your MarTech stack excessively and fail to produce intended results. As a result, it may become necessary for you to consider using an outsourced email service.

It’s always good to have your team corresponding with the outsourced ones because then you’ll always make sure your messages are effectively passed in transition. Always keep tabs on the overall improvement and necessary changes if you’d like to grow in the email marketing business. With many trends and changing dynamics happening all over the year, you’ve to constantly innovate and expand to keep up! If you’re afraid of being left behind, there are several very interesting marketing books that can help you grow and learn more.