Whether you've got an email marketing program in place that is performing well, or you are looking to get something started with email marketing, a great email marketing agency will always be able to provide expert support and guidance. This blog explores when you should consider appointing an email marketing agency and how they can help you.
Let's say you are a start-up or a business that doesn't have any email marketing in place. An email marketing agency will enable you to put a strategic plan together across a period of time in order to get you started and on the path to success with email marketing.
You might choose to initially have the agency support you with deploying email campaigns and execution. A good agency will listen to your needs and support you however they can, encouraging you to bring anything in house to save you money and time. A really good email marketing agency will even assist you in recruiting your own in-house email marketer. If your agency is uncomfortable about this, they are probably not the right partner for you. It is crucial that you begin a relationship with an agency that can be flexible.
Let's assume that you have a successful email marketing strategy in place already. You are getting results, but for some reason your goals have been increased and you need to step up your game. This is a great time to consult with an email marketing agency. They will be able to help you to explore the situation at present through an audit and define a strategic and tactical roadmap for your organisation.
It doesn't mean that you need to commit to working with this agency in the long run, and a good agency will be comfortable working with you on a one-off basis. After all, if you see the results, you will probably reinvest more of your budget into working with this agency and this is typically how we meet a lot of our clients. We never ask a prospective client to commit to anything longer than a 90 day engagement initially. If you're agency asking for more than this, I recommend that you seek other options.
If you are considering leaping into advanced email marketing automation for significantly extending any automation that you currently have in place, it can be tempting to go straight to looking at the tools and technologies that can achieve this. However, in my experience I would strongly recommend that you speak with an email marketing agency or email marketing consultant before you consider the tools or platforms that you might use to execute these automated campaigns.
A great email marketing agency will scope the entire customer life-cycle for you across all touch points and phases of the relationship that you have with a customer or prospect. Ideally, the agency will prioritise some of the most important strategies first and advise you on which ones should come later. You should expect to be shown recommendations around the frequency and timing of messages, content themes and specific content for each message, as well as wireframes and considerations for how other channels such as direct mail and paid social will play a part in the automation.
Almost every brand I've ever worked with have had some regret with regards to the email marketing platform they have chosen. It's tempting to choose tools before we think about our strategy, and this can serve us well in the short-term, but it never serves us well in the long term. We end up with a platform that doesn't do what we needed to do, only to discover that there are other options on the market that are far more appropriate for our needs. Don't fall into this trap. I highly recommend that you hire an email marketing agency or email marketing expert to assist you in choosing the right tools and technologies. Selecting the best ESP for your marketing objectives is one of the most important decisions that you will make. You will make a much better decision if you utilise the skills of an email marketing agency to assist you with this.
This is never a fun place to be. You may have spent many years building your email marketing program into what it is today, but perhaps now it isn't performing as well as it used to. It's often more efficient to look to an email marketing agency to help you understand what's happened and why performance has dropped. It might well be that you're just looking at the wrong metrics and having another point of view might be all that you need to see things through a different lens and to make your next strategic move. Hiring an email marketing agency doesn't mean that you need to surrender your responsibility for the channel to another company or individual, and it doesn't mean you're a bad marketer. all that it means is that you are eager to improve and that you are open to collaborating with others in order to achieve that. In modern marketing, this mindset is critical in getting the best results.
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