An email marketing agency makes it possible for you to grow your email list, sell more products through promotional email, and stay consistent with your monthly newsletters.
1) How Can A Full Service Email Marketing Agency Help You?
When you work with a full service email marketing agency, you can expect a menu of services. They will start by reviewing your current marketing strategy, the most effective email campaign, and the overall digital marketing situation. Before creating a single email campaign, they will probably also look at your company’s presence on Facebook, traffic from Google, and ask you questions about your target audience.
By gathering all of this information, you are more likely to achieve better results, including an acceptable return on investment. Besides, I also recommend working with a full service email marketing agency with expertise on specific marketing software like Mailchimp. For example, I use Mailchimp in my business, I have developed email marketing campaigns for clients in Mailchimp, and I’ve completed the Chimp Essentials course. If Mailchimp is a vital tool in your digital marketing, I would be pleased to help your marketing team.
2) Ask What Goes Into Designing A High Designing Email Marketing Campaigns For Your Business
Email marketing campaigns that drive results require several elements. You need a template design that your target audience will find easy to read. In addition, you need marketing expertise to set specific business goals:
Example Business Goals
- Increase orders from your existing customer email list by sending a weekly email campaign
- Improve email marketing efficiency by creating a newsletter template that you can use repeatedly
- Get better results from your sales funnel (i.e., increase email revenue by 10%)
- Grow your email sign ups with more of your target customers by inviting Facebook followers to your email list
- Implement marketing automation to onboard new customers (e.g., send an email campaign to new buyers with a buyer-specific email newsletter and a welcome email)?
- Launch a survey to your target audience to inform your next product launch
The details of digital marketing – choosing when to use automation campaigns, reducing your bounce rates, and improving brand awareness – are secondary to business goals. Your essential indicators in working with a full service email marketing agency should focus on revenue and lead generation business goals.
3) Are There Setup Fees To Start Your Email Newsletter?
Before you start sending out monthly newsletters, there is some preparation work to do first. That’s why setup fees are standard practice when you work with a full service email marketing agency. Specifically, a setup fee covers the cost of critical marketing activities like reviewing your current search engine optimization situation, evaluating past monthly newsletters, checking Salesforce, and evaluating the performance of the promotional email you send. All of these preparation activities take time and expertise, so you need to setup fees are a standard operating procedure before you start sending email marketing campaigns.
4) How They Use Content Marketing To Support Your Email Marketing Campaigns?
There is a close link between growing an email list and content marketing. Interesting content draws people into your business when people search for answers on the search engines. By offering helpful content marketing resources, prospects are more likely to agree to receive marketing email from you.
Once people are on your email list, content marketing continues to play an important role. You don’t want to fill every marketing email you send with sales pitch after sales pitch. That approach will encourage people to ignore their email marketing campaigns. Instead, train your customers to look forward to your promotional email by sharing valuable information like interviews.
Tip: Want to see interview-style content marketing in action? Check out my interview with Uploadcare, which explores their digital marketing wins.
5) How Will Email Marketing Agencies Support Your Marketing Team?
Email marketing agencies like to talk about their digital marketing expertise with copywriting and marketing automation. Those skills do matter. Alas, these skills are not enough. It is also vital that your email marketing agency knows how to work with your marketing team. After all, your marketing team has already put months and years of effort into understanding your company’s target audience, content creation for Google, and other Internet marketing projects. Such insights are vital to attracting potential clients to join your subscriber list.
To assess whether a digital agency will work effectively with your marketing team, ask the following questions:
- What is your monthly process to seek feedback on marketing email?
- What is your customer service process (e.g., do they report on bounce rates to you monthly)?
- How do they define marketing leads for your business?
- What is the team’s plan for the channel partner incentive program?
- Will they help your marketing team to choose email applications?
- Will the digital agency write email sequences for your business?
6) What Marketing Automation Ideas Do They Propose?
Email marketing agencies live and breathe digital strategy every day. Therefore, you should expect your digital agency to take a proactive approach to your email marketing campaigns. Specifically, email marketing agencies should develop a digital strategy that leverages marketing automation to achieve your business goals.
Practical marketing automation ideas may include:
- Improve the quality of lead generation with marketing automation (e.g., only send a lead to sales when the person has interacted with multiple email marketing campaigns)
- Get better results from Facebook with marketing automation (e.g., upload a customer email list to Facebook so that you can advertise to people in your target market)
- Send triggered emails to your subscriber list based on customer activity
A proper full service email marketing agency will not send the same email blast to everybody. Instead, they will use carefully use your email program to target different parts of your target audience with marketing software. You might decide to send one email blast to your existing customer list, offering them a discount to buy. Everybody else (i.e., non-buyers) would receive a different marketing email.
- Propose effective strategies for marketing automation based on other projects. As a business owner or digital marketing manager, you are only familiar with your customers. Experienced email marketing companies work with multiple companies. If they find a way to ignite visibility or get better results from a landing page in a different target market, those ideas could be adapted for your business.
7) How Will The Full Service Email Marketing Agency Achieve A Good Return On Investment?
An email program like MailChimp automatically collects specific data like open rate and customer engagement metrics like clicks. On their own, these data points do nothing to advance your business goals. As a business owner, you’re probably too busy to study your open rate for insights.
In contrast, your marketing team and a full service email marketing agency will work together to design more effective strategies. The digital strategy may evolve to recommend increasing email sign ups with a blog post and landing page rather than pay per click. In many cases, generating leads from Google is a better way to get more potential clients.
8) What Is The Digital Agency’s Approach To Using Strategic Partnerships To Grow Your Email List?
Your email list only contains a fraction of your overall target audience. For example, there are millions of people who use Microsoft Excel every day. Yet, only a fraction of those people is familiar with Excel products like FormulaSpy or Mr Excel. Rather than sending email campaigns to your current email list, email marketing agencies will sometimes suggest a different approach to lead generation: strategic partnerships.
In its simplest form, strategic partnerships mean that another company permits you to send a promotional email to their email list. To make the arrangement attractive to the other company, offer them a concrete benefit like a revenue share. What about cases where you don’t have the marketing expertise to do a direct marketing share?
You can still use strategic partnerships to achieve better results. Instead of a sales promotion, ask your partner to send a promotional email to tell their email list about an upcoming webinar or virtual event. With this approach to digital marketing, your company brings valuable information to the target market. Your partner looks good to their email list because they are bringing new insight to the market.
If you’re not sure how to create a webinar or presentation, you may need to work with a content marketing consultant. They can work with your marketing director to create a custom landing page, write the promotional email, and write the presentation script.
9) When Does It Make Sense To Take Marketing Software And Email Campaigns In House?
A full service email marketing agency probably would not tell bring up this point, but it is crucial. In some cases, you are unlikely to achieve better results or a meaningful return on investment when working with email marketing companies. This disappointing digital marketing outcome can happen for a few reasons.
Your email list is too small
If you have 10, 50, or even 100 people on your email list, it is challenging to generate significant results even if you send a marketing email every day.
Your email newsletter has no call to action
Your business goals probably include increasing revenue, right? Therefore, your email newsletter has to make it easy for people to buy a product or request an appointment. If your email blast does not include a clear call to action (e.g., click here to buy), nothing is going to happen.
You refuse to use a marketing email platform like MailChimp
Whether you use MailChimp, Constant Contact, HubSpot, or a different platform, it is vital that you use a professional marketing automation platform to send your email newsletter, triggered emails, and promotional email. These email programs are an essential component of running successful email marketing campaigns that increase revenue.
Your marketing director isn’t interested in working with email marketing companies.
Your digital marketing budget is too small. Do you only have $500 to spend each month on your digital marketing program? It is possible to ignite visibility on occasion and use some essential marketing software on that budget. However, the overall results are likely to be minimal.
You avoid participating in a kickoff meeting or campaign management discussions.
A kickoff call to gather information is critical. Without a kickoff call, creating lead magnets, developing a drop campaign, and exploring search engine optimisation ideas are likely to fail. Failure is likely because the digital agency will be guessing about your business goals and target customers.
What’s Better Than A Free Consultation: Get A Marketing Email Health Check
There are so many email marketing companies offering to run your email marketing campaigns. How are you supposed to determine which one will help you implement your marketing strategy? I recommend looking for an email marketing agency that gives new clients more than a free consultation.
That’s why I have developed a 10 point health check for email marketing campaigns. This checklist will pinpoint where you need to make changes to get more sales. For more information about the email marketing health check, contact me today to request it.
