There’s much more to email marketing than creating a compelling template. Maintaining good relations with the email service providers, dodging spam filters, running comprehensive A/B tests, and optimizing HTML emails are a few things where your in-house email marketing department can fall short. All these problems can be easily overcome by hiring a proficient email marketing agency.
Benefits of outsourcing to an email marketing agency
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Cost-effective
Creating an in-house email marketing department can get expensive. To begin with, you have to apply resources in the hiring process. After the hiring, a good amount of time will be spent training and helping the new employees get acquainted with the company’s work culture. Moreover, hiring all the necessary personnel does not guarantee effective email campaigns. You also have to pay full-time salary to these employees, even during the off-season.
Such exorbitant expenses might not be feasible for the newer brands. This is where outsourcing comes in handy. When a brand hires an email marketing agency, they are directly getting access to a larger pool of talent. The agency is responsible for setting you up with a team that will help you with your needs. A professional email marketing agency has different divisions for copy writing, coding, designing, web development, project management, and database management, and database management. You only have to pay for the services that you use. Some agencies will offer lucrative package deals to newer brands to help them with their budgets.
Let’s take a look at the average cost of maintaining an in-house marketing department and outsourcing your email marketing operations to get a transparent picture. The average cost of training and preparing new recruits can be anywhere between $12500 and $15000. Paying the salaries to your employees will be a major expense. Glassdoor lists the average salary of an email marketer to be around $75000 per year. Now, multiply this salary by the total number of personnel that you are hiring. You will also have to pay higher salaries to domain experts and professionals.
However, in the case of outsourcing, you only need to pay a lump sum amount to the agency. If you are new in the email marketing segment, it will cost you around $5000 and $10000 per month to run your campaigns. Of course, the prices can go higher based on your requirements. Even then, the total amount would be lower than what you would have to spend on maintaining your in-house email marketing department.
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Higher rate of production
As mentioned earlier, it takes the brand a long time to get its in-house email marketing department running from scratch. The time and money used to train the recruits could have been used to launch email campaigns. Even after all the necessary training, some recruits might not be well-equipped to deal with some critical areas of email marketing.
In such cases, outsourcing your email operations to an email marketing agency is the more viable option. Thanks to the expertise and experience of the email marketing agency, they have systems and workflows in place that ensure faster production of email templates. They also conduct multiple quality audits and rectify any mistakes with ease. The guidelines used by these agencies guarantee your emails comply with the quality standards that have been set by the various email service providers.
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Better email deliverability
Only knowing all the latest design trends and email marketing opportunities is not the mark of a great email marketing agency. Rather, a competent email marketing agency will be aware of all the latest pitfalls that can affect the deliverability of your emails. Your in-house email marketing department may lack the necessary tools to conduct robust A/B tests. Furthermore, your email marketing department may also lack the essential filtering tools to keep up with the ever-changing compliances of internet service providers.
Email marketing agencies comply with all the current best practices for creating email templates. The email professionals focus on creating emails that improve relationships with your subscribers. These marketers also establish good relationships with the email service provider to reduce the chances of getting marked for spam. The marketing teams can also run a detailed analysis of your email campaigns to pinpoint the areas where they are lacking. Leading email marketing agencies also have all the latest tools to help you with your email campaign management and deliverability.
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Access to specialized skills
Email marketing agencies have years of experience creating, running, and managing multiple email campaigns. They also hire experts that are well versed in all the various email marketing software. The email marketers are also highly knowledgeable about the tools they are using to handle the campaigns. This gives them options of optimizing the email campaign workflows to run smoother by removing the bloatware and other unnecessary trackers. Such widespread flexibility and access to talent simply cannot be substituted by in-house email marketing departments.
These email marketing agencies highly value their specialized skill set. The agency you are working with will be more than willing to share their thoughts and opinions with you to improve your email campaigns. All the tools at their disposal will be used to drive customer engagement for your email campaigns. Efficient usage of tools and systems will result in consistent and tangible growth in your business.
Conclusion
Many brands that have their in-house departments also employ the help of email marketing agencies for special projects. Essentially, you are not restricted from choosing between one or the other. However, if you are new to email marketing and need to immediately scale your campaign, then outsourcing your processes to an email marketing agency is the best option for you.
Author: Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.