If your company has solid revenue numbers and collects customer information but isn’t investing in email marketing — you’re leaving money on the table.
Email is the most direct way to connect with your customers. For many, it is their preferred channel to connect with their favorite brands.
However, if your company or marketing team has no experience in email marketing, it may be a good idea to consider hiring an agency to handle it.
There are a few key benefits that growing companies will enjoy in choosing to work with the right agency for you rather than hiring in-house.
At RiseFuel, email marketing is one of the primary tasks we handle for our clients. While we specialize in inbound marketing, email marketing also plays a critical role in every inbound marketing strategy.
Email offers a level of personalization and automation unmatched by other channels.
It allows you to develop a deeper connection with your audience and simulate a one-on-one conversation that helps you to develop trust with their brand.
Hiring an Email Marketing Agency
When businesses are looking to expand their marketing operations, most have the same question — “Would it be better if we hired in-house professionals to handle this for us, or should we look to an agency?”
The truth is that there is no right answer to this question. There are pros and cons to both
An expert email marketing services agency can be an important and trusted partner that works closely with you for years and provides scalability that in-house hires never could.
But agencies will not have the same level of on-brand familiarity and the decision that you make will depend on your own business needs. There is no way for anyone other than you to say for sure which will be the best choice.
Let’s take a look at the pros of hiring an email marketing agency.
- Hiring email marketers in-house can be expensive. Not only do the best email marketers demand a high salary, but they also require benefits. Agencies typically provide a set, predictable price. This is ideal because you can be certain that you will always stay within your budget when you work with an agency. Your advertising and labor budgets are typically rolled into one set cost.
- Agencies specialize. An email marketing agency specializes in what they do. Sure, there are generalist agencies, but if you were hiring an agency for a specific task, wouldn’t you want to make sure that they are uniquely competent in that area? While employees can specialize, most try to have a broad understanding of marketing in general. Your specialization options are less straightforward and more limited when you hire in-house.
- Agencies are agile. An email marketing agency can grow with you. They have a team and can divert resources to your account as required. Growing with in-house hires can be tricky. Not all hires will stick. Some will disappoint. Others will be great. Still — you can never grow as quickly when you have to onboard and train your team. With an agency, all of the resources come ready to work.
- If it doesn’t work out, the cost of moving on is low. Hiring an agency is much lower risk than building out a team. If it isn’t generating the expected ROI, you can cut ties at the end of your contract and move on. That just isn’t true with an internal team.
The ROI of Email Marketing Services
First and foremost, email marketing is an ROI-generating machine.
For many companies, their best results come from their email marketing. A well-defined and executed strategy is able to far outpace paid advertising, SEO, and traditional channels in terms of the ROI's that is produced.
Here are a few stats that give you an idea of just how impactful email marketing can be.
Email Marketing Stats
- An email has an ROI of $38 for every $1 spent
- 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content.
- 40% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are critical to their content marketing success.
- 73% of millennials prefer communications from businesses through email.
- 59% of survey respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.
The ROI of email marketing services is so high that most companies would not be foolish not to integrate it in some way with their existing strategies. There is simply too much potential there to leave it untapped.
A solid email marketing foundation could be the backbone of your complete digital strategy. It creates a consistent and reliable foundation that other channels can build on.
Often, our clients find that after we implement an email marketing services program, the channel becomes their most dependable channel for generating leads and converting website visitors into customers.
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A Preferred Channel for Customers
As a business, it should be your goal to engage with your customers through the channels and platforms that they are most comfortable communicating through.
That means that you need to meet them where they are. That may mean on Facebook, Twitter, or other social platforms. It might mean reaching out to them through their direct mail inbox.
Email should almost always be a part of the equation. Customers just prefer the platform. It gives them the ability to engage with content on their own terms.
But — customers only want to engage with brands through email that they trust. In that sense, email marketing is at its most effective when it is able to mesh with marketing from other channels to capitalize on that trust.
Meet your customers where they are and they will reward you with engagement.
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Specialization and Competency with an Email Marketing Company
Agencies, and especially those that specialize, are unique in that they deliver a very narrow skillset that is exactly what their clients need.
When you hire an email marketer to join your team, you get one expert in the field, so long as you can find someone that specializes.
When you hire an email marketing agency, you get the whole team. An agency that specializes in email marketing will have experts that specialize in different industries, styles, or strategies to provide a better match for your business.
Specialization is important. At RiseFuel, we experts and specialize in inbound marketing, of which email marketing is a core component.
When you work with an agency that specializes you know that they will have the experience to back up their words.
Because of that experience, an agency will be able to help you shape and mold your strategy.
Their work for other similar businesses allows them to start their engagement with your company with a rough idea of what will work and what won’t work.
What that means is that working with an agency typically means less testing required before your campaigns reach profitability. They know the direction that they need to take and are able to take you there reliably.
An internal team would require a lot more trial in error. Unless you are able to hire someone that has specific experience in your industry, they will have to go through multiple iterations before they can reliably find what works.
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Leverage Personalization
Regarding marketing, few strategies are more powerful than a well-defined personalization plan.
Email marketing is perhaps the medium that is best-suited for that level of personalization. To give you an idea of just how impactful personalization could be for your business, let’s take a look at a few key stats:
Email Marketing Personalization Stats
- 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations.
- Consumers are 40% more likely to view items that are recommended based on information they have shared.
- 36% of consumers believe that brands offer more personalization in their marketing interactions with them.
Using email marketing, you can inject any customer data that you are able to collect directly into your communications with them. This includes engagement data.
You can reference what pages of your website they’ve visited, what blog posts they’ve engaged with, and zero in on products they may be interested in.
Email marketing is so effective in part because the level of personalization that can be leveraged is unparalleled. The only thing that can hold you back is not collecting enough data.
That’s why any email marketing agency worth their salt is not just going to help you set up your email marketing strategy but also help you improve your data collection strategies to leverage more (impactful) data. This is very important for businesses to remember.
Pic Source: SalesCycle
Deep, Trigger-Based Automation
Email marketing is not only the perfect medium for personalization, it’s the perfect medium for deep automation as well.
If you spend your time manually sending out emails to customers or scraping together a newsletter every once in a while just to say that you did — you probably aren’t getting much out of your email marketing.
Deep, trigger-based automation uses your customers' actions to trigger the sending of specific emails to your core audience.
Let’s go over a couple of examples. Let’s say you own a window cleaning business. A prospect enters your website and visits your “Business Services” page, reading it thoroughly.
You wouldn’t want them to receive information about residential services. But most businesses aren’t collecting enough data to look that deeply at prospects individually.
Using customer actions as triggers is exceptionally powerful. You can ensure they receive content laser-targeted to their specific needs.
You can’t underestimate the speed of email, either. A customer could engage with specific content. Within a day, they receive more information tailored to your website's pages or other media they have engaged with.
RiseFuel creates personalized, buyer-centric email campaigns.
- Our email marketing services allow you to connect with your audience at the right time with the right information.
- Our email lead nurturing campaigns are designed to follow the traditional sales funnel (Top, Middle, Bottom) but with an inbound marketing twist.
- Each email campaign is researched and created as a personal message to your target audience, offering them sample content, offers, and information that would benefit them.
- Scheduled and segmented in advance of their deployment, email campaigns are designed to be unobtrusive and avoid the recipient’s spam or promotions filter.
- Choosing the right email marketing services can have a significant impact on the success of your email marketing campaign.
Nurture Prospects Through the Path to Purchase
Our email marketing services play an important role in guiding prospects through the marketing funnel.
When a prospect downloads a piece of premium content on your website, requests a demo, or signs up for an offer, you can continue to send them emails related to what they were initially interested in, while also suggesting case studies, product information, and special sales on related items.
When email marketing is personalized and customized to each recipient, prospects look forward to receiving the emails and are gently drawn to make a purchase.
Track Results to Ensure Success
When we first begin working with a client, we learn goals and expectations. Once we know what you want to achieve, we design and implement a strategy that provides measurable results.
Every email campaign is tracked, measured and benchmarked so we can see what’s working well and build on that success for even greater results as we move forward.
Let the experts at RiseFuel build an email marketing strategy that will grow your revenue!
- With our powerful automation tools and personalization features, we will create and send email campaigns that reach your ideal target customer at just the right time.
- We will give you advice on your email marketing strategy, design custom branded templates, create engaging email content, and help you maximize your results over time.
- Targeted and personalized communication helps you increase email marketing engagement rates.
- Email marketing services, when done right, drive serious revenue for businesses. The key phrase here is “done right.”
- While spam alienates prospects, email that delivers value to them builds trust and nurtures them along the path to purchase.
We will you find new customers, build stronger relationships, and boost your sales through deeper customer insights and email marketing services.
Want to set up a time to talk with one of our expert email marketing agency team members? Click here to find a time that works easily for you.