What is email marketing consultancy and why does your business need it?
Email marketing consultancy is one of the most important services that your business needs to flourish and compete well in the market today. Any competent email marketing consultancy expert knows that the return on investment from email marketing far outdoes all other marketing and advertising touchpoints. Additionally, the versatility of email marketing means that you can use it for lead generation, brand awareness, conversion, nurturing, and much more. Is there a business without an email address? Extremely unlikely, right?
Today, a business must have an email address if it has to make any impact. According to experts, a good business email has many benefits – it makes your business look professional, provides more control, and heightens security. In this email marketing consultancy guideline, we take you through;
- What is email marketing consultancy?
- Types of Email marketing consultancy services.
- The benefits of email marketing consultancy services
- How your business can identify email marketing consultancy opportunities and succeed.
- Why an email marketing consultancy agency is better than in-house staff and freelancers.
What is email marketing consultancy?
Whether you want to use email marketing to get more clients or to create a working email automation plan, you must understand what it entails. Email marketing is a form of digital and direct marketing that makes use of emails to promote and market your business’ products or services. It can make your clients aware of new services, products, offers, discounts, and many more.
Email marketing is deceptively simple on the surface. But it involves a lot of planning, multiple steps, and targeted actions. This is where email marketing consultancy comes in handy. This refers to the practice of getting professional help from experts to perform your email marketing activities. A good email marketing consultant can deliver information and targeted calls-to-action to your clients that subtly nudge them to the desired logical action – making a purchase. However, selecting a perfect email marketing consultancy agency is difficult. But read on!
Types of email marketing consultancy services
Apart from the emails you send to welcome, activate, follow up, and re-engage clients, other most important ones include the following;
- Email newsletters. Used to send information about promotions, product updates, business projects, company profiles, news, events, announcements, and more. You can also use these to create brand awareness and send your re-purposed business content (such as a blog summary).
- Dedicated (standalone) email marketing. Involves sending an email that has only one purpose, such as an invitation to an event or a release of a new product.
- Lead nurturing emails. Involves sending targeted emails to clients depending on who and where they are in the marketing funnel.
- Sponsorship emails. If you want to reach different clients (from what you already have in your database), you can pay to have your message included in another business’ newsletter or list.
- Transactional emails. Have you ever registered for an event? After filling in the registration form, you get an email with login details as well as details about the event. This is a case of a transactional type of email. Eight times more people open transactional emails compared to any other.
- Other emails can be used to, for example, tell a brand story, request subscribers to leave reviews for your business on social media or review sites (such as Glassdoor), and you can even send a video email.
Benefits of email marketing consultancy services
There are more than 4.2 billion email users in the world today and growing, and almost 99% of these users open their inboxes daily. In addition to getting a ROI value of $44 for every $1 spent on email marketing, there are several other email marketing benefits;
- Cost-friendly. No need for a lot of manpower. No need for postage or printing.
- Increases brand awareness. Message delivered right into the inbox.
- Tenable to monitoring. With the metrics tool, you can measure the bounce, open, and click rates of your emails.
- You can easily build an email list. Most people are willing to exchange emails for such things as product demos and lead magnets.
- You can add personalized messages to increase engagement.
How to identify email marketing consultancy opportunities?
A proactive email marketing consultancy strategy is important for your business to fully benefit from email marketing opportunities. You need a working email marketing campaign strategy that attracts the right businesses and delivers the desired results. Define your target clients and build a subscriber list. Can you do this on your own? Hiring an email marketing consultancy agency is a sure way to success. Here is a step-by-step tutorial to help your business hire the right expert;
- Choose an email marketing consultancy expert capable of the following;
- Developing solid strategies for email marketing campaigns.
- Building, implementing, and managing multiple successful email marketing campaigns.
- Having the right approach to the process of designing, creating, and disseminating promotional emails.
- Having the necessary creative, technical, analytical, and auditing skills for proper email-sending activities and steps.
- Using all email marketing tools, SMM and SEO.
- Arrange and hold discovery meetings. Arrange frequent multiple meetings to make sure that your business needs are well understood by the consultant.
- Review the email marketing campaign strategy and make sure your expectations are properly captured.
- Give the green light. If satisfied, give your agent the go-ahead.
- Monitor and evaluate email marketing campaigns in terms of performance, activities, results, and feedback.
Why an email marketing consultancy agency is better than in-house staff and freelancers
Using an email marketing agency provides more advantages compared to in-house staff and freelancers. This is because an agency can provide a dedicated email marketing team that will better understand and carry out a dedicated B2B email design and management campaign for your business. Other activities that an agency can do for your email marketing campaign include the following;
- Clearly help you define your email campaign objectives.
- Personalise and humanise email templates and messages. Target your clients based on their persona.
- Expertly segment your subscribers. Categorise your clients based on desired outcomes.
- Optimise landing pages. Make the page where you send your clients more relevant to the emails.
- Design emails for all devices including mobiles. This is because, in the UK, 63% of people do their shopping using mobile phones.
- Craft high-quality email content with targeted calls-to-action (CTA).
- Do email marketing campaign automation.
- Protect your business from the risks of strict data privacy and protection rules.
- Direct all efforts to your email campaign.
Email marketing consultancy: conclusion
Email marketing outperforms social media and any other forms of digital marketing in terms of ROI. Using email for marketing purposes may sound simple. However, businesses require to choose an experienced and competent email marketing consultancy expert, a task that is always difficult, especially for new businesses. A good email marketing consultancy agency will help your business with many email marketing touchpoints including creative support email services, email and lead nurturing templates, email marketing newsletters, and landing page form builders among many others.
virtualROI has been offering email marketing consultancy services since 2009. Our email marketing consultants help B2B clients in all stages of email marketing. Speak to us now.