Why should you partner with an email marketing consultancy?
Email marketing represents an important and powerful tool for companies to build up their brand online. It is also a cost-efficient way to keep your customers and prospects engaged and up-to-date with your brand. Although it might seem daunting to undertake if the skills required are not available in-house, but this should not deter from it being used to its full capacity.
Benefits of partnering with an email agency
An email marketing consultancy is there to help you get more customers and increase your bottom line in a cost-effective way. They’ll assist in creating a bespoke strategy that’s in line with your company objectives and goals. An agency should also help streamline and improve email campaigns, provide insights based on analytics and provide real-time reporting that highlights the effectiveness of campaign and programmes. Essentially, they’ll be the ones keeping track of your activities and give advice on what to change if required.
Guiding clients through the process of creating prospecting email campaigns, nurturing programmes and lead generation activities is a vital task for an email marketing consultancy. In addition to providing analytics, an email marketing consultancy will also help you incorporate other aspects such as welcome programmes for new contacts, reactivation initiatives for retargeting for existing contacts. They’ll know what works best for each client and how best to integrate these aspects into practical campaigns.
It can help you automate many of the tasks associated with growing your business, such as sending weekly emails, automating follow-up emails, and managing a customer relationship management software like Salesforce or HubSpot.
A professional email marketing consultancy will also be able to provide valuable insights into what works best for different industries and audiences, which can help you better understand how best to reach customers through email marketing campaigns.
Case studies and references
All email marketing consultancies, or in fact any agency, live by their reputation. You are only as good as the success you help your clients achieve. So, if you have never heard of an agency before, how do you know if they are any good?
Before partnering with an email marketing consultancy, you need consider their reputation by looking at the portfolio of clients and case studies they have gathered over the years. Reading client testimonials and case studies will tell you a lot about a client. If you know some of the clients that the email marketing consultancy work with them that would be a great way to gage their potential value.
You can learn a lot about a company simply by visiting their website, reading their testimonials and case studies. If the marketing challenges solved are similar to the one’s you are facing, then you are onto a head start already.
It’s worth mentioning here that not all clients of an agency are happy to publicly reveal what work an email marketing consultancy helps with as this could reveal marketing strategies for the client’s competition. For those scenarios it would be just as important and relevant to get some solid references and endorsements from client contacts that have worked or are still engaged with the same agency.
Cost vs value-add
The cost of engaging an email marketing consultancy is naturally an important factor to consider. After all, companies are started to make money not spend money. It’s certainly a concern shared by most before experiencing the advantages of using an email marketing consultancy.
The cost of an email marketing consultancy can vary greatly based on its size and location. A small company may only offer basic services like sending and collecting opt-ins, while larger agencies have access to additional features such as insight and analytics reporting.
But in reality, neither the cost involved, nor the size of the agency matters as it’s their knowledge and experience that you pay for which is where the value-add comes in. And a great email marketing agency should pay for itself in terms through delivering increased campaign efficiencies and higher marketing ROI (Return on Investment).
An email marketing consultancy should be knowledgeable enough to be able to advise you on the tools to use, how best to integrate them into your campaign workflows so that you don’t have to spend time trying to figure out what works best for your business.
Working with some many different clients, all with different platforms and systems, this allows you to take advantage of another level of expertise that may email marketing consultancies take for granted. But it is an invaluable knowledge-bank to tap into for clients.
So, whether you already have your own email software that you need help using, or perhaps looking for a suitable solution to be installed in-house, an email marketing agency with good experience are also able to assist with this. Creating campaigns on your behalf in your own system is now a standard way of working with clients for most agencies. This helps with keeping all marketing assets in a central place.
Speed of delivery
For an email marketing consultancy, a client SLA (Service Level Agreement) will certainly help formulise what the engagement officially looks like and what happens in eventualities that cannot be foreseen.
In a way, the SLA is not as important as the practicalities of an engagement. More often than not it is the speed of delivery in the marketing support provided that really proves the value of using an email marketing consultancy.
Most businesses are having to operating in an increasingly competitive environment and the cliché ‘time is money’ has probably never been so appropriate as in today’s digital economy. An email marketing consultancy should have the resources to respond quickly and effectively when needed and that expectations are met, and campaigns (as well as budgets) are kept on track.
Why use virtualROI
virtualROI has been helping businesses across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa since 2009 with solving their email marketing challenges to build trusted brands online, nurture prospects, and increase conversion rate and customer retention scores.
Our team of experts understands the importance of email marketing and has the expertise to create an effective strategy that will help you grow your business.
We offer a full range of services from strategy development to execution. We offer an end-to-end solution that includes design, content creation, promotion, and measurement tools so that you can focus on what matters to you most: growing your business.