An email marketing agency creates customized email campaigns to attract customers, build relationships, improve brand loyalty, and drive conversions. Her expertise is in understanding customer behavior, preferences, and triggers, and using them to build meaningful connections.
What is the main objective of email marketing?
The main objective of email marketing is to build and maintain a meaningful connection with your audience, drive desired actions and conversions, and contribute to the overall growth and success of your business.
Effective email marketing allows businesses to send personalized, timely, and relevant messages that resonate with subscribers, ultimately leading to increased customer engagement, loyalty, and sales. As a direct communication channel, email marketing allows businesses to inform their audience of new products, offers, or company updates. This case study from
SmartSites shows how strategic email marketing can achieve results that other digital marketing channels can’t. Virtual real estate brokerage eRealty Advisors wanted to attract more real estate agents to their membership program.
SmartSites sent monthly newsletters and email campaigns via MailChimp to automate the email flow to new subscribers and prospects. These and other measures increased conversion rates by 480% and leads by 360%.
How do email campaigns work?
Email campaigns work by sending targeted emails to a specific audience. These emails might promote products or services, share news, or provide information.
Here’s how the process works:
Marketers often collect email addresses through website signups and other lead generation strategies. 4,444 leads are segmented by engagement, location, or other strategies.
email marketing companies then create and send targeted emails for each segment, sending them at strategic times.
They then measure the success of their email marketing campaigns by monitoring open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
What Services Do Email Marketing Companies Provide?
email marketing companies offer the following key services:
Email Audit: An audit is the first step before developing a strategy, and it gives agencies clear information about their client’s performance, the challenges they face, and potential opportunities. Understanding past creative direction and sales strategies is key to planning future improvements.
Email Strategy: During strategic planning, email marketing agencies conduct audience research to determine the most effective messages, offers, and timing for their target market. This serves as the basis for later deciding which automation options, subscriber acquisition methods, and basic best practices (double opt-in, receipts/invoices, transactional emails, etc.) to employ.
Email Template Development: These specialized agencies design and develop templates for organizations that don’t have the in-house expertise or resources. These templates can be reused for different scenarios by swapping out text, images, and links.
Custom Creative: When templates don’t meet your needs, custom creative can do so. These may include a combination of content, design and development.
Email Campaign Management: This includes running and managing your campaigns as a full service, whether they are ongoing or one-off campaigns.
Performance Tracking: Tracking and analyzing key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversions, spam complaints and engagement can contribute to ongoing business success.
Other services offered by email marketing companies include:
1.Email list management and segmentation
2.Automation and workflow setup
3.A/B testing and optimization
4.Performance tracking and analysis
5.Compliance and deliverability
6.Integration with third-party email platforms
What is the difference between email marketing and… Marketing Automation?
The main difference between email marketing and email automation is that the former covers a wider range of activities and monitors users’ direct actions on emails, while the latter handles the tedious tasks associated with emails, such as collecting important data from emails across a wide variety of touchpoints.
Email marketing is a digital marketing channel that focuses on creating email campaigns that help brands connect with their audience. This includes:
1.Analyzing market research
2.Creating and designing email content
3.Scheduling and sending emails
Marketing automation refers to the use of specialized software to streamline repetitive marketing tasks across multiple channels, including social media, websites, and email marketing. Some of the most commonly automated email tasks include:
1.Collecting comprehensive data on customer demographics and behavior
2.Market segmentation
Customizing content and sending emails based on time or activity-based triggers
Monitoring the profitability of emails across email-email moves.
What types of email marketing are there?
There are two main types of email marketing: inbound email marketing and outbound email marketing.
- Inbound Email Marketing
Inbound email marketing targets existing customers throughout the customer journey. The goal is to increase brand awareness, engagement, and customer loyalty, as well as highlight new products.
Inbound email marketing can be further categorized into:
1.Welcome emails
2.Transactional emails
3.Promotional emails
4.Abandoned cart emails
5.Re-engagement emails
6.Survey emails
7.Summary emails
8.Product update emails
9.Email newsletters
- Outbound Email Marketing
Outbound email marketing targets a wider audience (i.e. people who are not on your email list). The main goal is to increase brand awareness and attract new customers to your brand, products, and services.
Types of emails in this category include:
1.Cold calling emails
2.Follow-up emails
How much do companies charge for email marketing?
Typically, email marketing companies charge between $100 and $200 per hour The top 50 email marketing agencies on DesignRush charge an average of $103 per hour. Around 95% of
agencies work on a commission basis. For companies working with these agencies for the first time, contract amounts can range from $5,000 to $49,000. Around 14.5% of email marketing agencies on DesignRush accept projects with a minimum budget of $1,000, while only 1.2% have projects with a minimum budget of more than $50,000.
Why should you hire a trusted email marketing agency?
Here are some reasons why you should hire a trusted email marketing agency:
High ROI: Email is the most important marketing channel for businesses in terms of its ROI. It earns an average of $42 in return for every dollar spent, making it even more budget-friendly than social or display advertising.
Overcoming common challenges: Email marketing agencies struggle with typical issues such as limited resources (40%), lack of data (30%), strategy (25%), outdated processes (22%), and content creation (20%).
Increasing email usage: By 2024, the number of email users is expected to reach 4.48 billion, and agencies can effectively target this growing audience.
Engagement expertise: Specialised agencies know how to address declining open rates. Open rates averaged 22.1% in 2019, down 8% from 2018.
Effective subject lines: Agencies are masters at creating compelling subject lines. Recipients decide whether to open an email based on the subject line.
Improved metrics: Agencies specialise in increasing open rates, click-through rates, and overall conversions. Many focus on how to personalise emails, resulting in 50% higher open rates.
Adapt to trends: Stay up to date on evolving trends and technologies in email marketing to create more effective email campaigns.
Here’s a case study that shows how effective an email marketing agency can be. Despite a strong product range and early success with PPC campaigns, Coldie Holdie was struggling with low organic website traffic and ineffective customer retention. Their marketing efforts were hindered by poor SEO, underutilised email marketing, and frequent product bans on Google.
SmartSites implemented a strong SEO and email marketing strategy with a focus on link building, automated email sequences, and a unified omnichannel approach. The strategy led to a 1,162% increase in email traffic and a 485% increase in email revenue.
How do I choose an email marketing company?
Follow these steps to select the best email marketing company:
Define your email marketing goals, such as improving subscriber retention, increasing sales, or nurturing leads. Set a budget, key performance indicators (KPIs), and timeline for your campaign.
Look for agencies with a proven track record in your specific industry. Use online directories and agency websites, such as DesignRush, to find an agency with the expertise to meet your specific needs.
Evaluate client references and dig into case studies to evaluate the agency’s efficiency, capabilities, strategic approach, and problem-solving skills.
We are looking for a seasoned email marketing agency with a team of experienced strategists, content creators, copywriters, graphic designers, data analysts, digital marketers and project managers.
Prefer an agency known for exceptional delivery speed. They must excel in list health, sender reputation management, email authentication and internet privacy compliance.
Select an agency with a strategic approach that prioritises research, audience insights, brand understanding and measurable goals.
Make sure your agency regularly A/B tests to optimise subject lines, CTAs and segmentation to improve campaign results.
Ensure government agencies strictly adhere to data protection laws (e.g. GDPR) and collect and protect customer data responsibly.
Align the agency’s pricing structure to your budget. The agency should be transparent about costs and offer packages tailored to your individual requirements.
Shortlist potential email marketing companies and send out a comprehensive email marketing RFP to get detailed bids. This allows you to thoroughly compare expertise, methods and prices.
We arrange meetings with the most promising candidates and select the one that best meets your criteria.
If you need help finding the right email marketing service provider for your business, tell us your project and our team will provide you with a list of suitable agencies. Visit our Marketplace to learn more.
What questions should I ask when hiring an email marketing company?
Key questions to ask a potential email marketing partner include:
Relevant background
How extensive is your email marketing expertise in our industry?
Can you provide case studies or examples of successful email campaigns you have run and the results they achieved?
Can you provide references from previous clients for email marketing projects?
How large is your email marketing team? How long has your company been providing these services?
Corporate Services and Processes
How do you balance an increasing workload with quality and timeliness?
What is your process for taking an email campaign from ideation to implementation to analysis?
What email marketing and automation platforms, tools and technologies do you primarily use for your email marketing campaigns and why?
How do you ensure data protection and compliance with regulations such as GDPR for your email campaigns?
What post-campaign services do you offer, such as analysis and performance reporting?
How do you create scalability to accommodate growing email lists and evolving campaign needs?
What other digital marketing services do you offer besides email marketing?
Projects
Do you manage your email campaigns in-house or do you outsource some aspects? If yes, which ones?
Are your email marketing campaigns fully customised or template based?
Can we integrate our campaigns with our existing CRM or other third-party tools?
Can we review and change the content and design of our emails before they are sent?
How involved will our team be in the campaign process? What input do you want from us?
What measurable results can we expect from our collaboration in terms of engagement, open rates, click rates, conversion rates and deliverability? How will you monitor these metrics?
How often will you send campaign performance reports?
What will your targeted email marketing campaigns cost? How is your fee structured?
These questions will help you understand a potential email marketing partner’s expertise, approach, and alignment with your specific campaign goals and needs.
