When you need to get started with email marketing, there are three options: hire a freelancer, find a full-time specialist, or contact an email marketing agency.
What does email marketing company do?
There are two types of agencies that work with mailing lists:
- only do email marketing.
- are engaged in all mass communications: mailing lists, instant messengers, chatbots, and other digital marketing tools.
They are contacted to:
- create an email strategy;
- make a newsletter from scratch: write texts, develop templates and make them up in the mailing service;
- set up and run trigger emails;
- connect email marketing with other channels: instant messengers, chatbots, push notifications;
- conduct email marketing on an ongoing basis;
- conduct an audit of work with mailing lists.
Email agency does not like to take on small tasks such as the layout of one template or writing a letter. Briefing and communication with the client in such cases takes more time than the task itself. Therefore, the priority is clients with whom you can work for six months. Agencies have been working with some clients for several years, turning into the client’s email marketing outsourcing team.
How do they work with clients?
Email campaign services usually have the following algorithm:
- Sending a brief to the client.
- A basic request is received from it: in what area the company operates, whether they are already working with mailing lists, what is the size of the database, and what needs to be done.
- They call the client and sort out the details: learn about business processes, identify portraits of the target audience, and determine key metrics.
- Determine the cost of the project.
- They work on the project in several stages, arguing each with the client. A team is formed for the project. For example, if you need to create a welcome series, the team will include an email marketer, a designer, and a copywriter.
- Submit the project to the client. Sometimes this point includes training company employees so that they can continue to work with mailing lists without the help of an agency: for example, updating the texts of the trigger email chain.
- They return after a while to collect analytics and evaluate performance.
Difficulty can arise if the company is already working with a specific email marketing services that cannot fulfill the client’s request: for example, send an interactive AMP email. You must transfer the contact database to another service or adapt and connect third-party services.
Also, difficulties may arise with clients from other markets. According to interviewed email marketing consulting agencies, customers here are also more straightforward, and if something doesn’t fit, they say right away. The United States rarely talks directly about the shortcomings of work. But if the client did not immediately make an appointment for the next meeting, this was his last order from the agency.
How performance is tracked
As with native advertising, the analysis of the effectiveness of email automation services is divided into two parts:
- monitored by the agency. For example, indicators of open rate and click rate in mailing services;
- tracked by the client. For example, the number of sales from the newsletter or traffic from the newsletter to the blog.
To keep track of essential data, the email marketing provider can build a summary dashboard with the client. This process looks like this:
- agree with the client about KPI;
- write technical specifications for integration with the dashboard building service;
- an outsourced or client-side programmer creates a dashboard with all the necessary data.
