Your guide to finding the perfect email marketing provider
Email marketing is a superb way to maintain contact with your brand’s community, keeping them up to date with your news, products and services and offering them rewards, opportunities and top tips in exchange for loyalty to your brand and membership of your mailing list. It’s also an effective way to generate new leads and sales, too, through the email equivalent of cold calling.
Email may be viewed as a bit old-school these days, with more and more brands using social media, WhatsApp and chatbots to communicate with their audience. But, despite all that, email is still the king of marketing channels, boasting a whopping 4 billion daily users (and growing), and there’s no doubt that it should be a core part of any robust marketing strategy.
Why do brands invest so heavily in email marketing? Well, the return on investment (ROI) in email marketing is potentially huge – $36 for every $1 spent according to Litmus. If that hasn’t already convinced you, then here are some other reasons that email marketing continues to go from strength to strength:
- With email, you have 100% control and ownership of your email list and data (unlike a social media channel, which could potentially be deleted or experience downtime at any given time).
- You can tailor content to appeal to specific audiences with powerful data segmentation options.
- You can conduct A/B testing with elements like subject lines and content topics, so that you’re always measuring what works best.
- You’ll get detailed analytics and metrics including bounce rates, open rates, URL clicks, unsubscribes and much, much more.
- You can repurpose content that’s been produced for social media, i.e. blogs, videos etc. so that they deliver more value and you’re not always creating from scratch.
- You can use regular emails to nurture warm leads who aren’t quite ready to buy yet.
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What is email marketing?
Email marketing ‘does what it says on the tin’ – it’s quite simply mass-emailing your customers and potential customers with offers, news, tips and incentives. It’s a fairly inexpensive way of reaching a lot of people, but as with all digital marketing services, there’s a lot more to it than you’d first imagine, so unless you’ve got an email marketing whizz in-house, you’ll need to consider outsourcing your email marketing to an expert.
One of the core skills of a good email marketer (beyond excellent content creation and design) is excellent data segmentation. Your audience will fall into different groups, for example: a) existing customers, b) lapsed customers c) potential customers, and what you send them must be relevant to them, or they’ll likely unsubscribe.
What should an email marketing expert do for you?
A good email marketing expert will be able to grow your mailing list and create more relevant and interesting content that provokes further engagement. It’s not just a case of firing off a bulk email every week or so; there’s a lot more that goes into it than that.
A good email marketer will take a step back, get to know you and your business and design a mass emailing strategy that should help you achieve your wider objectives. They’ll be able to advise you on the best tools to use, for example, Mailchimp or HubSpot (but there are loads more freemium and premium options available).
For contacts who have already opted in and given their permission to be emailed by you, a regular email newsletter is a great way of keeping in touch. Your email marketer will look at your existing content and see what could be repurposed, suggest topics, competitions, special offers, rewards and other ideas, and identify gaps in your content that need to be filled. They’ll then package this content into a beautifully designed email or newsletter and monitor the open rates and engagement rates.
If you’re using an email marketer to generate new business, then you need to tread slightly carefully. While it’s not illegal to send unsolicited emails, you need to operate within the confines of GDPR rules, so your expert should be fully up-to-speed with data protection legalities and best practice.
What makes a good email marketing expert?
A great email marketer should know the power of a well-placed CTA (call to action), a sizzling subject line and a beautiful image or captivating video. They’ll also be exceptional content writers who understand direct response copywriting and they’ll be great with managing and segmenting data. They’ll know the ins and outs of the legalities around sending solicited and unsolicited emails, and they’ll be able to continuously refine, test and measure to ensure optimum results and a growing ROI.
How do email marketing professionals price, and what factors affect this
An email marketing strategy takes time to develop and deliver, so don’t expect results overnight – although one great email may well do you a lot of good in the meantime. You should expect to commit to an ongoing strategy, which will usually be billed monthly – often with a retainer option – although some email marketers charge by email instead.
The price you’ll pay will be dependent on a number of factors, including:
- The number of emails to be sent per month
- The amount of new content that needs to be created
- The number of ways one email needs to be tailored for different audiences
- The amount of data analysis and management required
- The number of subscribers to your mailing list
- The amount of new data that might be needed (e.g. collecting prospective customers’ email addresses)
Don’t forget to factor in the associated cost of your email marketing software platform. This will likely increase depending on the number of contacts on your mailing list.
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What’s the difference between using a freelance email marketing expert and an email marketing agency?
While an email marketing agency will likely prefer to work on a retainer basis, and some may even have a minimum contract value, a freelance email marketer may be able to offer more flexibility.
An email marketing agency will have access to a wider variety of skills in-house, such as content writing and video production, whereas a freelance email marketer will have areas of strength and weakness that may either help or hinder you.
Because every job is different and every brand has different needs, it’s always best to get a quote from multiple email marketing companies before making your decision.
Marketing Supermarket’s top tips for finding the perfect email marketer for you
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Check their GDPR knowledge
Ask them about their knowledge and application of the legalities surrounding sending solicited and unsolicited emails.
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Ask to see previous work
See what sort of email marketing they’ve created for previous clients and ask to see metrics demonstrating the impact and return on investment achieved.
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Sign up to their mailing list!
An email marketer worth their salt should have a pretty impressive email marketing strategy of their own! Sign up to their list and see how they do it.
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Ask them about specialist skills
Sending an email is the easy bit! Ask them about their skills in content writing, video production (if relevant), data management, segmentation and analytics, template design and ask them what their preferred email marketing platform is and why, too.
Why use Marketing Supermarket to help you choose your marketing email consultant?
The world of digital marketing services is hugely populated, and searching for an email marketer via search engines throws up an overwhelming amount of choice with no easy way to sort the good from the bad. Marketing Supermarket offers an easier way to find the best email marketing suppliers.
Our free, quick and easy online tool grants you access to multiple quotes and a directory of email management experts who can work to your brief and budget.
Find and compare email marketing experts, and check out our guide on how to compare email marketing suppliers to help you make your choice.