7 Reasons to Outsource Your Email Marketing Development

If you have contemplated letting a team of experts take the wheel over your email marketing, the insights below may give you that final push towards a decision.

But before going into the benefits of outsourcing, let’s look at some important considerations.

Realistically, how much time can you and/or your team devote to an email marketing campaign? If creating your best email content requires more time to complete than you’d like, then outsourcing may work wonders for your company.

What are your goals and hopes for the bigger picture? If you’re looking to attract more people to your business and plan to use email marketing consistently, then outsourcing can better serve your interests.

Your staff are quite competent and well-acquainted with your clientele, but can they code from scratch? Can they analyze data to give your company an advantage? If these functions sound like they might be too burdensome for your people, then maybe its time to outsource.

Regardless of your decision, have a look at all that external marketers can do for you and the success of your business.

Cost Efficiency

The organization that outsources its email marketing campaigns to a team of experts saves time, money and improves conversion rates in the long-term.

The reasons are as follows:

It is increasingly difficult for in-house marketing staff to meet the criteria needed for successful email marketing while staying on top of other demands.  It is not uncommon for an email marketing campaign to slide down the list of priorities.

Every stage of development in an email marketing project requires a specific set of skills and industry experience for the finished product to perform at its best. Outsourcing means that your campaigns will have a designated team of expert marketers at every stage of development.

The majority of in-house marketing teams report operating with intermediate level skills. Not only does this mean that they are less likely to win out the competition of those companies that have outsourced, but they are also likely to use up more time and resources just to meet industry standards.

Companies have reported an increase in costs as high as 400 per cent to get their in-house marketing teams trained for optimal results. This figure does not include the cost of acquiring the latest tools and software needed for successful email marketing.

Not only would staff at external marketing firms already have these resources at their fingertips, they’d also have knowledge of the latest trends and best practices.

It is important to note that applying common techniques to your email campaigns can be damaging to your results. A team of marketing experts would be able to draw from their experience in the industry to select the approach and strategy that is best suited to your goals.

The Right Staff

Simply put, successful email marketing campaigns require more time and resources than before. According to experts, companies need a team of at least 3 to 5 people to devote themselves to the creation of an effective campaign.

Proficiency in the following key areas is a must for e-mail marketers.

• Coding
• Copywriting
• Graphic Design
• A/B Testing
• Marketing Strategy
• Project Management

The Right Steps

Operating within a standardized procedure can improve turn-around times and help companies capitalize on the skillsets of their employees.

Yes, each business has its own way of going about their email marketing, but those with years of practice behind them say the following steps are critical to success.

• • Strategy and Goal Setting
  • Content Creation
  • E-mail Design
  • E-mail Development
  • Quality Assurance
  • Approvals
  • Send
  • Post-Send Reporting

The final areas of development are often where in-house marketing teams can easily fall short and specialized teams distinguish themselves.

Quality Assurance

More than two thirds of marketing companies report using a “pre-flight” checklist before sending out their marketing e-mail baby into the world.

Some important features to test include image load time, links, overall rendering and the subject line.

More than half of marketing companies report using email rendering software to ensure that their messages display quickly and accurately across all clients, devices and platforms.

Below are some examples of email testing tools and their features.

Email On Acid allows companies to test their emails in at least 50 or more clients.

Litmus Test also allows for testing in at least 50 or more clients, and it also provides companies with feedback through a list of best campaign practices as they apply to a given test.

Other e-mail software like Wired Messengers,  MailChimp or Campaign Monitor allow for email testing directly through their platforms.

While it is possible for companies to manually test their emails, this route can be time consuming and frustrating.

E-mail rendering software is expensive, but it is one of the tools that external marketing teams already have at their disposal.

The Send

In addition to marketing techniques, companies must take deliverability into account. As the technologies behind e-mail filters, blocking and spam protections continue to evolve, your final product could be up against a trail of obstacles.

For the expert marketer, knowing what to test against and which tools to apply is one of the many tasks that comes with the territory of effective campaign production.

But in-house marketing teams may not even be aware of all the potential hurdles ahead of their emails, so they run a higher risk of sending content that will never reach their intended audience.

While they may inevitably take time to look at how their most recent email campaign was received, they may not delve deeply enough into an analysis of those responses to build a better campaign in the future.

Today’s common e-mail tools like Constant Contact or MailChimp make it easy for anyone to see when some e-mails are ignored, others opened and clicked through, but understanding the reasons behind these types of responses requires a special set of skills.

Post-Send Reporting

As mentioned earlier, an e-mail marketing campaign is but one of many tasks on a growing list of priorities for internal staff. Once an e-mail is sent out, it’s time for them to move upwards and onwards to fulfill yet another goal.

But the aftermath of an e-mail campaign is indispensable for metrics analysis.

An external marketing team will monitor data in the post-send reporting phase and use it to assess whether the campaign achieved its goals.

Below are some of the metrics external marketers will follow continuously to ensure they improve over time.

• Open rate
• Click through rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Hard bounces
• Soft bounces
• Delivery rate
• Churn rate (Contact list growth over time)

Increased ROI

The initial cost of retaining external marketing services is relatively high; however, outsourcing the development of your email marketing campaigns is a worthy investment. These companies use their expertise to create superior campaigns which inevitably boost conversion rates for the long-term.

Internal staff can maximize their skills and energy on other marketing tasks. More importantly, the people at your company will have more time to focus on the responses generated by these campaigns.

Leaving the work to external marketers also allows companies to expand or retract their efforts without any need for staff cuts.

Conclusion

If you’re still unsure about making the move to outsource your marketing development, you can always seek advice from the experts at Wired Messenger.

There is no right or wrong decision as outsourcing can provide many benefits. It’s more about taking the approach that is most suitable for the needs of your business.