Email Marketing Services
Email marketing is proven to be a highly effective strategy for driving website traffic, increasing brand awareness, generating leads and nurturing your relationships with customers. In fact, 81% of SMEs use email marketing as the main channel for customer acquisition and 80% for retention (Emarsys, 2018).
But sometimes it’s difficult to know where to begin with email marketing. And once you get started, you may want to find ways to grow your email lists faster or how to fine tune your campaigns to drive more conversion. These are just a few examples of when you might want to consider hiring an email marketing agency.
What is an email marketing agency?
Email marketing agencies specialise in email marketing strategy, audience segmentation, email campaign design, automation, campaign management and more. They are experts in email marketing best practices for small businesses in various industries and know how to cut through the noise to ensure your messages are being conveyed as clearly as possible. Email marketing agencies know how to communicate with your customers and use data and analytics to refine your strategy and campaigns.
What email marketing services do agencies offer?
Every email marketing agency is different and may specialise in particular services. But for the most part, email marketing agencies can tailor an entire package to suit your needs including:
- Email marketing strategy
- Email design
- List management and segmentation
- Email copywriting
- Full email marketing campaign management
- Performance analysis
- A/B testing
- Email automation
What are the benefits of email marketing services for small businesses?
Many small businesses ask the question of why you should hire an agency versus doing it yourself. Firstly, it’s important to highlight that you can definitely do your own email marketing. But this difference is that an email marketing agency can lend their expertise to perhaps find better ways of doing things, and also help you achieve your goals and objectives faster. This means you can keep raising the bar for better results. Some of the benefits of hiring an email marketing agency include:
- Maximise the effectiveness of your strategy and campaigns: One of the biggest reasons why small businesses don’t get the results they want is because they don’t really know what they’re doing, or why they’re doing it. Greetings, subject lines, CTAs - these are just a few things that can impact your results. Email marketing agencies have worked with a long list of businesses and they know what works.
- Email marketing is more complex than it seems: A good email marketing campaign takes so much more than putting a bit of copy together, adding a few images and personalising the greeting. Yes you could probably up your skills and learn how, but whether you have the time as a busy business owner is another question.
- Invest a little, gain a lot: It may seem like another expense to budget for, but the cost to hire an agency offers a great return. You might also benefit from hiring an agency on a short-term/project basis to learn the ropes before you start handling your campaigns yourself.
- Save precious time: Email marketing agencies are dedicated to email alone which allows you and/or your team to focus on other (equally important) marketing activities.
How much do email marketing services cost?
The cost of email marketing services really depends on thing like:
- The type of services you need
- How many emails you want to send per month
- Graphic design requirements
- Landing page requirements
- Email marketing agencies may charge a monthly retainer for a service package or an hourly fee.
How do I choose the best email marketing agency?
With so many email marketing agencies to choose from it can be difficult to find an agency that is a good fit for your business. Below are some of the top considerations to make the process easier:
- Define your budget: How much can you or are you willing to spend?
- Review their portfolio: Have they worked with small businesses similar to yours previously? Review their campaign portfolio to see if you’d be a good fit.
- Ask them about the tools they use: The tools and platforms they use may integrate with your other systems (e.g. CRM and CMS). Make sure you ask about this if you need integrations.
- Ask all of the questions: Don’t be shy when it comes to asking questions relating to their workflow, company culture, communication preferences, etc.
Now that you know about the services offered by email marketing agencies, the benefits they offer small businesses and key considerations when hiring, you may be wondering where you can find an agency. On SavvySME, we can introduce you to email marketing agencies in your area. To get started, all you need to do is answer a few questions about your project.
If you don’t think hiring an agency is the right option for you and you’d like to keep things in-house for the meanwhile, you will need to choose a good email marketing software to build and send your campaigns. Learn more about email marketing software and tools and discover the latest offers here on SavvySME.
If you have any more questions about email marketing services, you can also reach out to other small business owners in the community or browse through email marketing resources.
