Email marketing is often either under-utilised or underperforming which can lead some business owners and managers to wonder if there’s any point to it at all.
Email marketing still matters now, possibly, more than it ever has. Statistica’s latest figures show that 99% of people check their email address every day; 73% of millennials would rather hear from businesses via email and that return on investment for marketers may be as high as $42 for every $1 spent.
Those are some significant numbers that can translate to significant revenue for businesses who are doing their email marketing well. For email marketing to reach its potential it needs the right tools and resources – and that relates to both software and staffing.
There’s two ways you can build your email marketing team – you can hire and manage the functions in house, or you can outsource.
In-House Email Marketing
If you’re going to really do email marketing effectively, you need to have more than a generalist Marketing Manager and/or Assistant who does email marketing as part of their job. Here are some of the skills that are needed to create effective and high performing email campaigns:
- The ability to visualise and communicate the customer journey and consumer psychology. This is critical for creating triggered campaigns such as welcome series.
- A robust ability to analyse and use both performance and behavioural data. Performance data is things like email open rates and clicks. Behavioural is more related to things like people’s shopping habits.
- Basic web development skills. While many email marketing platforms use easy to navigate drag and drop style editors, there is almost always some coding or tweaking required that needs a bit of technical know-how.
- The ability (or authority) to implement list cleansing tactics and strategies to ensure your CRM data is working with your team, not against them to get better results.
- Copywriting skills with a sales and conversion focus. This is more than being a good writer, there is quite a bit that goes into things like the subject line and the email content that makes your customers more likely to both connect with your communications and convert that engagement to sales.
As you can see, some of these skill sets are quite specific and are crucial to email marketing success. It’s not always realistic to expect one or two people to be able to perform all of these functions to a best practice standard, and this can leave a lot of potential revenue in your customer’s inbox.
It can also impact your staff satisfaction levels too. People want to be good at their jobs, so being set up for success is essential.
This is why having dedicated email marketing experts who sit within your marketing and communication team can be the best approach for your business.
Outsourced Email Marketing
Of course not all businesses have the resources to expand their marketing team with specialist email marketing staff. This is where outsourcing can be a smart way to increase your sales without paying another salary.
Here are some of the key ways an outsourced team can elevate your email marketing efforts:
- They tend to be experts in the email marketing field which means you’re able to access higher levels of experience and skills than you could through relying on an all-rounder marketer to do their best.
- Specialist email marketing agencies partner with industry leading software solutions that can yield better results. Better yet, they know how to use all of the features to the maximum advantage.
- You’ll usually get better results outsourced than you do in-house. This is because when you focus and specialise in a particular topic, you’re able to do more with it.
Your options for outsourcing your email marketing can be tailored to suit your business. Sometimes your team just needs to be supported with setup and training in using a platform to its maximum potential so you’re able to purchase one-off packages and additional blocks or hours for ad hoc support. Other times you prefer to have a complete end to end solution implemented where your email marketing is completely managed by consultants, who collaborate with your team to discuss goals, priorities and opportunities.
Whichever you decide is better for your business, to get the most out of your digital marketing efforts in this day and age you need to have dedicated email marketing professionals and the right software solution in place to ensure you’re sending high quality emails that convert into tangible results for you.
If you’d like to know more about resourcing your email marketing team in-house or via consultants, book a complimentary strategy call with Greenfish Marketing today.