Why Hire an Email Marketing Agency?

Before considering whether or not you need an email marketing agency, let’s first take a look at what they do. In simplest terms, email marketing happens whenever a company sends out a commercial message via email. These messages are requests for business, sales letters, solicitations, or just advertisements. The idea is that they’re using email to help market their company, bring in revenue, increase brand recognition, or inspire customer loyalty.

There are a number of benefits an email marketing agency brings for their services. But first, a quick definition:

Email marketing is:

• Affordable: you’re not spending tons of money on the traditional version by purchasing paper, ink, stamps, and envelopes.
• Efficient: everyone has at least one email box these days. Not everyone gives their post box the time of day.
• Customizable: your email can contain anything from simple text to images to videos or, of course, all three. There are also ways to make it so that your message is addressed to someone by name.
• Targetable: with email lists, you can send one version of a message to one segment of your market and another to a different demographic altogether. You can’t do this with TV advertisements, and even online ads make this difficult.

Different Versions

While we touched on what an email marketing agency can do via emails, there are also a number of specific types of emails worth mentioning. One of the most popular is a simple welcome message. If someone signs up for a membership to your website, you probably want to send them an email to thank them and introducing them to what you have to offer.

Another popular option you’ll see an email marketing agency offer is an announcement message. If your business just opened or hit some kind of milestone, you should definitely do some PR via email to let everyone know. The same goes for a new product or service you may have just started offering.

Newsletters are also a common choice. These can include all kinds of information about products and services, the company itself, the industry you’re in, etc.

Technological Benefits

To a degree, a lot of the above are things that you could probably do on your own. Obviously, you wouldn’t have many issues sending out a newsletter every month to a number of people.

However, an email marketing agency has access to technology most people don’t. For example, they can leverage software that tracks how many people actually opened the email they sent. When you’re sending a mass email out to thousands of people, this is quite the advantage. It allows them to revise the email and produce a better version next time.

They can also use similar analytics to track how many people clicked on a certain link embedded in the email. So if you’re using email marketing to drive customers to a landing page or get them to your latest blog post, they’ll know if this is working or not.

Why an Email Marketing Agency?

Still, you may be thinking that a lot of these benefits are things you could either pull off yourself or get close enough to and save money. Well, there are still probably a few things an agency can do that you can’t.

For one thing, their bread and butter is writing a quality message. You can pay them to write these on your behalf. If your emails aren’t converting, an agency can probably help there.

Another huge advantage is that most email marketing agencies can offer industry-specific lists. If you’re selling a new kind of energy drink, you obviously want people who drink them. The right email marketing agency for you would be one that has a list of emails of people who fit this description. These lists can easily number in the thousands; that’s going to be a pretty tough service to duplicate on your own.

An email marketing agency definitely isn’t for everyone, but they’re worth keeping on your radar. If you do decide to use one, keep in mind the above information and take your time picking the right option.