Choosing an Email Marketing Agency

Let’s be honest—email marketing can be scary. When you start leveraging a marketing automation system, it is important to make sure you’re playing by the rules. Because of this constantly changing landscape, it’s important to choose an email marketing agency that becomes a part of your team and not just a vendor. 

Just like SEO experts and web developers, email marketers speak a language of their own. It’s easy to get lost in the lingo and miss what is actually being said. While your experts will be able to help you waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, worrying about what the latest changes in the Can-Spam laws mean to you, there are still some basic things you should understand in order to make your conversations meaningful and productive. 

Here are some things that you should be thinking about to ensure your campaigns are successful:

• List health:  Hubspot reports that your list deteriorates by 25% each year.  This decrease results from unsubscribe, deliverability problems and general job function changes.  This simple 5 question test from Hubspot will help you determine how healthy your list is. 

• Opt-Ins:   Having users opt-in is one way to grow your lists. If people choose to get your content, they are more likely to be engaged and respond to the content.  Simple, right?  But how do you get potential customers to opt-in to begin with?  Leveraging things like search, blog posts, social medial, will all help you grow your lists.  Hungry for more?  Check out this high-level inbound marketing post from Newfangled.
  

• Deliverability:  Making sure that the email makes it into the in box is the first challenge.  It’s often thought that there’s some “secret sauce” that makes this all work and that the large email marketing firms have a secret “in” to push your emails through.  The truth is that the only thing that can keep your emails finding their way to inboxes is following best practices.  This blog post from Deliverability does a great job of debunking some common myths.
  

• Metrics:  Once you have a list and your emails are being delivered, focus on performance. It’s not enough to just look at what your campaign does not do, you need to monitor and look at.  Open rates are one thing to think about, but also look at people who are chronically not opening your emails.  They may be mass moving your emails with rules, or just not interested.  Before you give, consider putting them in a new campaign to try to find an offer that is right for them.  Another Deliverability blog post from has some great other considerations.

• Performance:  Your email marketing agency will talk to you about ongoing analytics and performance.  Constant monitoring is critical for ongoing success.  Even if your campaign is performing well, things can change quickly.  Keeping ahead of the curve is critical. 

Some up front research and basic understanding of the process will help you choose an email marketing agency that will work with you on all your email marketing and nurturing paths provide your sales team with leads that are ready to be turned into customers.