Marketing is essential for all kinds of businesses. Businesses need to promote their work, product, or services through different marketing channels. In the beginning, businesses heavily focused on print and radio marketing, and then slowly and gradually, they moved towards television advertisements and other digital channels.
Marketing has also evolved a lot. Today, digital marketing includes social media marketing, search engine marketing, and many other divisions. Of course, email marketing is one of them. Although most of the population that uses the internet also uses social media nevertheless, email marketing prevails.
Emailing is a strong way of communicating. Emails help save time and money. Emails are the most used platform for formal or business communication. Surely, businesses have benefitted a lot from emails.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is when businesses roll out promotional and commercial messages via email. Email marketing has proven to be a highly effective strategy for targeting one-time or potential customers. This tactic is used by businesses to get more loyal customers by convincing them about their products, offerings, and brand.
Online shopping has been prevalent during the last couple of years. Usually, when you go to a website to purchase something, you either make an account and log in or continue as a guest. Either way, you are required to submit your name and your email address. The first step to email marketing: acquiring emails and making your email contact list.
Your company can then send out regular emails to keep these users updated. You need to know how to make your promotional emails attention-grabbing. The promotions tab of an email inbox is full of promotions from hundreds of companies. MarketingLand states that US companies send more than 1.47 million emails which is a lot higher than the global average.
Your emails are likely to reach the promotions tab of the consumers’ inboxes when the contents of the emails include information about sales, promotional deals, discount codes, etc. But these are some keywords that spark interest in the consumers’ minds, and they end up looking through your messages to see what you are selling. Even if the products don’t arouse that much interest in these consumers/potential consumers’ minds, they still are likely to mention your sale/discount, etc., to their peers. Either way, you get marketed well and increase your brand’s awareness.
Email marketing is used by all businesses, whether it is a transportation business, a retail store, a small startup, or even an academic website. Almost all businesses use email marketing effectively. It has also been deduced that bloggers who earn higher are 100% more likely to be using email marketing.
However, email marketing is a very technical skill. You need to realize that not everyone can do email marketing as it is more than just writing emails and sending them out at the push of a button. There is a lot of coding, automation, knowledge about algorithms, brainstorming, testing, etc., involved in email marketing. It is not everyone’s cup of tea. This required skill set is why some professionals and consultants help do this work for you.
Email marketing consulting
An email marketing consultant, as the name suggests, is a professional expert on email marketing. They know everything and every strategy of this type of marketing. It is a wise choice to bring in an email marketing consultant when you believe that your efforts won’t be as fruitful as you wish.
A skilled email marketing consultant can help you increase the open rates, click-through, and conversion rates of your emails. Bringing in a consultant may seem like an added expense initially, but once you understand how they operate, you will realize that the profits you receive with their marketing techniques outweigh their cost.
Types of email marketing consultants
An email marketing consultant has all the details, experience, and knowledge. There are two types of email marketing consultants available: individual independent workers and marketing consulting firms
Individuals
They are usually freelancers. Since these individuals work independently and are not backed up by any large organization, they are usually more inexpensive when hiring. Hiring freelancers as email marketing consultants is the better option if you have a small startup and don’t have a lot of free cash flowing around.
Consulting firms
These consulting companies offer different kinds of consultation services, not just one specific part of it. Hiring a firm will get you with a few people or an entire team working for you to best design your email marketing strategies. They will bring a fresher perspective to the table and will weigh in with their opinions and pitch their ideas which they think would be the best. Hiring firms are generally more expensive than hiring individuals. A well-established business would be the ideal entity to hire consultation firms.
If you have trouble maintaining and updating your email list, an email marketing consultant will first make sure you’re acquiring the emails correctly. They will come up with solutions on how to get the email addresses first. The easiest way would be to incentivize the customers by saying that they will receive updates about sales and discounts, which they will, or by offering them a one-time gift or voucher.
Once you have your customers’ emails, even if they were only one-time customers, you will now be able to commence your email marketing venture with your consultant. Then there are a few things that your email marketing consultant must know.
How to pick out the right email marketing consultant?
When hiring the right email marketing consultant, you need to see if they have the basic knowledge about email marketing or not. You need to evaluate your needs first. Are you just looking for a second set of eyes, or do you want someone who can completely redesign your entire strategy?
The technical part of the job is essential, but a good marketing consultant should also have some knowledge about the business that hired them. They need to do their homework and familiarize themselves with your business to understand the products and customers better. This familiarity will make the email marketing strategies more targeted and effective.
You need to evaluate their capabilities; would they manage the email campaigns that you have in mind? One usually has an idea but doesn’t know the correct way to implement it, and you need to communicate with them to see if they’re picking up what you are putting down.
Of course, the baseline of the requirements is that they need to have creativity. Designing and doing the technical work is one thing. But your consultant needs to have the creative aspect in their work to make sure that the emails you send out together will be appealing to the audience.
The best way to test out an email marketing consultant is to make prototypes and samples, and then you test them out. The response you get should be enough to let you know if your consultant will work out or not. You can indicate the performance through some key factors such as the number of emails opened, the number of emails forwarded, the boost in your open rates, click-through rates, and conversation rates.
The bottom line, if put, is that email marketing consultants are people you bring in that will weigh in on your current marketing campaigns, and they will suggest how you can improve them. But their work is not limited to just consultation. When consultants possess the proper skill set, they will also help you create more plans and make the best out of the budget that you provide them.
Final thoughts
The number of people who use the internet all has one thing in common: an email account. One cannot function without an email ID. Social media marketing may seem like the better option because of the perception that there is a huge population using these sites. But when looked further, we find that there are about 2.7 billion active Facebook users, whereas there are over 4 billion email users.
One thing to focus on is that most people don’t think twice about giving their email addresses. It is the safest way of communication in the digital world. They may feel a little iffy about handing out their phone number or private social media accounts, but they will feel comfortable sharing their email address.
There are many people using emails, and email marketing has proven to have a high lead generation score, which can arouse interest in the consumers’ minds. For this reason, email marketing should be a part of one’s marketing strategy.
