Is Hiring An Offshore Email Campaign Manager The Answer To Your Marketing Woes? Let’s Find Out

Remote working (or WFH, as we fondly refer to it now) wasn’t the only disruptive development that gripped workplaces in 2020. It gave way to another equally significant trend as well- offshore hiring. As the pandemic-imposed lockdown brought operations across the globe to a screeching halt, companies found themselves at their wits’ end regarding recruiting and acquiring new talent. Although WFH allowed businesses to resume their activities, it didn’t provide them any respite for their recruitment woes. This was when offshore hiring started gaining the attention of recruiters.

Offshoring For Email Marketing – How does it work?

Besides resolving hiring dilemmas, offshoring also enabled businesses to diversify their talent pools significantly. In essence, they could now access talent from every corner of the world! In the current scheme of things, several industries around the world have already taken to offshoring. That said, let’s try and understand this scenario from the perspective of email marketing. What does offshoring hold for this particular domain? 

According to Litmus’ latest State of Email Report, more than 40 % of businesses have slashed their email budgets since the pandemic. That should make offshoring an obvious alternative for email marketers, right? Well, it depends. Yes, offshore hiring does bring its own share of advantages to the table, but the whole matter is more nuanced than what meets the eye.

If you’ve been thinking of hiring an offshore email campaign manager for your operations, then this article is for you. Hop along with us as we attempt to navigate through the various pros and cons associated with this process.

The Positives

Let’s start with the good things first. Listed below are the positives of onboarding an offshore email campaign manager.

1. Cost-effectiveness

Creating and implementing an email campaign includes more costs than what you’d expect at the outset. At the very least, you need an ESP (Email Service Provider), an email developer, a designer, a marketing analyst, and a digital strategist. By the time a company is done allocating its budget to these parties, it no longer can bear the costs for a dedicated agency. Or even a campaign manager, for that matter.

When you hire an in-house campaign manager, their remuneration is not just the only cost that concerns you. The associated infrastructure and development costs take a significant toll on the budget as well. These are precisely the costs that offshoring allows you to save up on. By hiring an offshore email campaign manager, you sign yourself up for paying the talent for just their specialized services and nothing else. 

Besides, it also gives you the liberty of approaching talent from a region whose labor costs might be substantially lower than yours. Offshoring allows you to cut down on your maintenance and operational costs too.

2. Quicker Campaign Delivery

Often the greatest hindrance in the way of a project deadline is the presence of multiple touchpoints. A project remains entangled between layers of hierarchy and red tape even long after the concerned team has wrapped it up. Endless approvals and continuous back and forth keep it from being greenlit eventually. Offshore hiring gives you a chance to break through these shackles and fast-track the overall campaign delivery process.

This is because offshoring eliminates all the traditional touchpoints within an organization and concentrates on communication between you and the onboarded talent. This makes the relegation of information and the subsequent allocation of duties and responsibilities more convenient and efficient. In the process, it gives your campaign manager a greater shot at optimizing the campaign by streamlining the operations of customer segmentation, testing, forecasting, ROI analysis, and the like. 

3. Dedicated Attention

At any given point in time, every business catalogs its email campaigns in a chronological order of priority. This chronology is dictated either by the latest marketplace trends or the sentiment of your target demographic or, in most cases, by a combination of both. And this is entirely logical. But, this also means that some of your campaigns demand more priority over the rest. 

When you have an in-house campaign manager, you expect them to devote equal attention to all your campaigns, irrespective of their priority. This is where hiring a dedicated offshore resource proves to be extremely handy. 

Offshoring allows you to onboard resources that can provide special attention to your top-priority projects and see them through to their successful completion. What’s more, you also get the choice of deciding whether you want your hire to work on a part-time or a full-time basis. If you want to onboard a campaign manager to oversee a critical campaign or a string of similar campaigns, you can contract them for only that period. Likewise, if you want to have a certified and dedicated campaign manager on board for a more extended period, you’re equally free to do so.  

4. Business Scalability

The ability to scale up your business is hands down the greatest plus of offshoring. Often in-house hiring causes a company to compromise on the funds they would have otherwise stashed away to expand their operations.

Here’s how offshoring becomes critical to the scaling ambitions of your business- offshore hiring not only helps you save on infrastructure and operational costs but also lets you acquire top-notch talent from around the globe at lower costs. As a result, this allows your company to march steadily on the path of expansion without incurring any sacrifice on its existing operations. 

Especially in recruiting top-level executives, such as that of an email campaign manager, offshoring proves to be extremely helpful. This is because it is the hiring of these very roles that inflate the expenditure of a company. 

The Challenges

Alright, now that we have discussed the positives of offshore hiring, let us get down to the challenges as well.

1. Language And Cultural Barriers

Sure, offshore hiring allows you to tap into a global and diverse talent pool. But it also forces you to reckon your unfamiliarity with the languages and cultures of those parts. These cultural and language barriers, subsequently, get in the way of your projects getting executed successfully. 

Consider this from the perspective of email marketing. If your team cannot receive or communicate instructions to their campaign manager, then the entire campaign will come to a standstill. Besides language and cultural barriers, the difference in time zones also threatens to mess up your project deadlines at times. 

Therefore, when you’re coordinating with an offshore agency, it is vital that you are absolutely clear while communicating your cultural and other similar requirements to them. 

2. Confidentiality Breaches

When you hire an offshore email campaign manager, you can do everything in your power to ensure that their skill set aligns with your project objectives. But there’s only so much that you can do about their professionalism. There will always be an element of risk associated with handing over sensitive data and other confidential information to an offshore resource.

Besides, monitoring also takes a toll in the case of offshore recruits. Since on-site hires perform all their tasks on office systems, keeping an eye on their activity logs is convenient. In the case of offshore resources, however, this scope is no longer available to the administration. This can eventually lead to slipping control over operations.

The best workaround to this scenario is to have your offshore agency sign a non-disclosure and confidentiality agreement prior to beginning negotiations. The same will be binding on any resources that are provided by the agency as well. 

3. Quality Control Scares

With reduced monitoring and supervision, ensuring quality control can be a bit of a hassle as well. Even if you have steadfast guidelines in place, language barriers, logistical issues, and technical glitches can restrict your offshore resource from implementing the instructions in the desired manner. All of these factors can significantly hamper the quality of your finished product.

You can avoid this by partnering with an offshore Campaign Manager provider that practices rigorous selection and merit tests prior to recruiting their resources. This helps you ensure quality control at the grassroots itself.

Wrapping It Up

When you sit to analyze things from a logical and fiscal perspective, the future of many companies out there is all set to be decided by their judicious use of offshoring. Even though certain uncertainties and limitations are associated with the practice, they virtually amount to nothing if the long-term benefits of offshoring are to be taken into account. Besides, if you’re careful with your selection of offshore agencies, then the challenges can be dealt with extremely efficiently.

Hiring an offshore email campaign manager thus will not only help you roll out dedicated campaigns with greater efficiency and speed but also enable you to channelize the saved funds into other core aspects of your email marketing program.