5 Reasons to Outsource Your Entire Email Marketing To An Offshore Team

Not too long ago, a Twilio study found that email is one of the preferred channels for 83% of consumers when talking to businesses. Plainly, email marketing works. But when someone hands you their email address, they’re placing trust in your business, and you have a responsibility to protect and nurture this trust. This understanding can be overwhelming for some organizations, particularly those that are just getting started with email marketing. Smaller in-house teams also struggle with email marketing, especially when it comes to clarifying important things like:

• How do we identify the right audience and create relevant segments for each campaign?
• What level of personalization should we include?
• How can we keep our emails in our subscribers’ inboxes and out of their spam folders?
• Which tools do we need to plan, design, and get campaigns out quickly?
• What tech skills are required for graphic design, HTML coding, data administration, A/B testing, and post-campaign analysis?
• How can we maximize the value of our email campaigns for our audience and brand?
• Should we outsource just a few stages of our email marketing program or are we better off outsourcing the entire program itself?

A specialist email marketing vendor like Email Uplers can take care of all these aspects so you don’t have to worry about the nitty-gritties of your email marketing program. They can also manage every aspect of your email marketing lifecycle, whether it’s template creation, campaign management or automation, testing or analytics – taking the burden off of your marketing team and delivering the high ROI you can (and should) expect from email marketing. So if you’re still on the fence about outsourcing email marketing to an offshore team, here are some reasons to consider it:

1. Email Marketing is effective – but it also takes a lot of work!

Email marketing has come a long way since the first email was sent out in 1978 by the now-defunct Digital Equipment Corp to an audience of 400 people. A number of tools such as user-friendly Email Service Providers (ESPs) and CRM platforms are now available to help brands streamline their email marketing programs.

But even with the right tools, the effort can be a drain on your limited resources. Your in-house may be able to handle weekly or monthly emails such as newsletters. But to increase conversions and sales, engage with customers with great designs, and promote your brand in a more effective and less “in your face” manner, you also need to deploy relationship marketing campaigns, campaigns for cart abandoners, interactive emails, dynamic emails, and one-off holiday campaigns. You also need to manage and optimize multiple aspects like design, automation, metrics, deliverability, send times, etc., which is not easy to do for an inexperienced team. Also, managing the end-to-end email marketing program requires an investment of time, skills and money – which your in-house team may not be equipped or prepared for.

Modern email campaigns that successfully achieve their goals contain personalized copy, easy-to-navigate layouts, strategic CTA buttons, as well as elements that require technical and/or business skills like customer journey mapping, HTML coding, GIF creation, image design, automated workflow creation, etc. If your email marketing is part of a holistic digital marketing strategy, you will also need people who are skilled at A/B testing and analytics. Although you can hire such people in-house, the cost may be higher than your expected ROI, especially in the beginning. In such a scenario, you may be better off outsourcing your email marketing to a dedicated and skilled team like Email Uplers.

2. Outsourcing is best when time is of the essence

For some email campaigns, time is the most critical factor. This may happen when you are running a one-off campaign (e.g. a Black Friday sale), or because certain emails need to go out within a specific time period (e.g. thank you or registration confirmation emails). If your in-house marketing team is already juggling a lot of projects, they may not have the bandwidth to focus on such campaigns and meet the critical timeline requirements.

Outsourcing can enable your team to focus on their core tasks and keep an eye on the big picture while the agency takes care of such time-constrained projects. They can manage campaign planning, design, and analytics without any micromanagement required on your part. They can also create or modify templates, set up automation, identify, set up and track the right metrics, and manage campaigns from start to end. They will also deliver unique ideas, offer strategic inputs and seamlessly manage the end-to-end email marketing lifecycle – so your team doesn’t have to.

3. Automation is easier said than done

Many brands implement marketing automation to send out campaigns quickly. Usually, automated emails are sent based on user behavior and historical data. For instance, if a reader fills a form to download a free white paper, you can automatically send them an email with the downloadable document attached. Automation is also great for lead nurturing. So if one of your subscribers opens one of your newsletters and makes a purchase on your eCommerce store, you can add them to a separate segment and move them into a new workflow to offer exclusive content or special offers.

However, this requires the effective use of an email automation platform. It also requires a good understanding of audience behaviors, and the ability to analyze those behaviors and take action accordingly. For all these reasons, creating automated workflows can get complicated and time-consuming. Also, these platforms usually have a learning curve that may be too steep for your non-specialist internal team. But offshore teams already access these tools. And since they are already trained, they can easily leverage these tools to get you the results you need in a shorter time and at lower cost.

4. Take advantage of data

The availability of timely, complete, updated and good quality data can make the crucial difference between a successful and failed email campaign. So, for example, if the open and click-through rates of your emails are low, it may indicate that your subject lines are not that great, or that you are sending emails out to the wrong segment (e.g. a special offer email on baby products to a segment of men aged 60 and above). Data could also reveal other problems like lack of personalization, lack of right incentives, use of irrelevant or aggressive content, use of spammy words, a complicated email layout, too many links, ambiguous CTA buttons or links, etc.

Other important metrics you should monitor include:

• Unsubscribe Rate
• Bounce rate
• Delivery Rate
• Spam complaints
• Churn Rate

But successful email marketing requires more than monitoring statistics and checking off boxes. You also need to analyze these metrics and answer questions like:

• Are we meeting the goal of our campaign?
• What are the top problems that are hindering us?
• What do we need to do to improve and optimize our future campaigns?

This knowledge can help you pinpoint the gaps in your email marketing program, and build better campaigns in future. However, all of this requires an iterative way of thinking that your in-house team may not be equipped for.

5. No budgetary or scalability constraints

One of the best things about email marketing is that even humble businesses with small budgets can get started with it. Then as your business grows and your email marketing needs change, you can scale up an existing campaign, or deploy a new campaign. But to do this successfully with an in-house team, you may need additional special skills that may require that you add more resources or invest in more technology. The former requires an additional investment of both time (advertise, interview, train, etc.) and money (salaries, other remuneration, etc).  And then after hiring, there is always a chance that these new resources may not perform as well as you expected. But these issues are unlikely when you hire an email marketing agency, as their team of experts are all committed to your brand. They will set the right goals, plan results-driven strategies, identify customer segments, create effective content and design, and generate data-rich reports to ensure the success of your email marketing program, all the way from planning and strategizing, to deployment and beyond.

When you need to scale up a campaign, say, because the size of your audience has increased, the outsourced team can easily adapt and still deliver great results. Scaling down is also easier. For example, if you have sent out all your emails for Thanksgiving and don’t have another campaign scheduled till Christmas, you don’t have to worry about internal human resources sitting idle, or paying for expensive email marketing tools that are not being used. Many specialist email marketing companies charge on a “pay as you use” basis so you only pay for services that you use over a specific number of days, weeks or emails. You don’t have to worry about paying them during quiet periods, and you no longer have to bear the huge costs of supporting an internal team. 

Do more with your email marketing. Outsource!

If your internal email marketing team has only a basic understanding of the required tools, workflows and strategies, consider outsourcing to an offshore team of experts. Such a team can be much more cost-effective than an in-house team, and they can get started with your email campaigns in a very short time.  Plus, if you are looking to scale up or expand your entire email marketing program but don’t have the resources (human or technology), outsourcing is a great way to do so, without breaking the bank.

So whether you need help with individual aspects like audience segmentation, workflow automation, template design and coding or performance analytics, or want to offload your entire email marketing program to experts – talk to us. Our efficient, affordable, end-to-end email marketing services will quickly fill the gaps in your marketing approach, and help your brand reach its customer engagement, conversion, and branding goals.  To know more, explore our services or get in touch.