5 Powerful Reasons to Outsource your SFMC Campaigns in 2023

When it comes to marketing and promoting your business, you can’t afford to ignore an approach as valuable as email marketing. Email marketing can be your brand’s most potent weapon if you customize your campaigns and make each message persuasive, unique, and compelling. Here’s where the right email marketing tool comes in. Enter Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).

SFMC is one of the top email marketing platforms because it enables brands to power everything from email marketing and social media marketing, to marketing automation, digital advertising, audience segmentation, and loyalty management. SFMC makes it easy to create omnichannel customer journeys, execute compelling customer outreach programs, and deliver highly personalized content and experiences based on customers’ preferences and behaviors.

That said, SFMC can be a complex platform and dealing with it can quickly become overwhelming for in-house email marketing teams. The best way to reduce the overwhelm and take full advantage of SFMC is to outsource salesforce development and campaign management to experts. Working with salesforce outsourcing companies can also bring you many other benefits. Read on to discover these benefits for yourself.

The Benefits of Outsourcing SFMC Campaigns

Some companies prefer to take a DIY approach to SFMC email marketing. Although this approach can work, more often than not, it doesn’t, especially if the marketing program is growing and the inhouse team is not agile enough to make quick adjustments to customer needs or market dynamics. Often, marketing teams realize that using SFMC is not easy despite its user-friendly setup, automation capabilities, a comprehensive template library, and a built-in AI engine for email optimization.

So how can you make the most of these capabilities to set up memorable email campaigns without the associated complexity?

Answer: Outsource!

An external team of Salesforce email specialists, developers, campaign managers, and testers can help you build effective email marketing campaigns, impress target audiences, and gain an edge over your competitors. This is because they:

1. Bring advanced SFMC expertise to benefit your brand

Your in-house email marketing team may have designed small email campaigns in the past. However, creating a campaign for a small number of prospects, leads, or customers is not the same as designing a campaign that will go out to thousands of subscribers. Large campaigns require a lot of planning and effort. They also require people who specialize in all these areas of email marketing:

• Strategy and Planning
• Design
• Content
• A/B testing
• Deliverability
• Analytics
• Project Management

By outsourcing your SFMC program, you will get dedicated resources who specialize in these areas. You will get specialist coders, template designers, UI/UX experts, copywriters, email marketing strategists, campaign managers, and analytics experts who will deliver the best possible results with their expertise. More importantly, they will work together to plan and launch your campaigns and maximize your chances of success.

The best SFMC email marketing specialists keep themselves updated on all the new features and capabilities added to SFMC multiple times a year. They can thus continue to bring the SFMC expertise you need for successful campaigns, regardless of campaign goal, budget, or audience type.

2. Will help you save money

The cost of your SFMC email marketing program will include multiple aspects. One is the cost of the platform itself. For example, to implement personalized promotional email marketing, you will have to pay $400/month for the Marketing Cloud Engagement tool. The cost can go up to $1,250/month if you need personalized marketing automation with email solutions and $3,750/month for SFMC’s personalized cross-channel strategic marketing solutions.

You will also incur a cost for hiring SFMC specialists. According to Glassdoor, the estimated salary of a Salesforce email marketing specialist in the U.S. is $67,060 per year. A SFMC architect can earn between $67,000 and $150,000 per year while SFMC admins can earn $91,000 – $130,000 annually. Plus, you will incur costs related to hiring, onboarding, benefits, absenteeism/vacations, bench employees, equipment, and training. The more such people you have in your in-house team, the more you will spend on your email marketing program.

Then there are the other costs associated with your SFMC email program:

• Platform customization
• Data migration
• Integration with other systems
• Maintenance
• Subscriber list management

Outsourcing your SFMC email marketing program can help you avoid or minimize many of these costs. Plus, you will get access to SFMC professionals who will provide their expert services at much lower prices compared to in-house teams. Some outsourcing partners provide their services and experts for short-term engagements, meaning you won’t get tied down with a long-term (costly) contract. Others also provide predictable or tiered pricing models so you know exactly what you will pay without nasty surprises or unpredictable expenses.

3. Will hit the ground running

Your inhouse SFMC team will have to be trained on your business objectives, brand goals, and marketing processes. Training and onboarding can take time. It can take even longer for team members to reach a level of comfort and competence required to design and deliver effective SFMC campaigns. As a result, you cannot expect fast results from them. You may also have to put off some projects until they prove their ability.

Working with an outsourced team will cut out unnecessary waiting and onboarding time. Their learning curve is almost flat because they are both skilled in SFMC and highly experienced in a variety of deployments for many different companies and industries. Since they need little or no onboarding, you can get started on any kind of campaign right away.

The external team will also help your internal team with all these crucial email marketing tasks:

• Create a campaign plan
• Segment the target audience
• Design and optimize Salesforce HTML email templates
• Test email messages before sends
• Track and analyze campaign results
• Leverage SFMC’s Einstein AI to find campaign optimization opportunities (subject lines, send times, copy, etc.)
  
  Some SFMC outsourcing companies are available 24×7 so their experts are always standing by to quickly resolve issues and help you drive business growth with SFMC email marketing.

4. Will deliver measurable results

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. This is especially true of email marketing. In-house teams are sometimes unable to deliver measurable results because they are not motivated enough. For outsourced companies, their engagement contracts are often tied into the results they deliver, so they are definitely motivated to deliver measurable results for your email campaigns.

What are your email marketing objectives?

Increase opens and clickthroughs?

Boost email-led conversions?

Reduce bounces?

Minimize unsubscribes?

Grow your email list?

Increase overall ROI?

Generate more leads?

An outsourced email marketing firm will understand your goals and figure out which metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) must be tracked to assess progress towards that goal. They will also implement the processes and tools required to drive tangible results with every SFMC campaign for your brand.

5. Can scale with your growing email marketing program and brand

SFMC is a powerful platform to develop and distribute many kinds of email campaigns. You can set up automated triggered campaigns that go out in response to a specific customer action, such as sign up or purchase. You can also send regular newsletters to share useful branded content with your audience, engagement and re-engagement emails to stay connected with current and previous customers, abandoned cart emails to convert hesitant shoppers into enthusiastic buyers, and much more.

You might not be sending all these different campaigns. Now. But as your customer base expands and your brand grows, you may scale your email marketing program to include some or all these campaign types. The best Salesforce outsourcing companies can effortlessly handle the responsibilities of many types of campaigns, even larger, more complex campaigns, for your brand. Their SFMC email specialists, project managers, developers, copywriters, and designers will put their expertise to work in order to quickly scale up your email marketing program.

At the same time, they will give you the confidence to focus on your core marketing and branding initiatives. Leave all the campaign planning and execution to a team like Email Uplers so you effectively take care of the marketing tasks and activities that cannot be outsourced.

Over to You!

If you outsource Salesforce development, you can build smarter email campaigns and get them out faster. The right campaign partner will help you engage with your target audience and deliver useful email content that resonates with them. They will also set SMART goals for each campaign, personalize every message to appeal to your “audience of one”, track email performance, and in general, do everything possible to boost your marketing ROI.

Your marketing program and company have a lot to gain by working with the SFMC email experts @ Email Uplers. Set the stage for SFMC email marketing success with a team that’s 100% invested in your success.