83% of global consumers prefer email communications from businesses over social media or mobile apps. For both B2B and B2C marketers, email is a Top 3 content distribution channel, and the most reliable channel for lead nurturing and conversion. Considering that 4+ billion people use email, email marketing is a powerful medium for brand-to-customer communications.
These facts – plus a huge ROI of $51 to $1 – might have convinced you why your small business needs email marketing. Since it can yield amazing results, you should have the best resources taking care of it. Here are 5 reasons to hire dedicated email developers for your email marketing program.
#1. They Bring Technical Knowledge and Domain Expertise
Your marketing team understands the pulse of the audience. They know that email is a great way to connect with them and keep them engaged and interested. But do they have the technical expertise and domain knowledge to convert their ideas into tangible output?
Do they know:
- How to keep emails in inboxes and out of spam folders?
- How to create responsive, accessible, mobile-ready emails?
- Which tools to use to design and code emails?
- How to test emails before sends (A/B testing) to increase opens and click-throughs?
Do they have the tech skills for graphic design, HTML coding, data administration, and automation?
Are they aware of email marketing best practices to boost awareness, improve engagement rates, and increase conversions?
If you answered “No” to at least some of these questions, you need a dedicated email development team. This team can take care of all these aspects to convert amazing ideas into memorable emails.
Many email developers also bring domain/industry expertise. So whether you’re a B2C clothing business or a B2B engineering firm, a dedicated email developer can bring real value to your email marketing program.
#2. Email Marketing Has Changed Over the Years
The world’s first ever “commercial” email was sent out in 1978 by the now-defunct Digital Equipment Corp. Although it went to a small audience of just 400 people, this one email managed to generate sales of $13-$14 million for the company. Email quickly came to be regarded as a powerful marketing tool. And it still is.
And yet, email marketing has evolved from those early days of mass emails and zero segmentation. Today’s crowded email marketing landscape is often dominated by larger companies and well-known brands who know how to connect with their audience. To compete with them, you need to:
- Map out customer journeys to understand how customers connect with your brand
- Segment the audience to send the right email to the right subscriber at the right time
- Set up automation to send out many campaigns quickly, cost-effectively, and at scale
- Make emails memorable with dynamic content, interactive elements, and mobile-friendly designs
This cool email mail with background images and an interactive hover element generated a 58% open rate.
- Split test email for copy, design, subject lines and Call to Action (CTA) buttons
- Keep spam words out and warm up your IP, to ensure that your emails land in subscribers’ inboxes, and are therefore more likely to be seen
These aspects might sound overwhelming to a marketing team with little or no specialized experience of email marketing. But a dedicated email marketing team that includes an email developer can easily take care of these activities, and help streamline your email marketing program to generate great results.
#3. Customers Demand “What’s In It For ME?”
In the modern business landscape, customers demand easier solutions that simplify their lives and create ongoing value. To meet these needs, you need to engage with them in a way that boosts your brand value, without causing them friction. And for this, email is ideal – if done right.
If you send emails to a broad audience, chances are that you’re not seeing any results in terms of opens, click-throughs, or conversions. This is because your audience has no patience with generic, cookie-cutter type emails. They want emails that “speak” to them, and offers, discounts and information that are relevant to them. So if your emails don’t make the cut, at best, they will be deleted. At worst, they will be marked as spam.
By sending emails with valuable content, relevant offers, and “wow” elements like video, feedback requests, image carousels, countdown timers, etc. – you can convert more prospects into customers, and more customers into loyal brand advocates.
- But which kind of content and visuals should you include to wow subscribers?
- How to create such content and visuals?
- How to analyze delivery, deliverability and other issues?
The dedicated email development team can clarify these critical aspects, and take you closer to your goals.
#4. Get Campaigns Out Faster
For many email campaigns, timeliness is the most critical factor. Say, you want to execute a Black Friday sales campaign, or connect with the audience before the Christmas holidays, or send out thank you, registration, or abandoned cart emails. All of these emails are time-critical. Send them too early and your audience may ignore them. Send them too late and you’re already competing for space in their crowded inbox.
This Black Friday “coming soon” email generates excitement about a coming sale without giving too much away. The black background that signifies Black Friday also makes it highly memorable.
Your marketing team may not have the bandwidth, resources, or technical competence to meet such critical timeline requirements. But dedicated email developers would. They would know how to set up each campaign to go out at the best possible time for each subscriber. They can also help with all these time-critical aspects of email marketing:
- Email design and coding
- Test or resolve coding issues
- Identify and resolve rendering issues in email clients
- Take care of AMPScripts and Velocity scripting
- Identify, set up, and track the right metrics
This newsletter ticks all the boxes for great copy, a user-friendly, mobile-optimized design, and rich visuals that pull the reader in to explore more.
Finally, developers can work closely with campaign managers and your in-house marketing team to offer ideas, and ensure that the end-to-end email marketing lifecycle runs smoothly.
#5. Leverage Email Automation and Templates to Simplify and Scale Email Marketing
If your marketing team spends weeks or months on campaign design, content, and testing, and still doesn’t get great results – it may be time to rethink your strategy. Are your campaigns getting delayed because your team lacks the skills? Or is it because they spend too much time doing things manually, instead of automating or templatizing them?
Almost all Email Service Providers (ESP) support email automation, so you can set up any kind of automated email quickly, cost-effectively, and at scale. A dedicated development team would be able to leverage these tools to set up automated campaigns that go out based on certain pre-set conditions, e.g. a “trigger” based on specific customer actions. You can easily automate many kinds of emails, such as:
- Welcome
- User registration or onboarding
- Abandoned cart
- Event promotions
- Product recommendations
This automated recommendation email from Goodreads is a great way to continually engage with readers, and encourage them to explore more books and recommendations on the site.
- Order acknowledgment
- Newsletters
- Unsubscribes
- Birthday or anniversary emails
Templates are another way to scale up your email marketing program with minimal time and effort. Leverage pre-built templates within ESPs, customize them with content blocks, update the graphics (e.g. brand logo), and make every email accessible, mobile-ready and dark mode-friendly. Your email developers can build reusable modules for modular email templates, and even create or modify dynamic templates. This will allow you to reuse the same templates for different campaigns to save even more time.
In sum, a dedicated team of email developers can ensure that you get all the benefits of automation and templates in the shortest possible time – even if your small business has a small budget for email marketing.
Conclusion
Email marketing is a niche area that your marketing team may not be skilled enough to handle on their own. To grow your email marketing program, you need a dedicated team of email developers. However, hiring an in-house email developer can set you back by about $68,000 per year (U.S.).
Avoid such significant upfront and on-going investments while leveraging the benefits of dedicated email developers by hiring a specialized team like Email Uplers.
Email Uplers is a full-service email marketing agency with 150+ experts who can take care of email campaign coding, template production, rendering, and more. To know how Email Uplers can help you increase email marketing ROI for your small business, explore our email marketing services or get in touch.