Why you need to hire an email marketing consultant
If there’s one digital marketing strategy that’s PROVEN to guarantee results, increase revenue, retention and loyalty without hurting your pocket, it’s email marketing.
(Want to know how to write your own high-converting email newsletter? Click here)
But to get the most out of your efforts, you really need to work with an email marketing consultant.
Sold on the value of email already? If not, here’s why you should be…
With an average conversion rate three times higher than social media and a mind-blowing 3800% return on investment, email marketing is a key part of any digital marketer’s arsenal.
While social media platforms continue to lower their reach, email addresses aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Sure, email marketing doesn’t have the flash and pizazz of social media.
But while social media is treading the red carpet, snorting cocaine with children’s TV presenters in toilets and being photographed getting out of limos without their undies, email marketing is the silent workhorse, putting in the hours to bring in consistent revenue without excessive fanfare.
Here’s what I’ll be covering today:
Table of Contents
Let’s talk email marketing
Email marketing is the strategic use of emails to promote your brand and services. It is one of the best ways to develop a long-lasting consumer-brand relationship.
Why? Because unlike other marketing channels, if someone is subscribed to your email newsletter it indicates a level of awareness and intent that other marketing channels just can’t match.
Someone has given their permission to hear from you, and barring a sale, that’s about as valuable as it gets. They’ve let you into their front room and that’s a big responsibility.
When done well, email campaigns allow you to firmly plant your business in the minds of your audience and can be an essential tool in converting subscribers into customers and customers into raving fans.
But getting email marketing right is easier said than done.
…What should your emails include?
…How often should you send them?
…How do you take a so-so email marketing campaign and turn it into something that REALLY delivers?
Email marketing involves a lot of moving pieces – like building and managing a subscriber list, choosing a suitable email software platform and creating engaging and optimised emails for newsletters and email automations – and that’s where an email marketing consultant comes in.
What’s an email marketing consultant?
Email marketing consultants are experts in understanding the essential components of email marketing campaigns.
Put simply, they know what works and where to look when it’s not working.
They’re able to use their experience and expertise to apply the Pareto Principle – the 80/20 rule – and find the 20% that will make the difference.
An email marketing consultant is the person you hire when you need to get results in a competitive industry and accelerate your business growth.
What do email marketing consultants do?
Email marketing consultants are well versed in the full A to Z of email marketing.
Basically, they know their shizzle…
Depending on what you hire them for, an email marketing consultant may do the following:
- Analyse your current email performance (open rates, CTRs, revenue etc.)
- Look at the deliverability of your email provider
- Advise you on the optimal email marketing platform or tool
- Help you implement marketing automation through automated email series or flows
- Create the strategy for email automations, like welcome, abandoned cart, retention and post-purchase emails
- Write the copy for each email
- Work with your design team to create high-performing email templates
Each email marketing consultant will do different things.
For example, I analyse existing campaigns, get involved from a strategic perspective and write and test the email copy, but I NEVER get involved in technical discussions around deliverability or any design work.
I’m not good at those aspects and I don’t enjoy them, whereas that might be where other email marketing consultants show their worth. (If you’re interested in hearing more, you can contact me here.)
Want to know more? Well, here’s a more detailed list of the tasks performed by experienced email marketing consultants:
Strategic Planning
- Perform in-depth research on industry trends, competitive analysis and customer base analysis to assess the target audience.
- Conceptualise and design the architecture of a wide variety of email campaigns.
- Develop a personalisation strategy and create segmented campaigns based on behaviour to maximize conversions and retention and minimise churn. Segmented campaigns are reported to increase email revenue by a massive 760%.
Execution
- Write captivating, clear and conversion-focused email copy with compelling subject lines and effective calls to action.
- Create digital advertisements, graphics and images to be included in emails. (Many email marketing consultants, myself included, will work with a design team to do this, rather than doing it themselves.)
- Maintain a suitable balance between educational, entertaining and promotional content to nurture leads.
- Review and proofread emails for clarity, grammar, and spelling.
- Create and optimise email templates to ensure they are user and mobile-friendly since mobile opens account for 46 percent of all email opens.
- Schedule and send emails to subscribers.
- Create and manage website landing pages.
- Grow subscriber list by tactical use of opt-in and sign-up forms on your website, special offers, incentives and social media promotion.
- Advise on relevant lead magnets.
- Develop drip email campaigns, including choosing suitable automation software and creating automated emails such as welcome, transactional, discount, abandoned cart and feedback emails.
(Side note: Automated email workflows can net you 20% more sales opportunities. In fact, on average automated welcome series generate up to 320% more revenue per email than other promotional emails.
Basically, if you’re not using them, you’re leaving money on the table. Contact me to see how I can help.)
Management, Analysis and Optimisation
- Track and evaluate metrics and analytical data to assess campaign performance and make necessary adjustments in strategy and execution.
- Purge non-deliverable email addresses and unengaged subscribers.
- Create a database of emails for future lead generation and monitor database security.
- Ensure that required email data is captured in customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Why should you hire an email marketing consultant?
Are you considering using email marketing to grow your business? Then you shouldn’t neglect the benefits of appointing an email marketing consultant. Because not only will a consultant help drive traffic and increase engagement but also secure conversions and boost sales.
Here a few ways in which an email marketing consultant can help you grow your business:
They run successful email campaigns
Ok, this might sound like an obvious one. Maybe you think anyone can write good emails and send them out. But unless you know the best practices and spend your time analysing other companies’ email campaigns you’re probably not doing as good a job as an expert could.
Just because you can write a well-structured and professional email to a colleague does not mean you can do the same to your email subscribers.
‘Marketing’ emails are different.
Knowing what to write and how to write it is a skillset unto itself. It requires a lot of experience and extensive practice to communicate your brand identity in an engaging manner, speak in a consistent tone-of-voice AND encourage people to buy from you at the same time.
Here’s a nugget of wisdom from marketing genius Seth Godin, where he emphasises the power of storytelling to highlight your brand message:
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell."
This is one area where email marketing consultants can change the game. As outsiders to your company, they can take a step back, assess what really makes you different and turn your USP into a compelling story that resonates with customers.
What do you think of this storytelling example used by The Hustle in their welcome email from CEO Sam Parr?
Witty? Check.
Engaging? Check.
Pleasing and fun to read? Checkity check.
There’s not even a CTA in this one, but hey…THAT’S OK. It’s designed to make you feel like you’re talking to a friend, and friends typically don’t ask you to do something every time you interact (unless they’re shitty friends. I’m not your therapist, but you should TOTALLY ditch those guys.)
Another banging example of story branding is Lush’s welcome email about their core values.
They talk about the ingredients they use in their products and why they use them.
They talk about ethics…why they do what they do.
Subscribers know who they’re getting in bed with from the start…an authentic brand that wears its beliefs on its sleeve.
What better way to build trust?
They save you time and money
It takes a long time to learn the best practices for effective email. Email marketing consultants spend a LOT of time learning, reading, tweaking and trialling different approaches.
They’ll know a lot of things that you don’t.
Where do you want to spend your time? Learning one marketing channel or creating a fast-growing business?
Finding the right email marketing consultant isn’t an expense on your balance sheet – it’s an INVESTMENT.
Let’s look at another example.
The lifestyle brand and ecommerce store, Dormify, increased their email revenue by a whopping 92% with just a little tweak to their strategy.
Discussing their previous approach, CEO of Dormify, Nicole Gardner, said:
“definitely more of a batch and blast approach. We didn't have as much ability to segment as we do now. We also didn't have as many automated programs.”
Her team realised that they were sending too many irrelevant messages to people which led to a dip in sales.
“We really saw that there was this opportunity to serve up our customers with the most appropriate content if we could start to work toward both segmentation and automation”
The company began personalising three automated email series – welcome, cart abandonment and post-purchase. Just from this change in strategy, their conversion rate DOUBLED.
They saw a (can you believe it?) 92% increase in email revenue.
Now that’s a mic drop moment, right there.
They build and nurture your email list
You can’t expect to grow your business with a tiny email list. You should be making moves to consistently acquire more subscribers.
“Focus on growing your list all of the time as newer subscribers are more engaged adding to healthier open rates and ROI.”
But how do you do that? Do you have the necessary marketing expertise required to generate leads?
Shorten that learning curve by working with experts to create lead magnets, offers, website sign-up boxes, referral offers and bonuses that attract more subscribers and drive new sales.
And have I mentioned retention yet? There’s no point gaining new subscribers if you’re losing the old ones…
80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention.
Email marketing consultants use their expertise to nurture your subscribers with valuable information that keeps them coming back for more.
They use personalisation for greater impact
Personalisation is the key that opens the door to rapid business development. (A study by Experian found that personalised emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates!)
However, 70% of brands fail to use personalization within their email marketing strategy. Trust me, you don’t wanna be one of them.
Personalisation helps you engage with your audience and build trust, which results in consumers feeling a sense of partnership with you. This is the basic foundation of email marketing: interaction to conversion.
Highlighting the importance of personalisation, Dharmesh Shah, CTO & Co-Founder of HubSpot, said
“Many companies have forgotten they sell to actual people. Humans care about the entire experience, not just the marketing or sales or service. To really win in the modern age, you must solve for humans.”
Here’s a wonderful example of a winning personalised email from Frank Kern. The use of an image with the subscriber’s name on it is pretty clever and tough to ignore.
With an email consultant on board, you get creative tactics that will make your audience go GAGA!
Consultants also understand the benefits of segmenting your email list based on multiple factors like age, location, gender, purchase habits, behaviour, browsing history, etc.
This requires a thorough knowledge of data collection and analysis. Once these insights are drawn, they design a consumer-focused content strategy and create emails that appeal greatly to the recipients, which in turn, steers your campaign in the right direction.
Only a skilled email marketing professional who understands how to create emails for diverse target audiences can achieve this.
Here’s how Mailigen used behavioural segmentation to increase their email open rate from an industry average of 20% to 29%.
But they weren’t done yet. They selected the non-openers, tweaked the subject line and sent it again.
And BAM! The open rate increased by 8.6%.
This is what email consultants offer — strategic solutions to your problems.
They know what to do and how to do it.
Are you looking for an email marketing consultant?
If you need an email marketing consultant and strategist to take your email marketing to the next level, increase your open rates, CTRs and revenue, then get in touch here to see how I can help.