Acquiring new customers gets more expensive year after year. E-commerce stores rely more and more on email marketing to get the most out of existing customers and repeat purchases. Therefore, partnering with the best out there is vital. If you are unsure if you have found the best partner already, here are five things your email marketing agency should be doing.
Initial audit & market research
You can tell right off the bat if an email marketing agency will create a successful personalized strategy for your store or not. If the agency audits your current strategy, makes sense of your metrics, and provides solid conclusions and suggestions, it’s a great sign.
A great email marketing agency will use its expertise to implement best industry practices and bring perspective to your strategy. This includes sending times, segment ideas, content and design trends, email frequency, engagement benchmarks, etc.
The first deliverables you should expect are the first-look report, a tentative content calendar, and copy and design guidelines. Those should be adjusted to your brand, industry, and target audience.
Assembling the best team for you
It’s no secret that one of the reasons businesses outsource email marketing work is how hard it can be to build an in-house superstar team that can focus solely on email. Therefore, your email marketing agency should make this a breeze for you.
One person should be in charge of making your business goals, your industry’s trends and best practices, and the agency’s talents all align to create a successful strategy. This is the role of the Account Manager. This person will bring overall email strategy knowledge and project management skills to the table.
An Account Manager cannot (and should not) do it all. You’ll need a talented set of creatives that make the strategy come to life in the email’s copy and design. Having an experienced and specialized digital copywriter and a designer is a must.
This is, of course, just the base of the team that should be working for your brand. In the bigger picture, your email marketing agency should also count on a Research & Development department, tech experts, account manager associates, etc.
Last but not least. Your email marketing agency should continuously work on developing its partnership with your email marketing automation platform to guarantee you get all the possible benefits.
Here at Hustler, we recently celebrated becoming Klaviyo Elite partners, which allows us to work closely with the Klaviyo team and be privy to all the latest developments, new features, and product rollouts.
Frequent analytics reporting & update calls
When working with an email marketing agency, you are trusting them with your brand. More often than not, as an eCommerce owner, you won’t have the time to gather email marketing data. Your email marketing agency should frequently provide concise & relevant reports on your analytics: revenue, engagement, deliverability, etc.
This regular reporting is beneficial for your agency too. It will allow them to quickly catch any issues that need fixing or any opportunities to step up your game.
Not all can be said in weekly short reports. Update calls are needed so you and your agency align goals and strategies. This will help develop the partnership needed to make your eCommerce business thrive.
Quality assurance check-Ins
Your agency should have systems in place to avoid those mistakes or catch them in a timely manner.
In email marketing, there are so many moving parts that there’s always something that can break. Therefore, the first thing your agency should have is an email marketing checklist of everything to double-check that all works as it should and that there are no errors.
But we are all only humans. Mistakes are bound to happen. Your agency should be regularly checking on the most common issues: imperfect integrations, low metrics, broken snippets, bugs, etc.
Constant optimization
There’s no such thing as a perfect email strategy. Your business, the industry, and the audience are in constant change. Ergo, your email marketing should too.
Your email marketing agency should push you and themselves to optimize your strategy, copy, and design constantly.
Your email marketing agency should be doing A/B tests, trying new content ideas, optimizing send times and segments, analyzing your return on investment, creating action plans to improve specific engagement metrics, optimizing your flows, etc.
If your email marketing agency is not doing these five things: audit & market research, assembling the best team for you, regular analytics reporting & update calls, quality assurance check-ins, and constant optimization, maybe you need to try something new.
