Originally published October 2018.

Let’s put Dr Seuss away for a moment.  On a serious note, email marketing has become a lot more complex.  It is no longer the work of one person, organisations now depend on team members with specialised skills in order to get the best results from their email marketing.

Here are five ways you’ll benefit if you outsource your email marketing to an experienced email marketing team.

You’ll have more time

Email marketing takes time:  planning the topic of the newsletter or promotion, designing the email, coding it, and testing in the email sending platform.

The email production cycle is one week for 21% of email marketing teams. But for 62% of email marketing teams, it takes two weeks or more to build an email. And considering resources isn’t just about time, it’s also about volume. And at any given time, 23% of teams have up to 5 emails in production. That’s a lot of emails!

Litmus 2023 State of email workflows

And if email marketing is an activity you are doing on an ad-hoc basis, between your other tasks, then it’s taking you longer than it would take people working on it every day.

According to Litmus building and collecting feedback are the biggest blockers in the email production cycle.

60% of the email marketers surveyed said they use an HTML framework or an email template, at the very least—and these are
all great ways to optimise the build process.

You’ll be more likely to see the bigger picture

If you find that your time and focus is taken up with the ins and outs of getting mailers ready for distribution then you may be missing out on the strategic side of email marketing. Strategy, planning and campaign performance review may not get enough attention in the rush to get the next email ready. The insights that can be gained from reviewing performance against objectives and adjusting the next campaign accordingly are then lost.

You won’t need to employ an email marketing team

Email marketing appears simple to do but it in reality it is quite specialised. Even the simplest campaign can have many bits and pieces working together to make the campaign run smoothly. Some large organisations have entire teams to manage their email marketing. This isn’t the case for all organisations. Here is a list of email marketing team members:

• Email marketing strategists
• Email designers
• Email developers
• Campaign co-ordinators / managers
• Deliverability and compliance specialists

You may not have all these skills in house but you would still like to benefit from their expertise!

Businesses with teams or individuals dedicated to the channel are nearly twice as likely to report excellent ROI from the channel as those whose teams or individuals take responsibility for it along with other marketing responsibilities (46% vs. 25%).

Econsultancy’s 2018 Email Marketing Industry Census

Outsourcing your email marketing to an experienced team means you get the benefits without the cost of employing them full time.

Your email marketing campaigns will do better

It’s true! Sometimes the smallest detail can make or break your campaign. For example clever use of personalisation in the subject line of an email can boost the open rate of an email by 8 %.

It can be that you simply don’t have the time or the expertise to really hone your newsletters and campaigns. You might not be able to test how the email will render in different email clients like Outlook or Gmail, or the variety of mobile devices.

Colleagues could help by reviewing the design of your email, or correct the grammar, but they might be out of the office when you need them to review your email.

The extra attention to detail and testing by an expert team can make all the difference.

You can maximise your email marketing budget.

The skills of your in-house email marketing needs to be maintained and improved. You need to put budget towards educating your team.  In addition, new releases for email clients and mobile devices or operating systems means that CSS support (cascading style sheet: the styling code that makes your email look beautiful) could change overnight and the code of your existing emails may not work. This translates into the need to continuously tweak your email code, which is a waste of time and budget.

When you work with a competent email marketing team that focus on these nuisances, your budget can be maximized as there’s no waste due to lack of experience.

Also consider the cost of the necessary software licenses that may be required for the production of html and graphics for email marketing.

Is it all or nothing?

You might be wondering: is it necessary to completely outsource my email marketing?

Maybe, but a hybrid model or combined approach works too. Consider where you are low on email marketing skills or resources and look at outsourcing those functions only. Cantaloupe Digital specialises in email marketing and thus have the ability to slot in with client requirements. We fill the gaps for many of our clients by supplying them only with the services they need.  Services ranges from full service email marketing to email design and production services.