Rat Race Armaggeddon: Email Marketing Consulting

A question: Do you know anyone who doesn’t have an email?

Highly unlikely, right?

After all, it’s mandatory to get an email address for all kinds of things – from opening a bank account to signing up for social media platforms to booking flights online.

And that’s not it!

Nearly 3.93 billion users have email addresses, out of which the clients you’re trying to target or retain already have active email addresses.

What makes it even better is that most people don’t mind signing up for a product/service demo or a lead magnet in exchange for their email addresses.

In short, you get a direct connection to your lead, where you can leverage your offerings and boost your chances of landing a sale.

Let’s take a look at some email stats while we’re at it:

Nearly 99% of consumers check their emails daily.
73% of millennials prefer receiving business communication via email.
Approximately 80% of business professionals believe that email marketing can be incredibly useful for increasing customer retention.

In addition to the above, experts found that email marketing is 40 times better than running social media PPC for increasing customers and gives you an average ROI of $38 for every dollar spent.

So why not incorporate the brilliance of email into your marketing strategy to achieve your business objectives?

This also brings us to our next question: Why do most campaigns fail despite such fantastic results?

Well, landing into people’s email inbox isn’t as easy as one would assume. Making sure your email gets read is yet another obstacle.

Precisely where email marketing consultancy comes in.

Using the expertise and experience of a consultant, you’ll be able to reach large swathes of prospective clients faster and without much effort.

Plus, email marketing can help you score some big wins, whether it‘s your marketing goals or commercial goals.

In this guide, our team at Neil Patel Digital will help you through the process of hiring a consultant for email marketing, along with its benefits for your business.

4 Ways an Email Marketing Consultant Can Help Grow Your Business

If you find yourself googling the term “Email Marketing consultant,“ chances are you’re in one of the following situations:

You’ve tried going through multiple blog posts and YouTube videos that tell you how to run good email campaigns, but it still didn’t work.
You haven’t been successful with email marketing ad gurus or email marketing agencies despite spending a bomb on your campaigns.
You‘re tired of sending poor emails and are even considering asking Sundar Pichai how to connect your money to your results.

The fact that you’re looking to hire an email marketing consultant means you want one thing – business growth.

If you don’t have a consultant already, there’s a good chance you aren’t getting as much out of marketing as you potentially could.

At the same time, we have to point out that email marketing has no cookie-cutter approach.

The consultant you choose should be able to come up with a solution after taking into account the unique challenges faced by your businesses, along with other factors like your business goals and budget.

The following are a few ways in which an email marketing consultant can help formulate an authentic and winning marketing strategy:

Make Email Marketing Easier For You

Email marketing is easy – but only at the surface.

Even after writing emails almost every single day, it can be challenging to put together an effective email marketing campaign.

You can, of course, write an email and send it out to your subscribers. But whether or not you get results is another story.

Writing a marketing email is completely different from writing a typical business or personal email. You have to put in a lot of thought and effort – something that an email marketing consultant can help with.

These consultants understand the nuances involved in putting together a good email. And considering this takes a good deal of know-how and skill, it’s a task better left to experts.

Could you still figure it out for yourself? Probably.

But do you have the time to learn a complex new skill such as writing effective marketing emails? Probably not.

Getting a consultant is a perfect shortcut to the whole marketing process, where you get faster and better results.

No Time or Money Wastage

If you don’t have a strong background in email marketing, the majority of your time – or whichever employee you give the responsibility to run your email marketing – will be spent on learning, tweaking, and figuring things out.

So not only do you lose time, but you also lose a sufficient sum of money considering email marketing is a pricey affair.

You may think that having a consultant is an extra expense. In reality, however, it is more of an investment that can drive sales and grow your business – that too without having to invest money into the learning curve.

Adding a Personalized Touch to Email Campaigns

A personalized email campaign can help you effectively engage with your audience. An email marketing expert and strategist will create a campaign, which is customized according to recipient characteristics.

Why does personalization matter, you ask?

Consultants segment your subscriber list based on factors like age, location, gender, buyer interests, purchase habits, and so on. These insights can then be used for creating emails that have a greater appeal to the recipients, which, in turn, will deliver better results.

This is also one of the primary reasons why you should hire an experienced email consultant who knows how to create email campaigns for a variety of target audiences.

Email List Nurturing

One of the biggest advantages of email marketing is you stay connected with potential customers while driving new sales.

However, the whole purpose will be defeated if you have a tiny email list.

An email marketing consultant can provide your email subscribers with information and calls to action that subtly nudge people to the next logical action. This can include downloading information, subscribing to newsletters, or making a purchase.

Additionally, the consultant knows the art of creating effective triggered messages for specific purposes, such as cart abandonment, welcome messages, post-purchase, and transactional emails.

How to Get Started With an Email Marketing Consultant

Every email marketing campaign requires a thorough strategy that attracts the right kind of audience and delivers results.

Generally, it starts with defining your target audience and building an email list. Working with an email marketing consultant will take most of this load off your shoulders, though.

The following is a step-by-step guide to help you get started with a consultant to enhance the efficiency of your email campaigns:

Hiring the Right Email Marketing Expert

Before you start strategizing and implementing plans, you need to have the right person to manage your campaign.

You can determine the suitability of a prospective consultant by asking him the following questions:

Is the email marketing consultant capable enough to develop underlying strategies for their marketing campaign?
Can they build and manage multiple successful email campaigns?
What is their approach when designing and creating promotional emails?
Do they have the necessary creative and technical skills?
Are they comfortable using email marketing analytics to audit email campaigns?
How familiar are they with email marketing tools, and SEO and SMM best practices for optimization?

The list is long but necessary to help you determine the right fit. You can either hire freelancers on platforms like Upwork or Reddit or opt for more seasoned consultants who usually ask potential clients to fill an inquiry form.

Hold Discovery Sessions

You should hold frequent meetings with your selected consultant to make sure both of you are on the same page with regards to your business goals and budget.

Take this as an opportunity to discuss your expectations from these campaigns, how you expect them to perform, and any other consideration you may have.

At the same time, this will make the email marketing consultant aware of your objectives and goals. When discussing strategies, always be vocal about your vision and the kind of money you‘re comfortable spending.

Review the Campaign Strategy

In this stage, the consultant will use their expertise and knowledge to come up with a framework of the marketing campaign.

You can do a detailed review of the whole plan before giving the go-ahead. In case you want to make any changes, make sure you let the consultant know.

This should include the type and how many emails to send, what tools to use, how to implement email segmentation, personalization and automation, and so on.

Give the Final Go-Ahead

Once you launch an email marketing campaign, you cannot expect the result to be instantaneous and positive.

Like every other process, there is a learning curve involved.

Within the first few weeks, you and your consultant will get an idea about the type of emails and CTAs that your target audience reacts most to, the subscribers that actually open your emails, and the ones who don’t.

The insights you gain can be implemented in future campaigns, which can enhance the overall effort and help you achieve better results.

Keep an Eye on Campaign Performance

The email marketing consultant will collect, analyze, and provide you with useful insights about the launched campaign.

Depending on the results, they’ll use their skill set and knowledge to suggest tweaks for writing better emails and making other adjustments.

You can also adjust your budget as needed. After all, the main aim is to meet the predetermined objectives – be it more leads, increase in click-throughs, or driving sales.

Remember, you should continue monitoring the whole process and making adjustments when needed even when your email campaign starts performing better.

Measuring the ROI of Email Marketing Consulting Services

Email makes you money in one of the following two ways: product sales and lead conversion.

This stays true irrespective of your industry, and is, in fact, used by companies to grow their business and generate higher revenue.

Before we discuss the two concepts in more detail, you should know the crucial key performance indicators (KPIs) involved in the fascinating world of email marketing.

Here are a few of them:

The number of emails delivered
The number of emails opened
Click-through rate
Click to open rate
Unsubscribe rate
Bounce rate – hard bounce (permanent) and soft bounce (temporary)
Spam complaints
Social shares
Forwards

Product Sales

The sale of a product or service is the obvious end goal for every business owner.

A consultant should be able to get your subscriber to buy something from your website after reading your email. And while this may sound simple, it can be surprisingly complex.

The expert needs to work on all the basics of a good email, such as a compelling body text, attention-grabbing subject line, and appropriate visuals.

These emails should walk the recipients through the four phases of the purchasing process – awareness, consideration, decision, and delight.

Lead Conversion

As the name suggests, the idea here is to convert the lead into a paying customer.

For those of you who aren’t aware, the customer journey can be quite long, requiring you to follow up several times with a person until they finally make a purchase.

In this case, your consultant needs to work on creating convincing emails that provoke the recipient to take the final plunge.

In this case, your subscriber list will receive a series of emails based on the sales process with an option for your lead to convert into a paying customer at the end.

5 Point Checklist for Finding the Right Facebook Ad Consultant

Below, we’ve compiled a list of five things to check when finding the right email marketing consultant to promote business growth:

Know Your Goals

After you’ve taken all the pain to go through the dozens of steps necessary to launch a successful email campaign, you need to make sure the outcome is aligned with your initial business goal.

For this, you have to first know what this specific goal is.

Your goals will help you select your ad campaign objectives, the kind of ads you want to run, and how you can create key performance indicators (KPIs) to make sure you hit those goals.

Keeping this in mind, your next step should be to find a consultant that can help you achieve your goals. Although there are plenty of freelancers on the market, enlisting the services of high-caliber consultants are typically a better choice due to their larger expertise and knowledge.

Expertise in Creating Excellent Emails

The primary job of an email marketing consultant is to help you land more sales or generate leads through email.

In other words, they should be well-versed in email best practices that get the job done. Additionally, the consultant should be able to design effective and executable email marketing strategies that deliver results and add more value to your campaign.

A Winning Marketing Process

Different email marketing consultants have unique processes when it comes to delivering results.

Just like your campaign needs to be exclusive, every consultant has an innovative thought process and a distinct style of doing things as well.

Hence, it’s important to make sure the consultant‘s process resonates with yours to prevent any clashes.

Relevant Experience With Credentials to Back Claims

Email marketing is anything but a narrow concept.

This is exactly why we recommend enlisting the services of high-caliber consultants that usually comprise a team of specialists, which gives you in-depth knowledge to connect every aspect of the email marketing process on the whole.

This includes copywriting skills, technical skills, email and web analytics, and knowledge about email marketing tools.

A Distinguished Portfolio and Testimonials

Always look for a consultant who has demonstrated hands-on experience and has worked with a diverse set of clients.

A diverse clientele would ensure a better understanding of how to send effective emails to recipients who have different ideologies, thought processes, and beliefs.

In addition to the portfolio, customer testimonials are equally important. Before signing the contract, make sure you check out client reviews to get an idea about the professionalism and work ethic of the email marketing consultant.

Wrapping Up

If you want to do email marketing right, but don’t have the internal resources required, a consultancy might be your best bet.

Hiring the services of an email marketing consultant will assure you expert support throughout your marketing strategy and help you achieve real results that actually benefit your brand.

At Neil Patel Digital, we have years of expertise and knowledge about the best email marketing practices, and also offer additional programs like SEO and content creation to streamline the whole campaign for maximizing results. You can get in touch with us here.

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