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If you’re wondering why your emails have been dropping in performance lately, it might be time consider an email marketing agency.  Email is a great way to effectively communicate with your audience in a personal way, but if it’s done incorrectly you could be doing more harm than good.  Here are a few signs you could benefit from outsourcing your email efforts.

Your metrics are dropping

First and foremost, if your email performance has steadily been declining, you should look for some help.  Consumer preferences change, and as marketers we need to adapt to their needs in order to effectively engage them. 

Analyze at your open rates and click-through rates.  These are a direct notion of audience engagement and can show you the overall effectiveness of your email campaigns.  Another metric you should always keep an eye on is your deliverability rate.  In order for people to engage with your business through email, they need to actually get the email.  If your emails aren’t making their way into the inbox, it might be a sign of a much bigger problem.

Your CRM is outdated

If you don’t have the right tools to effectively segment your contact list, it could be hindering your email performance.  An email marketing agency survives by staying on top of the latest trends and technology and will be able to apply them to your overall marketing strategy. 

You only send batch-and-blast emails

These types of emails are the messages you get simply because you’re on a mailing list.  Many times, these in the form of a newsletter, but they’re often sent to everyone in your database.

You might be asking yourself, “What’s wrong with an email newsletter?”.  Well, nothing is wrong with newsletters, but it’s what you include in them and who you send them to that tends to lack the strategy and creativity to be effective.  Technology exists to send dynamic email messages and can dramatically increase your newsletter engagement.

Your emails aren’t responsive

It’s 2017, your emails need to be viewable on whatever device your customers are reading them on.  Stats show that over 50% of emails are opened on a mobile device, and if you fail to present your message loud and clear then you could be missing out on valuable conversion opportunities. 

You don’t apply automation to your email strategy

This is a big one.  If you’re going in and manually creating an email each time you want to send a message to your audience, you’re wasting tremendous amount of time.  Email automation is the way of the future, and people expect it nowadays.

Using templates, you can create emails to automatically send based on the engagement each person in your database.  This way, you can be sure your message is relevant to your audience, and it’s delivered in a timely fashion.

Automated email marketing works because it’s relevant.  Sending a message based on user actions allows you to deliver a contextual marketing message in a way that “keeps the conversation going”.

You don’t use email templates

Email templates will drastically increase the efficiency of your email marketing efforts.  Not only will it streamline the email creation process, but it will reinforce your branding when your audience reads your message.  They’ll recognize the layout, color scheme, and overall feel of the message and attribute it to the value you provide them.

Your contacts are from purchased lists

If you struggle to organically grow your contact database and rely on purchasing lists to send to, there needs to be a change.  Not only does this result in high bounce and unsubscribe rates, it infringes upon CAN SPAM regulations.  These regulations require people to “allow” you to send your marketing message to their inbox, and for good reason. 

If you get a high number of spam complaints, it directly effects your deliverability rate making it harder for you to make it to your audience’s inbox.  Gmail, Yahoo!, and other email clients associate these complaints with the domain you send from, so it’s important to send relevant messages to people who are expecting to hear from you.

You fail to achieve impactful email roi

Email marketing has the biggest return on investment across all digital marketing channels with an average ROI of 4800%.  Sounds insane right?  This is why email marketing is still relevant to businesses in every industry.

If your email efforts aren’t bringing in the money your business needs, an email marketing agency can realign your strategy to help you reach your business goals.

You don’t have the time

This is usually a sign that your business is growing, so congrats!  When it comes down to it, time is money, and money is time.  If your business is growing and you don’t have the time to focus on email, then hiring an email agency can be extremely beneficial.

Hiring an agency is also usually less expensive than bringing in a specialist to work on your in-house team, so the benefits compound on each other.  An agency will be able to allocate the time needed to segment your database and effectively send targeted messages to the right people at the right time.

In conclusion, hiring an email marketing agency can be a big decision.  Their email marketing services can be the difference between pushing your contact database away with irrelevant marketing messages or pulling them in with the value they’re expecting.  If you’re considering an agency, there are a few things to look for when making the decision. 

At the end of the day, your agency and your business need to be a good fit for each other.  Your vision and goals need to be aligned so you can bring your email marketing efforts back to life and create a sustainable and predictable revenue stream for your business.