5 ways an email marketing consultant can instantly improve your email marketing

Engaging an email marketing consultant can help you take your email marketing programme from good to great.

Think of an email marketing consultant as your secret weapon. Any email consultant that's worth their salt will have a huge depth of knowledge and experience, they'll have their fingers on the industry's pulse, and they'll quickly be able to identify areas where you can easily improve your email marketing campaigns and see a significant leap in ROI (return on investment).

Think of it like a personal trainer. If you want to get in better shape, shed a few pounds, and tone up, you know you're going to have to hit the gym and probably ease off on the gin and tonics.

You can do this on your own but the job becomes infinitely harder without structure, guidance, a plan to follow, and accountability.

It's exactly the same when you work with an email marketing consultant. You might know what you need to do but actually getting it done is a totally different story.

Here's 5 ways working with an email marketing consultant can instantly improve your email marketing programmes and turn them into the best shape they've ever been in. 

1. EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY

There are many elements involved in a successful marketing strategy, it's nigh on impossible to be an expert in all of them. If you were building a house, you wouldn't do it all on your own would you? And you wouldn't hire the carpenter to wire up the electrics. You'd get an expert to help.

The same is true with email marketing consultancy and strategy.

Essentially, when it comes to email marketing strategy, you need to figure out what you want your email marketing campaigns to do and how you want people to engage with what you send them.

This could be something very tangible like: We want to increase direct revenue from our email campaigns by 10% in Q1, or ,We want to sell x number of units of our new product through email marketing by June. 

More often than not, strategy can turn into death by spreadsheet.' We love a good spreadsheet to help us plan our activity but don't fall into the trap of thinking you need to create something complex. You don't. Simple is better and infinitely more effective.

An email marketing consultant can put a simple and effective plan together. With a robust plan you can both mitigate any potential risks to your businesses while at the same time identifying opportunities you might not have previously seen. And you have something you can measure your results against, which leads us nicely to our second point

2. EMAIL MARKETING REPORTING AND ANALYSIS

An email marketing consultant can provide you with statistics, infographics, reports and support to demonstrate how your email marketing is performing.

By analysing these results, they can use the insight they glean to make tangible recommendations to increase your ROI.

Typically, this will involve examining how campaigns perform in comparison to targets, demonstrating insight into engagement of the database and resulting conversions, and acting on their analysis to make recommendations and provide commentary on how to improve future campaigns, spot trends, and tailor your approach.

3. EMAIL MARKETING EDUCATION

The best email marketing consultants will help educate your team on best practice and how to get the best returns from email marketing. As a trusted advisor, your email marketing consultant brings an objective view to how your emails (and your team) are performing. 

Where it's required, they can use their knowledge to aid in your team's growth alongside their personal and professional development.

4. EMAIL MARKETING BENCHMARKING

Benchmarking in email marketing is there to provide guidance as to what is an industry-accepted standard and give an indication as to where your company stands in comparison.

When used appropriately, benchmarking figures can highlight where you rank in terms of industry competitors. This information can then help you to generate ideas as to what you need to do to catch up, or in an ideal scenario, work out what you are doing right and how to stay ahead.

An email marketing consultant can help you understand this to a better degree so you can see how you stack up and are performing against your competitors.

5. EMAIL MARKETING DATABASE MANAGEMENT

It's vital you keep your email marketing database in good health. An email marketing consultant can help you do this and ensure you don't fall foul of data privacy regulations.

From advanced segmentation through to best practice data management, they can help keep your database in great shape and ensure it gives you the results you're looking for.

Regular data audits help to consolidate multiple email marketing lists, which not only helps to manage data more efficiently, in many cases, it reduces the amount being spent on email marketing platforms (who charge by number of records, not number of unique contacts).

Not only will a consultant help consolidate the data, they can also help you ‘clean' the data by suppressing inactive contacts (maybe putting them into a reactivation programme), reducing ongoing costs and protecting data integrity. This in turn helps maintain deliverability.

This data management support can also include running testing to identify and remove rogue entries put in there by spam-bots, essentially clearing out the duds, which can often include spam traps and therefore protecting your sender reputation.

What's more, they can help you develop a growth strategy that's effective and compliant with the latest data regulations like GDPR and ePrivacy.

NEXT STEPS

Since 2003 we've helped businesses - ranging from investment banks to luxury hotels and everything in between - create industry-leading email marketing programmes to fuel growth, drive revenues, and build lasting relationships.  

We draw on this experience every day in design, development, content and consultancy to make sure our clients always see a return on their investment.

If you need expert consultancy to help take your email marketing to the next level, we'd love to help.