Top Email Marketing Agencies

What Is An Email Marketing Agency?

This agency specializes in using email marketing to boost sales, attain brand loyalty and increase returning customers.

In other words, these agencies use email as a channel to promote brands, their products and/or services.

Their job is to send targeted email messages to prospects and customers to help brands achieve specific objectives.

What Do Email Marketing Companies Do?

These companies provide services that can help brands automate and execute strategic email campaigns.

These may include but are not limited to:

• Performing email audit: It is the first step these agencies take before they develop a strategy that gives them a clear picture of what the client does well, their challenges and areas of opportunities based on what they’ve done in the past. Understanding past creative directions and distribution strategies is key to planning for future improvements.
• Creating an email strategy: During the strategic planning, they will do audience research that helps pinpoint the most effective messaging, offers and timing, among other things. The strategy will identify automation opportunities, ideas for gaining subscribers and outline the basic best practices, such as double opt-in and transactional emails.
• Developing email templates: These specialized agencies offer template design and development services to organizations that don’t want to have their campaigns fully managed and that don’t have the expertise in-house to do their own. These templates can be reused in a variety of scenarios by swapping out text, images and links.
• Producing custom creatives: If a template won’t do the work, there’s always the option to produce custom creatives. These may include content, design and development or some mix of the three depending on the client’s needs.
• Managing email campaigns: This includes full-service campaign execution and management, either on an ongoing basis for the entirety of the client’s email needs or on a more limited basis for a one-time campaign.
• Tracking performance: Following the best practices alone does not ensure success unless these specialized agencies track campaign performance. Tracking key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversions, spam complaints, engagement and more, contribute to continued business success. This is why every top company pays close attention to analytics in order to ensure campaign effectiveness.

Email Marketing vs. Marketing Automation: What’s The Difference?

Email marketing is a digital marketing channel that focuses on creating email campaigns to help brands connect with their target audiences.

There are different types of email campaigns including:

• Welcome email series
• Email blasts
• Newsletters
• Seasonal promotions
• Post-purchase drips
• Connect-via-social campaigns
• Abandoned cart emails
• Win-back campaigns
• And more

Instead, it refers to the software used by marketing agencies to streamline repetitive tasks on various channels, including social media, websites and email marketing.

Some of the best automation platforms are:

• Mailchimp
• Constant Contact
• Sendinblue
• Drip
• AWeber
• ConvertKit
• ActiveCampaign
• MailerLite
• BombBomb

How Much Do Email Marketing Firms Charge For Their Services?

These agencies typically price their services on hourly rates and time estimates. While each company comes in different sizes and shapes, the cost will vary depending on several factors including:

• The type of services you need
• The project complexity
• The company stature
• The company size

You can expect to see rates that go as low as $15 and as high as $300 per hour.

When it comes to project-based fees, the lowest most of these agencies would take up is $1,000.

However, there are some companies that provide exclusive services and would accept projects valued at $10,000 - $50,000.

Why Hire An Email Marketing Agency?

According to DMA, email is the most important marketing channel for businesses. In fact, for every $1 they spend on it, they can expect an average return of $42.

This is why it's one of the most cost-effective marketing methods, even more budget-friendly than social media marketing or display advertising.

However, DMA also shows that the most significant challenges that businesses face when executing these types of marketing campaigns are:

• Limited internal resources (40%)
• Lack of data (30%)
• Lack of strategy (25%)
• Ancient internal processes (22%)
• Lack of content (20%)

...which is something that these specialized firms can help with.

What’s more, according to Statista, in 2019 there were 3.9 billion email users and the number is projected to grow to 4.48 billion in 2024.

However, while an increased number of people use email, in 2019 the average open rate was 22.1%. When compared to 2018, that is a drop of 8%.

A survey by OptinMonster shows that 47% of email recipients decide whether to open an email or not based on its subject line.

69% of them, on the other hand, claim that they would report an email as spam based on the subject line only.

A professional agency knows the tactics that will bring higher open rates, click-through rates and conversions.

How To Choose The Best Email Marketing Agency For Your Business

While choosing the best partner agency for your business needs can be a tricky process, our comprehensive table of the leading agencies can make your search easier.

The following tips can also help:

Tip #1: Understand Their Strategic Approach

For email campaigns to be successful, they should follow a very specific strategy.

The best companies establish a competitive edge by emphasizing the research and discovery exercises they conduct as part of every customer engagement.

This ensures that campaigns are developed on a foundation of audience insights, deep brand understanding and measurable goals for anticipated outcomes.

In addition, a key component of every strategy should be personalization.

Personalized email campaigns drive better responses from subscribers and achieve higher ROI. In fact, personalized email subject lines generate 50% higher open rates.

This is why it is the most popular tactic among marketers.

It’s in your company’s best interest to work with an agency that makes personalization a core function of their approach.

Tip #2: Learn If They Track Campaign Performance

Email is a powerful marketing tool that provides key data on user behavior and engagement.

These experts know how valuable this data is and they use it to their advantage to continuously hone and optimize their client campaigns.

You should expect the agency you hire to position itself on its deep analytical abilities and skill at drawing meaningful insights from vast swaths of data.

Keen analysis of campaign performance indicators (open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, etc.) is the key to constantly bettering the client’s messaging, offers and email newsletter creative, which ultimately generate better returns in the long run.

Tip #3: Find Out If They Perform A/B Testing

A key characteristic that the best agency should possess is the ability to regularly conduct A/B testing.

It is the type of testing that helps marketers understand what type of emails and components perform better.

Regularly testing elements like subject lines, call-to-actions (CTAs), email list segmentation and creative direction will improve campaign outcomes.

This is why you should search for a partner that makes testing a core function of their service to their customers.

10 Questions To Ask Email Marketing Companies 

To ensure that a potential agency is fully qualified and suits your needs, make sure you ask the following questions:

1. What is your strategic approach? How do you create your campaigns?
2. What automation platform do you use?
3. Do you measure campaign performance and what metrics do you track?
4. Will you send us analytical reports? What will they include?
5. Do you have a team in place to facilitate APIs or other integrations?
6. Does the platform you use integrates with CRMs, social media accounts, management systems or websites?
7. Can it integrate with Google Analytics or other reporting systems?
8. How often will we communicate and who will be the point of contact?
9. Are we going to be involved in the project and how?
10. How much will your services cost?

Takeaways On Email Marketing Agencies

These specialized agencies can help your business generate brand awareness, increase loyalty and boost sales with the help of email as a marketing channel.

They approximately charge between $15 and $300 per hour for their projects.

Consider outsourcing the services of these specialists because they can help you execute email strategies without facing any challenges.

To choose the best partner for your business needs be sure to:

• Understand their strategic approach
• Learn if they track campaign performance
• Find out if they perform A/B testing

Best of luck!

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