How an Email Marketing Consultant Enhances Digital Strategy

Getting Started With an Email Marketing Consultant

Although there are numerous aspects to digital marketing, honing in on your email marketing strategy with an email marketing consultant is a great way to enhance a foundational aspect of your collective marketing campaigns. 

In an era of COVID and the shift to a remote/digital workforce, digital marketing channels are becoming more difficult to compete for the already shrinking attention span of their target audience. Evolving with these increasing challenges is a crucial step toward remaining competitive in the years to come. 

This discussion will break down a number of ways that email marketing consulting services can help you gain the most out of your email marketing channel and ultimately drive other aspects of your strategy in the process; Further increasing your return on investment. 

Initial Audit

Prior to kicking off your first email marketing campaign, an email marketing consultant will perform an audit on:

• Existing tools that you’re using

Your existing tools consist of which email marketing platform you’re using, how effectively it’s being used, and if it appropriately integrates with other platforms. 

Chances are you probably already have the tools you need to deploy your email campaigns, but just need a little help getting the most out of those tools. 

If you need a little help choosing, this article does a great job of breaking down your different options based on features and price point. 

• Sequence of your workflow rules

The integration with other platforms is key because it helps you provide a consistent user-experience. For example, you’ll be much better off if your email marketing software easily integrates with your email domain (most will) and website. 

The sequence of your workflows will ensure that your target audience receives the right email, at the right time, based on the right information that will appeal most to them (this will be developed over time as you better understand the audience). 

What these workflows enable is crucial in the years to come, AUTOMATION. 

• Current messaging 

Once your tools and workflows are analyzed, it’s time to dive directly into the campaign messaging to ensure that it’s grabbing user-attention and effectively communicating your desired message to the audience. 

Developing the right messaging comes with a mix of analyzing past performance, personalization, and creative copy that will help your email stand out among the hundreds that your end-user is already receiving per day. 

• Prior campaign performance

Your email marketing consultant should also seek to understand past campaign performance. Just because you’re leveraging a consultant doesn’t mean that you’ve been doing it all wrong this whole time; Insight on past performance can help you understand what has worked well, and what can use some improvement. 

Further developing your email campaigns is a continuously evolving process (as is almost everything else in marketing) and you should expect to see greater results with each campaign that is run as adjustments are being made. 

Enhanced Workflow Rules for Automation

Optimized Sequential Workflow Rules

According to industry leading CRM, Salesforce, “Workflow lets you automate standard internal procedures and processes to save time across your org.” Experienced email marketing consultants will help you enhance these rules to get the most out of your email campaigns. 

The image above shows a sequence of who to send the email to, when to send which email based on the action your audience took, and even send internal messages to your team based on the action.

For example, if someone replies to an email, you’ll want to immediately notify a colleague to reach out to that contact while the topic at hand is still at the top of their mind.

Or, maybe you want to send a reminder email after discovering that after a week, a contact in your audience still hasn’t even opened the email. You can completely automate the follow-up that is otherwise very difficult to stay on top of when it has to be completed manually. 

The most enticing part of setting your sequential email workflows is that the tasks are completely automated based on a set of predetermined logic that meets your business goals. This is where an email marketing consultant can be most handy as they’ve had experience working with the logic and understand what drives the best results. 

Over time you’ll watch your results grow as you become more effective within your email marketing campaigns. 

Your ultimate goal is to take the manual guesswork out of your email marketing campaigns and leverage tactical automation to gain the best result; Sequential workflow rules greatly help this effort. 

Optimize Your Messaging

By leveraging a combination of data from your prior campaigns’ performance, industry best practices, and finally a little creative copy, you’ll enhance your overall email messaging. 

According to campaign monitor, over 269 billion + emails are sent a day. With email marketing being such a populated channel, you’ll have to be creative in order to capture attention and make your messaging stand out. 

Creative Copy

Because you’re no longer able to just include a contact first name within the email to make your message seem personalized, you’ll have to do much more homework prior to kicking off your campaigns. 

A few ways to better understand your target audience include but aren’t limited to:

• Social media research (birthdays, interests, hobbies, alma mater)
• Geographical research (local restaurants, landmarks, scenery) 
• Trending news and topics (new movie releases, upcoming sporting events, the newest meme)

By finding a way to incorporate any of the information above topics that you gathered from genuine effort and research, you’ll greatly increase your chance of success; Simply put, your competitors probably aren’t spending the time and effort doing it. 

Less is More

TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) is common among copy within content. Organizations struggle to fit all of their offerings and value-add into a page so they opt for including as much information as they can and bundled all together. 

Inundating your messaging with wordy copy detracts the reader to the point where your messaging is written off before it was even given a chance. 

An effective email marketing consultant will use a ‘less is more’ approach to make your value clear immediately, easy to navigate/skim through, and get straight to the point. 

CTA’s

Finally within your messaging, enabling a healthy balance of call to action buttons so that the user knows exactly how to get in touch or gain more information will complement your creative copy. 

Ensure that:

• The button or link stands out
• It’s easily accessible 
• There aren’t so many that the user gets confused

The Takeaway

An email marketing consultant can help you with your overall strategy; Whether that be completely outsourcing your tasks or providing guidance during your implementation and deployment of your campaigns.

3 aspects to keep in mind before hiring a consultant to help reach your goals:

• Are they using creative copy?
• Is the message simplified?
• Are they leveraging prior campaign data for better decision making?

“The goal is to turn data into information and information into insight.” – Carly Fiorina, former chief executive officer, Hewlett Packard.

Let us know how your email campaigns are performing, or if you’re looking for an email consultant to provide a little guidance along the way.