So, you’re interested in using email marketing to grow your business but you’re not sure where to start. Should you hire an email marketing consultant?
Email marketing is an excellent way to utilize digital marketing to grow your business. It helps you build relationships with your clients and potential clients, drive leads and sales, and truly maximize your marketing strategy efforts. With an average return on investment of 38x, you want to be investing your time and money into email marketing.
But, email marketing can be difficult to get the hang of, especially if you’re just starting out. In order to start building effective email marketing campaigns, you need to understand how to brand your emails, what kind of content you need to be sending, the prime timing of your emails, how to include call to actions, and creating and maintaining a healthy email list.
Sound like a lot of work? It sure is. You can take the time to teach yourself the best email marketing practices through online blogs, courses, webinars, training, and other resources, but this is a big time investment. Not to mention all the time it will take to build the campaigns after you’ve gained the knowledge.
44% of companies don’t invest in email marketing because they’re overwhelmed by the daunting task of gaining the necessary experience and resources to build healthy and effective email marketing campaigns.
Rather than miss out on the benefits of email marketing, you should consider hiring an email marketing consultant to advise your marketing campaigns.
Benefits of Hiring an Email Marketing Consultant
#1 An email marketing consultant will make it easier for you to utilize email marketing
You may have writing expertise, or you may not, but writing a personal or business email is entirely different from writing a marketing email. It takes a unique skill set in order to write effective marketing emails.
You can take the time to learn how to write marketing emails, but you may not have a whole lot of extra time. If you don’t already have writing skills and you don’t have time to invest in learning how to write marketing emails, you should consider hiring an email marketing consultant.
Having an email marketing consultant to guide you through your marketing campaigns and to answer any questions will simplify your email marketing efforts and will ultimately save you time and energy that you can invest into other areas of your business.
#2 You can get better email marketing results
If you’ve sent out a few emails and you’re not seeing the same return on investment that other companies seem to be boasting about, you probably feel a little lost. Maybe you’re wondering if email marketing is even worth it.
On the other hand, email marketing consultants have years of experience and a specialized toolset. They’ll likely know exactly why you aren’t seeing results. They can help you with your headlines, pre-headers, calls-to-action and more, to help improve your results and maximize your campaigns.
#3 You can stop wasting your time and money
If you’re new to email marketing, expect to encounter a big learning curve. In order to understand all of the ins and outs of the business, you’ll need to invest A LOT of time and money into learning. In the meantime, you’re likely sending out emails that aren’t effective. So now you’re not only wasting your time, but also your money, as you’re not able to truly maximize your email marketing tools.
Hiring an email marketing consultant does cost money, but you’re saving your time and you have the benefit of knowing that a good marketing consultant will create effective campaigns that are successful from the get-go.
#4 You can free up time to get out of the trenches and start focusing on your vision for your brand and sales strategy.
Most marketing teams are already swamped. Building effective marketing campaigns takes dedication and time.
If you’re a marketing director, you don’t want to get caught up in the minute details of implementing marketing campaigns, like email list segmentation, automation, email drips, analytics, and personalization. Your time is better spent focusing on the big picture, like the vision for your brand and your overall sales strategies.
Investing in an email marketing consultant will not only free up your time, but also your marketing team’s time, so that you can focus on other important aspects of growing your business and brand.
Popular Email Marketing Services
Here are our top recommendations for email marketing services. If you haven’t already purchased an email marketing provider, definitely consider one of the following for your digital marketing needs.
- Constant Contact
- SendinBlue
- MailerLite
- HubSpot
- Moosend
- GetResponse
- AWeber
- Omnisend
- ConvertKit
- Drip
Email Marketing Consultation Services: How to Hire a Consultant
If you’ve invested in one of the aforementioned email marketing services, but don’t feel like you’re getting the guidance that you need, it’s time to find an email marketing consultant. But how do you do this and how much does it cost? Well, you can either hire an email marketing consultant freelancer, or you can hire a full-service marketing agency.
- Hire an independent marketing consultant from a freelancing website like UpWork.
- Hire an email marketing consultant agency like:
- Ignite Visibility
- Disruptive Advertising
- Inbox Army, LLC
Price Comparison for Email Marketing Consultation Services
Let’s compare our top three marketing consulting agencies and freelancing opportunities to see which option is right for you and your business.
| Freelancers | Ignite Visibility | Disruptive Advertising | Inbox Army, LLC | |
| Price | Prices vary from $50 – $250 per hour | $100 – $149 per hour | $150 – $199 per hour | Undisclosed |
| Min. Project Size | Varies by freelancer | $1,000 + | $1,000 + | $1,000 + |
| Location | Varies | San Diego, CA | Pleasant Grove, UT | Grapevine, TX |
| Employees | Typically 1 solo freelancer | 50 – 249 | 50 – 249 | 10 – 49 |
Questions to Ask When Hiring an Email Marketing Consultant
Ask them to describe their email marketing approach.
This is a great way to test a consultant’s knowledge about email marketing. A good consultant should be able to explain their unique approach with their own rules, user expectations, and various design aspects and considerations.
Ask them how they will personalize your email campaigns.
You want to make sure that you pick a consultant that has experience in personalizing email campaigns to specific email recipients. You don’t want to invest in a consultant that uses a one-size-fits-all approach, because that’s not how to build effective email campaigns.
A good consultant will help you personalize your campaigns through list segmentation and selecting the right messaging to send to each group of clients.
Ask them whether or not they will nurture prospects and how they plan to do so.
Nurturing prospects is the art of providing your email subscribers with intentional information and calls-to-action depending on their previous interactions with your business website.
You’ll want to cater messages to prospects that are within every stage of the buying cycle. These types of messages are often referred to as automated emails. A good email marketing consultant will have creative ideas for automated messaging and should be able to easily demonstrate these ideas to you.
Ask them about campaign testing and what their approach is.
There are methods for testing your email marketing strategies prior to implementing them. A/B testing is a popular method for testing different variations of your messaging for effectiveness. Email marketing consultants should understand the value of testing and should run these tests with business understanding and return on investment at the forefront.
Ask how they will measure campaign results.
Data is KEY in measuring success, especially when it comes to email marketing. There are numerous methods to tracking effectiveness, but a few metrics that you should consider asking about are bounce rates, delivery rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
A good marketing consultant should be able to deliver these metrics to you and analyze them in order to inform their marketing strategy to determine what is working and what is not.
In summary, email marketing consultants are a great investment when you lack email marketing awareness, time, resources, and want to see better results. While email marketing is an excellent digital tool, it can be quite overwhelming, especially with all of the other endeavors you and your marketing team are exploring.
A marketing consultant simplifies the email marketing process and provides you with expert intell to guide you through the best practices, maximizing your campaigns, and improving your return on investment.
You can find a freelance marketing consultant on sites like Upwork, or you can invest in a full-fledged marketing agency that should hopefully specialize their campaigns to your unique business needs.
Whatever route you decide to take, whether it be to educate yourself on email marketing practices or to invest in a consultant, the key to effective email marketing is to do it right. Make sure you’ve taken the time, money, and energy, to run a successful campaign, and find out why 30% of marketers cite email marketing as having the highest ROI.