They say that the answers you get will depend on the questions you ask. More often, this simple tenet is ignored -- in life and with regards to business management.
If you are looking to hire an email marketing agency for your e-commerce business growth, there are certain questions you ask. The answers will make or break just how this relationship will work out with the agency.
Here are some of the questions you must ask (print this out, laminate it):
What do you believe is achievable in terms of performance?
Email marketing is truly as performance-oriented and result-oriented as it gets, maybe only next to paid ads marketing (but with a whole set of goals, for the agency that knows what it's doing).
The agency you are talking to would have a basic idea of how many subscribers and/or customers are likely to sign up through lead generation elements on e-commerce sites, the industry averages, the benchmarks, and more.
So, the simple question to ask is this: What’s a reasonable level of results (across parameters) that we can expect?
What’s the timeline for these goals?
Without timelines, most goals are worth nothing.
You know that, but does the agency in question know it too? For every aspect of email marketing management, there ought to be timelines.
Tasks for projects have timelines.
So, how long does it take to create lead magnets? What’s the time frame to create pop-ups, sticky-bars, and slide-ins? What’s the time for creating a basic set of automations with email marketing?
How well do you know our niche? Do you work with other brands in our industry?
While it’s not critical that the “agency must have previous experience working with exactly the same kind of business” before, it should have experience and past history of working with e-commerce nonetheless.
Email marketing for e-commerce isn’t exactly the same as email marketing done for an IT company or a SaaS business (even though that’s e-commerce as well).
It helps if the agency knows and understands your target audience as much as you do.
It helps if your email marketing team knows the pulse of customers even before a single creative or an email is created.
Do you produce creative/designs in house? Examples of creative designs?
Email marketing agencies can choose to source designs however they want.
But you’d still want to know how your potential email marketing agency creates email designs, email copy, and more. Are the designs created by in-house teams?
Or are the designs outsourced? Does the agency collective put its brain for designs or are these generated by AI?
You’ll do well to know before signing on for a ride.
How do you measure success? What does your reporting look like?
If your email marketing agency insists on sending reports that only show you how many emails have been delivered, how many opens were opened, and the average click-rate from your campaigns, you’d want to think again.
Email marketing should lead to revenue ($$$). Sales. Actual, tangible, numbers showing up on your e-commerce dashboard attributed to the email marketing channel.
Before anything else, these numbers should show up (thanks to email broadcasts, email automations, retargeting emails, and so on).
Beyond that, all other numbers are welcome. So, how exactly does an email marketing client report look like, coming from the agency?
How do you optimize ads and email performances over time?
Many businesses think that paid ads and email marketing campaigns are “set it and forget it” -- these campaigns are anything but that.
Each campaign takes work to create, set up,and roll out. Once campaigns are live, you’d have to measure results, test campaigns out, tweak, and relaunch.
It’s the same for every result-oriented marketing channel. So, how does your agency deal with optimization, campaign management (yes, even for email marketing), email performance, and so on over a period of time?
How do you gather inspiration and how can we decide on campaigns together?
You’d want to know how and where your agency gets creative inspiration.
Where do they learn from? What are their top sources for getting ideas, understanding email marketing offers, using various angles in email campaigns, and more.
Note: If your agency doesn’t know, recommend Panoramata -- a tool that can help you challenge the relationship with your agency while allowing you to pick from the best email campaigns, ads, and email examples on boards (and lists) for inspiration.
How well do you know our competitors?
Any email marketing agency that does some homework will know about your competitors, even before any work starts. If they don’t, that’s a red flag.
Ideally, they’d have a bunch of tools to help them quickly identify your competitors (or competitors for practically any business, in any industry or vertical) using several tools available in the market. Plus, there are also social media listening tools and brand monitoring tools that help.
If you’d like to add to the list, especially for email marketing competitor analysis, Panoramata helps compare any brand vs. the competition
What tools do you use?
Email marketing agencies have their own set of tools to work with (and to help deliver email marketing campaigns for clients).
Some of the normal ones used are a clutch of email marketing platforms they have access to, testing platforms like Litmus, and more.
Do ask about some of the tools your email marketing agency uses.
