What You Still Need to Know When You Outsource Email Marketing

Even when you’re outsourcing all or part of your marketing tactics, you still need to ask to see results — and know what to look for.

In Part 1 of “What You Still Need to Know When You Outsource All of Your Digital Marketing,” we talked about the e-commerce company that began their plan to have a virtual office where every employee worked remotely several years before COVID. They were using an outside marketing agency – that was also staffed with all remote independent contractors — as essentially their “marketing department.”

But there was no tracking of results. And the SVP Sales and Marketing complained that he had to spend too much time editing the content. Enter the “marketing strategist” – to bring a new focus on results, strengthen all of the sales-focused copy, and see if we could build a continuous improvement plan.

Why aren’t we constantly testing in email? And why don’t we know our conversion rate?

I asked the agency, “What are our email results?”  They sent me reports of Open Rate and Click-Through Rate.

Why do so many agencies still think “Open Rate” has anything to do with whether the recipient actually “opened” the email? It doesn’t. The technology currently doesn’t exist to identify whether an email in an inbox was actually viewed.

“Open Rate” means any image in the email was pulled from the server. But that “open” happens automatically with many email software systems if the recipient has “images on” as the default. If the recipient has “images off” and never turns them on, that recipient could actually view your email 50 times and unless they click something within the email, an “Open” will never be recorded.

Further, because more than 50% of emails are now opened on a mobile phone, no “Opens” register – because images aren’t included in most phones.

Click-Through Rate tells you how effective the individual email’s copy (message and offer, if there is one) was at getting someone to learn more.

In this agency’s case, they were managing email programs for an ecommerce company – but weren’t tracking sales.

How can you manage any marketing effort for an ecommerce company – and not track sales?

“What’s our conversion rate?” They weren’t tracking it. They were in a “production” mode – if the client needed a project done, they just got it done and moved onto the next project.

Are your outside resources using email to test messaging and offers?

I asked, “Have you done any email testing before? What have we learned?” The agency owner told me the client hadn’t wanted to do that.

I suggested that we start testing different email Subject Lines and messages to learn which approaches work best.

I wrote the email sales messages. But we had no tracking in Google Analytics.  So, the agency email team and I worked together to figure out how to get the email system to include tracking links – and exactly how that information was going to appear in Google Analytics. (The email system, Act-On, uses Subject Line as “Campaign” in Google UTM tracking. So, as we handle email programs by state, we have to remember to put the state name in the Subject Line, so we can track results.)

After an email campaign concludes, the agency runs reports from the email system – showing me how many emails were delivered per message version. I’m interested in “delivered” only – how many emails did we actually have a chance at getting a click.

From Google Analytics, I now pull sales and visitors by message, and translate that into CTR and visitor conversion.

Among the 7 messages in each campaign series, we choose the lowest performers to rewrite for use in the next state.

With this plan, the client knows we’re tracking results and constantly working as a team to improve with each email effort.

Outsourcing doesn’t mean auto-pilot

Challenge your outside resources to manage by results. Cost per sale for ecommerce and cost per lead for lead generation. Email programs should be judged by click-through rate and final conversion rate to sales (for ecommerce).

Many elements of digital marketing are easily testable – and email messaging and offers are some of the easiest to test. You can easily use email to test headlines, messaging approach, benefits, offer – before you rollout a larger campaign.

Ask your outside resources what they’ve learned about the most effective approaches. If they’re spending your marketing budget wisely — and not just “getting the project done,” – they should know exactly which words, headlines, benefits, and offers are doing better than other approaches.

If they don’t, it may be time for new outside resources.

Need to know more about the tactical areas of digital marketing?  Our new BEST-SELLING book, “The Results Obsession: ROI-Focused Digital Strategies to Transform Your Marketing” is available on Amazon!

Learn more about The Results Obsession and see the Table of Contents

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