One of the biggest drivers of new age ecommerce businesses or D2C (Direct to consumer) businesses has been the evolution of marketing. From the days of newspaper and TV ads, we’ve come a long way. Now, every smartphone is a potential advertising board and everyone from a chef to a home decor blogger is a potential ad model. So it stands to reason that marketing is one of the most, if not the most crucial function of an ecommerce business.

But when most businesses think of marketing, they think of acquiring new customers through paid ads – whether on Google or social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. And one of the most crucial marketing functions — retention marketing – which is essentially getting more sales out of potential and existing customers oft gets ignored or the businesses take it inhouse mistaking it to be easy and non specialized.

While acquiring customers through paid ads may be getting harder and more expensive by the day, retention marketing through email, sms, push and others still remains a thoroughly ROI-positive marketing arm, and ecommerce stores get 20-30% extra revenue from email marketing. This is of course provided it’s done strategically and consistently.

This is why ecommerce businesses especially D2C stores making $20K and above in revenue, should consider hiring an agency instead of going inhouse: Here’s a few points to consider when making the decision 

1. Expertise and Resources:

Does your team have the required expertise and available resources in email marketing? Email marketing is not just writing an email and shooting it people en masse. A well-engined email marketing program needs strategists, people with ecommerce experience, copywriters, designers, HTML experts and more. It may not be possible or time-efficient for your time to have all the skills to perform email marketing in a way that brings the revenue it potentially can. However, an agency can provide specialized skills and dedicated resources to handle your email marketing campaigns. 

2. Specialization:

Email is a highly specialized function: This is where most businesses lose the plot. They start off well, setting up an ESP and integrating some automations, but usually they’re not set up correctly or fully, leaving cracks in the marketing mix. A badly done email flow is actually worse than having no email marketing in place. An email marketing agency lives and breathes email and knows the inner hacks and tricks and important metrics like spam rate, deliverability, domain warming and lot more. 

3. Cost Considerations:

On the face of it, hiring an email marketing agency sounds like an additional cost commitment that you may not deem worth it. But consider the cost of investments in personnel, training, email marketing software, and other tools. Not to mention, email marketing mistakes can cost huge in terms of revenue and worse, reputation loss! Sometimes it’s better to go with expensive specialists than cheap novices. 

4. Scalability and Flexibility:

Evaluate your business’s growth potential and the scalability of your email marketing efforts. An agency can often adapt quickly to scale campaigns based on your needs and market conditions. They can leverage their expertise and resources to handle increased volumes of email marketing. In-house teams may face challenges scaling up if they lack the necessary capacity or face resource constraints. 

5. Industry Knowledge and Best Practices:

Email marketing agencies typically work with multiple clients across various industries; allowing them to gain insights and knowledge about the latest trends, strategies, and best practices. They glean from experiences and their mistakes and leverage it to improve the work for your account. They stay updated with changes in email deliverability, engagement metrics, and regulatory compliance. If you value industry-specific expertise and want to stay ahead of the curve; an agency can provide valuable insights and optimize your campaigns accordingly.

6. Bigger incentive to perform well and get your results

An agency’s business is your business. Their potential to remain partnered with your business depends on their performance and results your business gets with them. They stand to gain good reviews and more business by doing good work. Hence, they have a vested interest in putting in their best work to get you the results. While similar can be said of employees, sometimes they can tend to ignore a few things; and get a bit too settled in their roles to go the extra mile. In these cases, having an agency really helps get the most ownership and responsibility on the crucial email marketing function. 

7. An agency gives stability

An agency is a business and is here to stay. While just like your business, they’re also affected by employee turnover, leaves and other disruptions in business; the onus of having a workflow assigned to your business is on them. On the other hand, having an email team inhouse means opening a crucial marketing function to the risk of an employee leaving suddenly; sick leaves or other human-resource related issues that could interrupt and negatively affect your business. 

While the decision to hire an email marketing agency or going inhouse is a big one, eventually; as you scale you will need the stability, scalability and the specialization that comes with an agency. However, take your time with choosing the best agency that fits your needs, go on discovery calls with them; ask the right questions, make sure your agency performs these 5 crucial functions; and then sit back and relax while they do all the work.