Questions to Ask Your Next Email Marketing Firm

Read on for the key skills and tactics you’ll want to consider as you choose an email-marketing firm to help you get your email marketing efforts to the next level.

• Are you current on the latest technologies? Be sure to ask your prospective firm about their thoughts on some of the most important, recent developments for driving the best email-marketing results. There are always new best practices to be aware of.
• How do you build and manage lists? Your consultant must know how to build a list, manage its growth, and work through any challenges of unsubscribes, spam complaints, and inactive user issues. They must do more than assume you have a list—it’s his or her business to help you build that list.
• What do you do to manage deliverability? Your new firm should outline an IP warming strategy, periodically purge your list of inactive subscribers, establish a tight opt-in process and create a preference center, to name a few very important tactics for managing deliverability.
• Do you build and optimize customer journeys? Customer journeys and data-driven lifecycle messaging are key to long-term email marketing ROI. Partner with a firm who offers journey automation engines that automatically move customers to the most optimized flow — all based on their behavioral and transactional interactions with your brand.
• What is your opinion on integrating social media with email marketing? Email becomes even more powerful when integrated with social media campaigns. Not only can social drive list growth, but it can greatly enhance the customer experience and provide valuable insight into your customer base. Be sure your new firm has a grasp on social.
• What is your testing process? The things you can test within an email campaign are seemingly endless, so it’s important to establish key performance metrics. Metrics should include much more than opens, click-throughs, and unsubscribes. You’ll also want to include testing subject lines, template styles, body copy, calls to action, dynamic content or list segmentation, for example.
• What does “full-service” really mean? Every firm will have their own definition of full-service. Will they provide software consultation, creative, account management? Work jointly with your marketing team on product insight? Organize all management, testing and deployment logistics? Monitor your metrics and suggest campaign improvements? Be sure to ask!

Whether you’re looking for full-service email marketing—software, creative, account management, and more—self-service, or a collaborative relationship that falls somewhere in-between, Vertex offers several enterprise-level email service providers and a team of professionals that will help you discover an email marketing solution that fits your exact business needs.

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Vertex Communication Group, headquartered out of Frederick MD, is in a unique space within the digital marketing arena. With over 15 years in the industry, Vertex can supplement marketing teams by offering full-service email marketing to include strategy, design, production, QA, execution and delivery.