If you are wondering as to why hire a marketing agency for eCommerce marketing, here’s the short answer: people’s productivity makes a difference to your “cash power”. It enables a confluence of the best minds working together towards a common goal.
Reach. Branding. Traffic. Leads. Sales. Revenue. Profits.
Michael E. Gerber in his bestselling book “E-Myth Mastery” writes:
“Going to work on your business, rather than in your business, is the key to building a world-class company”
Notice the emphasis on the word “on”? It’s the single most important thing that differentiates whether you control your business or if your business controls you.
Further in the book, Michael also writes:
“Your staffing is dictated by your organizational strategy, your systems development plan, your business plan, and your budget”
Here’s why you should hire a marketing agency for eCommerce marketing:
Plan Workload Capacity and an Expect Marketing Calendar
Typically, businesses (including eCommerce businesses) have too many moving parts, people, resource allocation, and management.
Most eCommerce businesses, meanwhile, are run with solo entrepreneurs and small teams at best. Either way, you’ll do better handing over work to a marketing agency to help push your business forward since you can avoid having to “seek, hire, train, fire, hire, fire, train” cycle.
With an agency to do all the heavy-lifting for the nuanced work that modern-day marketing involves -- with it being 1/3rd science, 1/3rd art, and 1/3rd-technology -- you can plan your workload, resources, time, and manage business better.
Master Your Acquisition Channels
With the marketing agency working alongside, you’ll be able to take a holistic approach to marketing, connect the dots, and start to internalize the workings of each acquisition channel for e-commerce marketing.
How do ads work, and why do they work the way they? What are some of the trending new social media platforms and do they make sense to be active there for new customer acquisition?
What are the other marketing channels and opportunities that we are una
Identify Knowledge Gaps for Expertise
You know what you know. Agencies know what they know. While you know your business inside out, agencies know theirs.
The way it works with marketing agencies -- especially in the case of having agencies manage marketing for eCommerce -- is to identify knowledge gaps, rely on their expertise to execute campaigns faster, and find creative solutions to everyday marketing-related issues you’ll face.
Identify time constraints for things you already know how to do
Calculate ROI potential
With some parts of marketing offloaded and outsourced (such as email marketing strategy and execution), your business is left with saved time, resources, and a lot more wiggle room for everything else that you should focus on -- such as customer support, strategic growth, partnerships, and so much more.
But even with email marketing agencies, thanks to the way email marketing programs are structured, you can start measuring the ROI (Return on Investment) of email marketing for eCommerce.
You can also start benchmarking your own results against that of your competitors and also see how you fare with regards to the industry or niche your e-commerce business operates in.
Use Tools to Challenge Status Quo and Manage your Email Marketing Agency
Most agencies tend to certain email marketing strategies that they roll out as soon as businesses sign up with them.
On the same note, agencies tend to use a fixed set of email marketing tools, analytics tools, and other elements of the marketing stack -- that’s their normal.
While you don’t have to micromanage agencies and their work (unless performance goes south), it’s a good idea to “challenge” the relationship itself.
You can partake in strategy discussions, provide ideas to agency managers to make your campaigns run better, discuss budgeting, and also let them know about new tools that can be used.
With tools such as Panoramata, for instance, your team and the email marketing agencies themselves will always have inspiration, benchmarking, swipe lists, and collections that be used for creatives, ads, email marketing design, email marketing copy, email subject lines, frequency of emails, and so much more.
You not only gather inspiration (on a rolling basis), but also have everything you need for competitor email marketing tracking.
Consider Growth Goals [to communicate to an agency]
You know your business best. As an entrepreneur, you’ll relay the most important goals that your email marketing agency should strive to achieve on your behalf. More often than not, your business goals need to be reiterated.
Apart from email marketing KPIs (that you’ll measure), you’ll be able to advance towards other goals that could be a little less tangible than KPIs such as open rates, click rates, and revenue.
Once you consider (and share) overall growth roles with your potential email marketing agency, managers who oversee your business will be better equipped with your brand voice. They’ll be able to align resources to match your ultimate goals and work towards most of the goals cohesively.
