You’re almost sure you don’t want these guys any longer. You’ve got reasons, and you’re almost confident you can share them with the agency representatives. 

As an email marketing agency ourselves, we’ve sat at those awkward, ahem-filled meetings and Zoom calls quite a number of times. We’ve been let go as well. We’re not perfect after all. But our goal has been to learn from our mistakes. 

Yes, it’s easier said than done. Ultimately, if you, the client, are not getting any value from your current agency, it’s time to move on!

So we’re going to share nine signs you should switch your email marketing agency. 

Our purpose is not exactly to enlighten you, but to reinforce what you may already feel to be true. You want to verify whether you’re on the right track; well, if you’ve been seeing these signs together of late, you are. 

• Poor, strained collaboration
  
• Communication Breakdown
  
• Yet Another Subtle Wave-off
  
• Poor Grasp of Your Industry
  
• High Staff Turnover Rate
  
• Lack of Honest Reporting
  
• Mission Creep, Budget Bloat
  
• Retarded Martech Adoption
  
• Inadequate Business Success

1. Poor, Strained Collaboration

Collaboration is the main health indicator of a business relationship. 

You may not always be on the same page about everything, but it’s crucial that both parties agree on the fundamental plan of action, strategy, and vision. 

It’s one thing to be in disagreement, quite another to be in misalignment. The latter leads to goal confusion, unclear responsibilities, and unforeseen requirements.

As Hannah Woods writes, “Poor collaboration is like two people in the same boat rowing in opposite directions. Each person thinks they’re doing something, but in reality, they are going absolutely nowhere.”

2. Communication Breakdown

Part of the collaboration bucket, lack of communication and frequent communication gaps indicate a souring relationship. 

Understand that lack of communication and communication gaps are different. 

The former includes a lack of willingness to engage and silent assumptions. 

The latter includes unclear/non-contextual/untimely/staggered communication, leading to misunderstandings. For instance, is your agency listening to your problems or simply selling their own ideas? 

But here’s what drives the final nail in the communication coffin: Engaging is increasingly becoming frustrating, so much so that one feels justified in not giving a damn.

3. Yet Another Subtle Wave-off

Co-existing with a dinosaur might be easier than co-existing with a paleontologist. 

Your agency is, all things being equal, an expert in email marketing. And YOU are not. While the difference is critical, it shouldn’t be pushed to an extreme. 

So the question is: Does your agency pay attention to your inputs? Or do they subtly ignore your suggestions/feedback completely all the time? 

Equally, are you sure you’re not raising your hands too often?

4. Poor Grasp of Your Industry

Does your email marketing agency identify with your industry/niche? 

Do they know your customers as well as you do, if not better?

Don’t trust them if they say they do. Ask for proof in the form of customer and market analysis, competitor analysis, survey documentation, etc. 

If they don’t seem to be speaking your language, if you find they’re wholly unaware of the latest trends, if they’re not consistently analyzing your CRM to offer market-aligned recommendations, then you know you’ve got gum under your shoe.

The sign of signs? They could never tell you what your industry looked like in the past. 

Read More: Why You Should Hire a White Label Email Agency

5. High Staff Turnover Rate

Are you frequently having to meet new people at the agency, leading you re–initiate the rapport-building process much too often? 

If yes, it means the agency suffers from a high staff turnover.

The turnover rate varies from industry to industry and from niche to niche. But usually, the government sector and marketing/advertising agencies almost always occupy the polar ends of the employee attrition spectrum. In 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded a 47.2% annual employee turnover rate in the marketing sector. 

But that’s generally speaking. If you see that you’re having to meet and connect with new contacts too often, it’s time to bring it to the agency’s attention. 

6. Lack of Honest Reporting

If your agency doesn’t reveal/seems to hide/is defensive about reporting, confront the relevant stakeholders.

Are they honoring your preferred reporting frequency? 

Do you know what your unsubscribe rate looks like? 

Are you aware of any delivery and deliverability issues? 

Are they giving you at least limited access to reporting dashboards? Better still, do you currently have a self-serve dashboard? 

Are they potentially abusing your lack of expertise in email marketing by reporting on surface metrics only? For instance, do they emphasize how good your open rates are but rarely talk about the conversion rate? 

Are they willing to remind or (re)explain what these metrics mean? If you’re unfamiliar with the core email marketing metrics, look them up in our post on email marketing KPIs. 

7. Mission Creep, Budget Bloat

The phrase ‘mission creep’ comes from the military. It means a gradual shift in objectives in a military campaign, often resulting in unplanned long-term goals.

So, here’s the test: Does your agency constantly seem to push you to try the more advanced price tiers? 

Usually, email marketing agencies are also digital marketing agencies. If you hired your agency for email only, and they try to push SEO, social media marketing, PPC advertising, etc., without any solid reason, it’s a big red flag. 

Are they offering a sneak peek into “ultra-detailed” data analytics to justify campaign underperformance? A see-it-for-yourself bait? 

Beware of upgrades offered without good, data-driven arguments to back them up. These require additional setup fees, ongoing subscriptions, consultant hours, etc. 

8. Retarded Martech Adoption

Martech is integral to modern email marketing. Even generally, there’s been a 100% increase in martech adoption from 2019. 

Greater marketing efficiency, deeper analytics, actionable insights, faster data processing, cross-channel optimization — these are some of the benefits of integration.

Email is no longer just a broadcast channel. With segmentation, hyper-personalization, automation, and real-time reporting part of the fabric of email, underutilizing the channel is not an option. 

Your agency knows this. To be fair to them, martech adoption is complex, resource-intensive, and data privacy/security is still a hot button. As posited by Scott Brinker, vice president of platform ecosystem at HubSpot, the so-called Martec’s Law states: Technology changes exponentially, but organizations change logarithmically.

Brinker argues, “Changes in behavior and culture take time. There are only so many changes in people, processes, and technology that an organization can productively absorb at once — at least without a major disruption.”

But these challenges also belong in the matrix of knowledge and skill. If your agency harps on the challenges, they’re signaling their incompetence as well as unwillingness. 

9. Inadequate Business Success

When you were considering how to choose an email marketing agency, your primary motivation was likely to address stalled business growth. 

Obviously! But here’s the thing: Poor email marketers tend to overestimate email marketing to the point of isolating it from its real objective, which is driving sales. 

In his book, Email Marketing Rules, Chad S. White devotes an entire chapter to press home the difference between email marketing success and business success. In his eminent opinion, email marketers must focus on business metrics as well as on email metrics. 

As a business owner, you should monitor which metrics your agency is most passionately discussing. To begin with, watch for the following metrics as recommended by White:

• Customer lifetime value
  
• Customer RFM (Recency, frequency, monetary)
  
• Length of customer inactivity
  
• Email marketing revenue
  
• Revenue per email
  
• Revenue per subscriber
  
• Sales conversions and conversion rate
  
• Email marketing profit
  
• Email marketing ROI
  
• Lead generation
  
• Incremental lift across all channels from email 

Those are some of the business metrics you need to follow up on with your email marketing agency. Do not let them get away with email marketing metrics only. 

After all, if the agency has consistently failed to generate revenue, what’s the point? If you find they’re hesitating to talk about the above KPIs, don’t wait for another sign.

Still on The Fence? Maybe That’s Good!

Because you don’t want to hurry. 

Choosing an email marketing agency and letting one go are both considerable tasks. Make sure you’re actually seeing those signs for some time now. Make sure you’ve escalated your concerns with the agency before. 

Be open-minded, respectful, and mindful of the legal considerations. 

There will be many soundwaves, but let them resonate in the presence of the right stakeholders. For all the talk about email, do NOT initiate the process over email. 

Looking to boost sales and revenue through email marketing? Our services have helped over 5,000 clients in 52 countries. Let us help you too—reach out today!

The post 9 Signs You Should Switch Your Formerly Best Email Marketing Agency appeared first on Email Uplers.

• You seem to be losing your strategic footing
  
• You are failing to generate sufficient leads
  
• Your content is not good enough to engage prospects
  
• You are not leveraging data to translate intent into impact

The underlying cause of all these is stress. First, you are a small business. Second, email marketing is complex. Unless you are a large team of dedicated pros, it can feel overwhelming to manage email campaigns. Besides, it’s not your only channel of marketing, albeit a very profitable one. As a business, you must be flailing your tentacles every which way. 

Maybe it’s time for you to consider outsourcing. But let’s explore it at some length. 

1. Outsourcing Saves You Time

If you want to do email marketing right, it’s going to be time-consuming. According to one Litmus survey, 53% of email marketers say that it takes more than a fortnight to create a marketing email. Design, coding, and review take the most time. 

Now, you are a small team. True, you are creating emails at a quicker rate than larger teams. However, it’s equally true that you are producing fewer emails at a time; maybe no more than four or five, if you are a three-person team. The bigger team is churning out at least 20 higher-quality emails at a given time. 

If you outsource to a larger team than yours, you will be producing more emails and better emails. In the meantime, your team can attend to other pressing marketing needs in a more efficient way. 

2. Outsourcing Costs Less

The typical email marketing team is made up of the copywriter, designer, developer, and marketer. Now, suppose you want to hire a team of email specialists. You will have to reckon with the “true employment cost” of each employee, which can be broken down in the following manner:

• Unemployment insurance
  
• Infrastructure costs
  
• Hardware and software costs
  
• Federal and state income taxes
  
• Medical insurance
  
• Fully paid vacation, sick leaves
  
• Retirement policies 

When you outsource, you don’t need to bother with these additional costs. Now, remember that email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools. In fact, a majority of marketers spend no more than 20% of their marketing budget on email marketing. 

With a cumbersome in-house team, you may end up allocating twice the amount of money for email marketing alone. Why would you do that? If you know how powerful email is compared to other costlier marketing channels, you should inevitably want to save. 

3. Outsourcing Involves The Experts

Email marketing demands expertise. Period. 

Don’t expect to luck into a stellar campaign now and then. Knowing just enough about email marketing is equivalent to knowing nothing about email marketing. If you really want to rake it in through email, you must engage full-fledged experts. Since hiring in-house experts is not an affordable solution, as we just saw, outsourcing is your best bet. 

It’s not just about the money, though. If you are thinking long-term, you must bring in the pros. 

Let’s say you want your business to grow into a strong brand over the next ten years. Branding requires, among other things, powerful storytelling. Email is a great way to share your brand’s story, engage your audience, and keep the conversation going. Having the right startup resources can make this process smoother and more effective.

Ah, but you are a small business. You don’t have the manpower to shoot above a couple of emails at a time. Do you expect to fashion a narrative in the space of two emails and also have it work wonders for you? We hope not!

4. Outsourcing for Seizing The Moment

The relationship between marketing and news media is a relatively new one. Earlier, marketing was predominantly inward-facing. In other words, you would build a campaign around your product, launch the campaign, and then wait for the results. 

Today, however, marketing is outward- as well as inward-facing. Apart from premeditated campaigns, you might have to build instant campaigns around attention-grabbing events around the world. Yes, we’re talking about moment marketing. Let’s say that it is seasonal marketing scaled down to per-diem trends. 

Without an email-only team of deep-dyed experts, you could not attend to daily, interesting stories across the globe, let alone turning them to your advantage. You are a small team. You don’t have the time to watch for trends and such on social media 24×7. 

Even if you do come across a particularly juicy, trending newsbyte, converting it into a robust campaign on time without the support of a dedicated team is a Herculean task.

5. Outsourcing for Deliverability Management 

Email deliverability management is complicated, to say the least. Let’s try and understand why. 

To begin with, your email list is not evergreen. It starts decaying owing to a number of reasons. By the end of the year, your list contains a lot of disengaged users. These users will affect your engagement metrics, damaging your sender reputation. 

Suppose you end up on a blocklist. Delisting is equally complicated. If not handled properly, you might throttle your chances at future requests and end up securing a permanent block. 

Another problematic aspect is the seemingly whimsical nature of ESPs. There is no universal standard of legitimacy in email traffic. The standards vary from one service provider to the next. 

To make things worse, ESPs don’t tell you their peculiar requirements. You can’t tell whether or not your email has met their standard until you find out that it has been routed to spam. Gradually, if too many emails land in the spam folder, your reputation will suffer a major blow. Repairing it is not easy, either. 

Adapting to each service provider requires considerable industry knowledge. Take feedback loops, for instance. You need to find out if your ESP signs you for feedback loops automatically or if you must do it yourself. If it’s the latter case, it’s not simple. You need to apply for feedback loops. Now, there are many feedback loops. Which ones should you sign up for? Only an expert can help you answer that question. 

Evidently, it is quite overwhelming to manage deliverability on your own. It’s not something you can avoid, either. Good deliverability is the prerequisite of sustainable email marketing. 

6. Outsourcing Provides You with Insights

Email marketing is not only complex but dynamic. When you are engrossed in managing your campaigns for hours on end, it’s only natural that you lose track of what’s working and what isn’t. It may not always be the case. Yet, it often is. 

One of the benefits of email marketing is that it is measurable. We now come into analytics territory. As a business doing email marketing, you want to know:

• Who your most engaged subscribers are
  
• Where your highest-quality subscribers are coming from
  
• How your subscribers interact with your emails
  
• What your email deliverability trends look like
  
• What your bounce reports look like
  
• How your email journeys can be improved
  

Performance monitoring is key. Yes, there are many advanced software solutions that can generate granular reports for you. However, translating data into impactful action is what makes the difference ultimately. A good third-party team will comprise skilled data interpreters who can suggest micro improvements and enable you to make data-driven decisions. 

Identifying Your Email Marketing Needs

Which areas of email marketing should you consider outsourcing? It varies from business to business. You go where the cracks take you. Still, if you are not sure, here are some areas of email marketing that typically require time and aggressive expertise, encouraging outsourcing:

• Email design
  
• Email coding
  
• Conversion tracking
  
• Subscriber/contact list management
  
• Performance monitoring

Wrapping Up!

Do you have more respect for email marketing now? Evidently, you are dealing with a monster of a tool. Nothing in email comes easy. It demands constant monitoring and improvement. 

Equally, bear in mind that resource optimization and strategizing are the two biggest challenges that marketers face. Outsourcing can take a lot off your shoulders, leaving you to focus on your core competencies. 

The post Have You Considered Outsourcing Your Email Marketing Needs? Maybe You Should! appeared first on Email Uplers.

It goes without saying that if you play your cards right, you stand to make your brand very profitable during this season. But, this is easier said than done. With so much up for grabs, the competition to claim the same is also immense. Add on top of that the ever-evolving nature of holiday email marketing trends, and the resulting workload can make it impossible for you to even catch your breath. So, what can one do to effectively navigate the demanding nature of the holiday season? Two words- seasonal staffing.

In this blog, we discuss 5 major benefits of onboarding temporary email marketing resources for your holiday email campaigns. Read on to find out!

1. Reduced Workload of Existing Staff

Now, putting in some extra hours once or twice every month is reasonable. But, if you are made to do so regularly over a period of 1-2 months, your mental and physical well-being is bound to crash and burn. So, whatever you do, don’t subject your staff to persistent long working hours to deal with the increased workload of the holiday season. The subsequent stress and exhaustion will breed a host of health problems. Not to mention the increased dissatisfaction and decreased workplace morale.

This is why hiring temporary staff during busy seasons is crucial. Not only will that reduce the workload of your full-time staff, but it will also increase your team’s overall productivity. As a result, your turnaround time will increase, and staying on top of your customer’s demands won’t seem like an overwhelming affair. 

2. Flexibility to Hire as per Your Requirements

The incredible flexibility that comes with hiring temporary email marketing resources is a big reason why many brands are so fond of this model. You’ll be working on your holiday season campaigns for a period of  3-4 months at best. It only makes sense that you hire resources only for that time window, doesn’t it? I mean, why should you hire a full-time resource for seasonal email campaigns? Additionally, while roping in temporary resources, you don’t necessarily have to abide by the elaborate string of formalities that are non-negotiable while onboarding a permanent employee. Thus, you can hire them on short notice and get started right away. 

Typically, organizations deny their employers from availing their rightful leaves during the holiday season out of fear of being understaffed. This, subsequently, fosters strong feelings of discontentment among the staff. Such a situation can be easily avoided by embracing the seasonal staffing model. It lets your employees enjoy their much-deserved leaves whilst also ensuring that your project remains on track at all times. An absolute win-win, isn’t it? 

Lastly, should you ever feel that any of the temporary resources you have onboarded through an offshore agency has long-term potential, you can always talk to the agency and see if you can continue with the resource for a longer duration.

3. Cost Efficiency

Do you know what the average cost of hiring a full-time email developer in-house in the US is? $65,861/yr. The figure goes up to $78,188/yr for email automation experts. The point I’m trying to make here is that in-house recruitment is not a wallet-friendly affair. Let’s say you decide to assemble a full-time team, comprising email developers, designers, campaign managers, and automation experts for your holiday campaigns. So, for the holiday season, alone, will easily cost you in the range of $85,000-$90,000. And this excludes the expenses that will go toward their skill development.

The important question is this: What happens once you are done with the holiday season? Even though you’ll no longer have any work for them, you’d still have to bear their paychecks. Consequently, your organization will be both, overstaffed and strapped for cash, an extremely unenviable combination. 

Now, let us look at the costs involved in hiring temporary email marketing resources. Allow us to cite our own example. At Email Uplers, you can onboard pre-vetted and trained campaign managers starting at $1750/month for Non Enterprise ESP (Enterprise ESPs being Salesforce, Marketo, Braze, Adobe Campaign, and Eloqua). These professionals are fluent in 50+ ESPs and are certified in Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Other resources such as email designers, developers, and automation experts can be onboarded around similar price windows, too. This brings your holiday season expenditure to approximately $28,000- $35,000. See the margin of savings in this case? 

4. Access to Professionals With Niche Expertise

While hiring temporary resources, you have the freedom to look for talent with niche expertise and leverage their specialized knowledge to boost your campaigns. Let us consider this discussion in the context of holiday season itself so that you have greater clarity. For your holiday email campaigns, wouldn’t you much rather prefer onboarding a campaign manager who has proven experience running holiday campaigns in the past? 

Moreover, introducing such professionals to your team can prove to be a great learning experience for them. It can help them acquire skills and unlock perspectives that can improve your daily operations by leaps and bounds. 

5. Time Efficiency

When you put out a recruitment call, a large chunk of your time goes into scanning through all the resumes that come your way, isn’t it? Normally, that’s alright, but with a thousand things already on your plate, as is usually the case during the holiday season, you’ll be hard-pressed to prise out that kind of time. So, is there some way where you could onboard the best person for the job without putting any time into filtering the CVs?

Yes! By hiring resources from offshore agencies. All you need to do is provide them with your requirements. Upon receiving it, they’ll identify the most suitable candidate and share them with you. Pretty convenient, you’d agree?

The time efficiency, however, is just not confined to this aspect. You see, when you induct certified and reliable resources, you don’t have to really guide them on the execution side of things. They already have full clarity regarding what is to be done. This allows you to invest your time in other critical tasks, such as chalking out the strategy, shaping the customer journey, and the like. 

What Kind of Email Marketing Resources Can You Hire?

Depending on your requirement, you can choose from among the following types:

Email Designers 

An email designer will help you with:

• Creating a design language for your holiday campaigns that will usher in increased engagement, interaction, and, ultimately, sales. 
• Using layout, graphics, color, and typography in the most optimal manner.
• Abiding with email accessibility design practices.
• Rolling out communication that is consistent with your brand identity.
• Leveraging the latest design technology in the market.

Email Developers

Listed below are the various ways in which email developers can boost your holiday campaigns.

• They take care to develop email templates that render across all devices and email clients. Additionally, they can create dynamic email templates too. 
• They help resolve complex coding issues.
• They make sure your campaigns abide by CAN-SPAM and other similar email regulations.
• They integrate email templates with the client’s ESP/CRM.

Campaign Managers

An email campaign manager takes care of the following responsibilities:

• They deploy your email templates in the ESP.
• They plan out your email calendar (and maintain it, as well).
• They prepare complex segmentation frameworks.
• They set KPIs and define goals for your campaigns.
• They look into building seamless customer experiences across channels.
• They design robust email campaign reports and use them to track your campaign’s performance.

Automation Experts

An automation expert can contribute to your holiday season campaigns in the following ways.

• They are responsible for importing and segmenting lists. In the process, they also look after your email data hygiene.
• They setup, execute, and manage your email automation programs.
• They design multi-channel automation programs.
• They manage copy, coding, design, deployment, and automation testing.
• They monitor the deliverability of your emails.
• They look into the analysis and performance optimization of your workflows.

Wrapping It Up

If you are starting to feel bogged down with your holiday email marketing preparations, you know what to do now! Hire a temporary email marketing resource and maximize your productivity. Remember, we are rooting for you, always!

The post 5 Benefits of Hiring Email Marketing Resources for the Holiday Season appeared first on Email Uplers.

You might be thinking: “When it comes down to an email development team, why do I even require dedicated offshore developers? Why can’t I just have an in-house team instead?” But let me tell you something, leading an in-house email development team is no easy task. It calls for an in-depth familiarity with programming languages, email marketing best practices, and immaculate coding skills. 

On the other hand, there are many benefits attached to hiring an offshore team – the resources are cost-effective, possess a broad skill set updated on the latest trends, tools, and technology, and the list goes on. However, if you plan to hire an offshore team, you’ll have to deal with challenges like different working hours, cultures, and language limitations. 

But trust me when I say this – you can easily manage it. How? We have scoured the internet to find the 11 best tools to help you manage an offshore email development team successfully. We’ve covered everything from project management to collaboration tools.

Let’s set sail. 

1. GitHub: Software Project Collaboration Tool 

GitHub is a platform that promotes remote cooperation between programmers working on the same project. The key advantages of GitHub are its capacity to facilitate easier collaboration, boost productivity, and enhance code quality. 

Key features that help GitHub stand out are its:

• Sophisticated version control system
• Bug tracking system 
• Code review features 

GitHub is an excellent place for remote software development teams to store and collaborate on source code. Its bug tracking and code review features assist in guaranteeing that the code is high quality and fits project objectives. In addition, its version control system lets multiple developers work on a single file simultaneously.

Pricing	Alternatives
Starts at $4/month per user/month	GitLab, Bitbucket

2. Slack: Communication and File Sharing Tool  

Slack is a platform for instant messaging and file sharing that aids remote teamwork. Group chat rooms, private messaging, document storage, and app connections are some of its unique features. 

Slack is a preferable choice for businesses because it:

• Enhances teamwork and communication
• Simplifies processes
• Boosts efficiency 

Slack is an effective tool for facilitating communication and cooperation between members of remote email development teams. But you must hire an email campaign manager to keep the boxes ticking successfully. File sharing and integration capabilities assist in expediting workflows and enhancing efficiency. At the same time, channels allow team members to organize talks and track project progress. 

Pricing	Alternatives
Starts at $7.25/month per user for small teams, enterprise pricing available	Microsoft Teams, Discord

3. Trello: Basic Project Management Tool

Trello is a simple project management solution that provides a visual interface for teams to set priorities and organize their work. Trello proves advantageous because it facilitates better teamwork and communication, boosts productivity, and simplifies processes. 

Key features that make Trello the first choice for businesses with a small team are:

• Boards for project management 
• Cards for task management
• Lists for tracking progress 

Trello is a helpful tool for managing tasks and projects for remote teams working on email development. Its collaboration features make it easy for teams to coordinate their efforts. At the same time, its visual-organizing and progress-tracking features help individuals keep on top of their work and set priorities. 

4. Jira: Software Project Management Tool

Jira is popular because it is a powerful software project management solution. 

Key Features 

• Seamless integration with other popular software development platforms, including GitHub and Bitbucket 
• Extensive reporting and monitoring features 

The flexibility of its workflows makes it simple to tailor project creation and management to the individual requirements of your team. In addition, you can keep tabs on your project development and identify problems as they arise. 

5. Asana: Advanced Project Management Tool 

Asana is a widely used project management tool with many unique features that facilitate efficient teamwork by keeping everyone on the same page. Boards, timelines, and custom fields are just options for prioritizing and delegating work in Asana. 

Key Features 

• Facilitates real-time communication 
• Eases file sharing among team members 

The key advantages of Asana are its user-friendliness, flexibility in workflow design, and comprehensive reporting capabilities. 

Asana provides an all-inclusive system for remote email development teams to organize work, monitor progress, and coordinate efforts. Its flexible workflows let teams adapt the project management process to their requirements. 

So, if you are looking to hire dedicated email developers, Asana would be a great fit. Its reporting functions aid in detecting bottlenecks and developing more efficient processes.

6. Zoom: Communication Tool 

Zoom is a widely used online meeting and communication platform. It’s ideal for conducting business conferences, educational seminars, and online workshops. In addition, it facilitates real-time communication and file-sharing among group members. But what gives Zoom an edge over its competitors? Its simplicity, dependability, and scalability. 

Zoom is a dependable virtual meeting, training, and webinar hosting tool, making it ideal for remote email development teams. With its real-time messaging capabilities, it’s much simpler to coordinate dispersed teams and make sure everyone is on the same page. In addition, because of Zoom’s screen-sharing capabilities, it is a valuable tool for managing remote teams working on email development. 

7. Litmus: Quality Assurance Tool  

Litmus is a campaign-focused and quality-assurance email marketing tool. You may check how your email will look in various email clients and on multiple devices using its email preview, spam testing, and analytics features. The key advantages of using Litmus are its capacity to reduce time, enhance email deliverability, and boost participation rates. 

Litmus is a valuable platform for testing and optimizing email marketing campaigns, especially for offshore email development teams, because it involves multiple real-time participation to save time and boost productivity. Its analytics provide insights into engagement rates and campaign performance. In addition, its email previews and spam testing tools help teams spot and fix issues before sending emails. 

8. Harvest: Productivity Measurement Tool

Harvest is a team time tracking, project management, and productivity analysis tool. Time tracking, project budgeting, and invoicing are some of its other unique features that help you keep tabs on your projects and your clients’ wallets. The key advantages of Harvest are its usability, adaptability, and depth of reporting. 

Harvest is a valuable tool for managing finances and monitoring productivity on remote email development teams. Its reporting features offer insights into productivity and efficiency. At the same time, time tracking and invoicing functions enable teams to bill clients for work done appropriately. Harvest is an excellent solution for organizing remote email development teams due to its low cost and intuitive interface. 

9. Visual Studio Code: Code Editor Tool

The global developer community relies on a robust code editor from Microsoft Studio Code. The editor’s extensibility allows it to adapt to various workflows and programming languages using the marketplace’s many available extensions. The key advantages of Visual Studio Code are its speed, adaptability, and user-friendliness. 

Offshore email development teams can benefit from Microsoft Studio Code’s features for collaborative coding, bug tracking, and quality assurance. Its debugging tools allow teams to detect errors and correct them. For example, Visual Studio Code is essential when organizing remote email development teams and enhancing the code quality of a remote HTML email developer. 

10. Google Drive: Collaboration Tool 

Google Drive is a robust platform for teamwork that accelerates the exchange of data and materials.  

Key Features

• Integration with other productivity tools 
• Sophisticated search capabilities 
• Real-time collaboration 

Google Drive has many advantages, including its usability, adaptability, and capacity for teamwork. 

It is an excellent place for remote email development teams to store and share their projects. Its vast connections with other productivity tools make it simple to integrate with those already being used by the team. In addition, its real-time collaboration tools let teams work together on files. 

11. LastPass: Data Security Tool

LastPass is a password management and data security service that can be used by individuals and groups. Its robust encryption, password generation, and platform independence are just a few of its unique characteristics. The key advantages of using LastPass are its simplicity, increased security, and simplified access to passwords and other private data. 

LastPass is an excellent platform for storing and exchanging passwords and sensitive information for remote email development teams. Its cross-platform compatibility makes it simple for team members to access passwords and other sensitive information from anywhere. In addition, its robust encryption and password-generating capabilities help ensure that team members use secure passwords. 

Key Takeaways 

These 11 tools can be a lifesaver if you manage an offshore development team. Each tool belongs to its own dimension, serving its own purpose. Whether it be project development, coding, communication, collaboration, data security, etc. You name it, and it’s there. 

The crux is that you can either have expertise in programming languages, email marketing best practices, and persuasion writing all at once or get accustomed to these 11 best tools to manage your offshore email development team.

Set your priorities right and let them become necessities in leading an offshore email development team. Although you will face many problems, including different working hours, diverse cultures, and language barriers, communication and collaboration on little to the most significant things will ease managing remote teams. 

The post 11 Tools to Successfully Manage Your Offshore Email Development Team appeared first on Email Uplers.

According to insight, 65% of businesses are likely to continue with the same outsourcing partners! 

Now, think about this for a minute. 

Suppose you want to create innovative email templates for growing the reach of your business. You would need the help of skilled professionals for the task. However, will it be worth hiring a special team just for the creation of templates? 

I can already envision a look of apprehension on your face! 

Outsourcing the task to a dedicated email professional is the most viable option in this case. Whether you are a start-up or an established business owner, hiring a remote email developer can be your best bet! 

In the past few years, we have seen a shift in various trends, and the concept of offshore remote development has undoubtedly gained a lot of popularity, especially in the field of email marketing. Simply put, remote email developers are professionals who work from a location different than your company’s headquarters, but as an extension of your in-house team. With their skill and talent, they can provide excellent quality work and service. 

Having an offshore email developer for enhancing your email marketing can offer various advantages.

Let’s delve into deeper insights as you make your way to the end of this post.

9 Reasons To Hire Offshore Remote Email Developers

1. Save those extra pennies! 

One of the most significant benefits of hiring offshore remote developers is financial savings! Hiring email talent locally demands extra office space, proper equipment, and various other aspects as opposed to hiring developers that are located at a different location. Moreover, outsourcing can be a cost-effective alternative if you want to ensure quality work but do not have the required budget. 

Since the cost of living and salaries vary in different countries, you may save a huge chunk of money and invest the same in the growth of your business instead! 

2. Higher time-zone flexibility

If you hire an email template developer remotely, you can easily leverage the advantage of the time zone difference to make sure about 24×5 coverage, as you can seamlessly operate at all times.  

Since email marketing campaigns require continuous monitoring and support, the offshore remote developers can be assigned a shift while you are not working and vice versa. A great move to keep things moving smoothly, isn’t it?

3. Access to a large pool of talent

Creating a visually appealing and flawless email template is not a cakewalk. It requires an innovative mind and a highly skilled professional. By choosing to outsource, you will be able to choose the best of the best. 

Hiring offshore email remote developers gives you access to tap into a large pool of talent from across the world. This means that you will be able to spot the right developers with the appropriate skill set and experience irrespective of the location. 

This enables you to choose the best talent out of the pool rather than choosing candidates from your local area. 

4. Hire developers with specialized skillsets

When you hire offshore remote developers, you get access to a wide range of specialized skills and expertise that may not necessarily be available remotely. This is inclusive of knowledge of email marketing tools and techniques, programming languages, HTML email development, etc. 

These skill sets play a pivotal role in taking your email marketing campaigns to the next level. Hence, the final result delivered will be top-notch and also result-driven. 

5. Increased team productivity 

Offshore remote developers can assist in increasing your email marketing team’s productivity by offering additional expertise and resources. This can further help you to get more done in a limited time, leading to better results and enhanced efficiency. 

Additionally, there is better time management with a remote team since you do not deal with tardiness as the team does not have to commute from their home to their workplaces, which can wear down employees. In a remote setup, employees have more time to relax and it helps them to get more productive in their work. 

Moreover, remote email marketing experts are much more flexible in terms of their work schedules and can adapt to your needs easily and seamlessly. 

6. Scale up your team instantly

There may be times when you feel the need for a helping hand immediately. This especially happens in situations when the team’s bandwidth has reached a peak and there is a delay in finding more developers for the team- reminds us all of the Holidays, doesn’t it?

Hiring offshore developers can be the best move as they can begin the work immediately, resulting in faster results. You even have the option of scaling down the team when you feel there is no requirement for extra resources during a lull time. 

7. Concentrate on other important tasks

Since you and your company will save a lot of time by outsourcing email-related work, you will be able to concentrate on the other aspects of your business and your duties more aggressively. 

This pointer is especially true for new businesses that are on the way to establishing themselves and are struggling to take out time for the growth of their business. 

8. Meet deadlines consistently

If you are an agency, outsourcing email talent can enable you to successfully help improve your capability to meet client expectations and deadlines by completing the given projects on time. Additionally, with the help of remote offshore developers, you receive extra assistance from highly qualified individuals, allowing you to complete the tasks on and sometimes before time. 

Since offshore hiring enables you to have the world’s best talent on board, you can guarantee quality and consistency at the same time. 

9. Improved Return on investment

Lastly, hiring offshore remote developers can help you steadily enhance your return on investment (ROI). This happens mainly because you will be able to plan and execute your email marketing campaigns more effectively, improvize the quality of the campaigns, and reap better results. 

Moreover, many workers have noticed that working remotely impacts them positively as it provides them with a much-required work-life balance. Hence, a happy employee is likely to work and put in more effort. This helps generate more revenue and also assists in increasing your profitability in the future. 

Let’s Call It A Wrap! 

Just like I started the post with an interesting fact, I am ending with one too! – 

According to Forbes, the remote worker is 35-40% more productive than their office counterparts and also have a much higher increase in their output! 

On that note, we are ready to wrap up the blog and you are now aware of the top reasons why you should go ahead and hire offshore remote developers for scaling your email marketing strategies. 

In a nutshell, hiring offshore remote developers is an excellent option and you will surely be able to enjoy the aforementioned benefits. Apart from that, you will also be able to adjust to the transitioning market needs by employing and working with remote professionals. 

Now that you know it all, we highly recommend you go ahead and employ talented remote developers and take your email marketing efforts to a whole new level.

The post Top 9 Reasons to Hire Offshore Remote Email Developers appeared first on Email Uplers.

Slashed budgets and unsatisfactory turnover have made it an uphill task for companies to fill out their vacancies via internal hiring. Particularly for highly specialized departments such as email, the challenge is significantly more pronounced. So, what can they do to hold their forts? Resort to outsourcing. The practice has come to the rescue of businesses in the past as well, most memorably during the 2008 recession, arguably one of the worst economic crises in living memory. Through outsourcing, tech giants such as Apple, Cisco, IBM, Skype, Netflix, and the like were not only able to survive the recession but also came out on top at the end of it. Fifteen years hence, as a similar situation looms large upon us, we can take notes from the past and turn to offshoring to navigate the situation deftly. 

In this article, we’ll help you understand the trends that are currently defining the outsourcing landscape so that you can chalk out your strategies accordingly. Let’s dive in!

Benefits of Hiring Dedicated Resources

The virtues of email marketing are ceaseless, of course, but they are exceptionally hard-earned as well. To be able to harness its true potential, you have to find answers to a lot of critical questions, such as:

• How do I maximize the value proposition in my campaigns?
• How many segments should I divide my audience into?
• What metrics must be present in my email campaign report?
• What kind of automation workflows should I set up?
• What design language will best fit my brand?
• How should the tone of my copy be?
• Which tools are essential for designing, developing, and implementing campaigns swiftly?

Admittedly, this is a lot. And we wouldn’t blame you if you feel overwhelmed. This is where offshoring proves to be beneficial. It gives you the scope of relegating your email marketing responsibilities to certified and pre-vetted professionals, allowing you to focus on other crucial pillars of your business. But that’s just the scratching at the surface of outsourcing benefits. Let’s take a deeper dive.

• Cost-effectiveness: This is perhaps the most compelling benefit of working with an offshore dedicated team. When you build an internal team, you not only have to invest in the talent pool you are recruiting but also bear the costs of the technology they have to use. And for an email marketing team, technology can include a lot of things like automation tools, ESPs, post-campaign analytics tools, and CRMs. In a similar vein, for every talent onboarded, besides their basic remuneration, you also have to factor in additional expenses such as medical insurance, infrastructure costs, federal and state income taxes, and retirement policies, to name a few. Even after excluding these costs, the median salary of an email specialist comes to $62,150. Compare this with our pricing at Email Uplers, where you get to onboard a dedicated campaign manager starting at $1750/month only. Developers and other resources will cost you on the same scale. You don’t have to do a lot of math to figure out the better deal, do you?
• Flexibility: With outsourcing, you aren’t bound to recruit full-time resources alone. Have a contractual requirement? Looking to onboard a few temporary resources to tackle that holiday season burden? Need specialized personnel for a specific project? Offshoring empowers you to find a fitting solution for all these scenarios.
• Time efficiency: The hiring process is incredibly time-consuming. From scanning through hundreds of CVs to setting up interviews to setting up paperwork, it gets pretty exhausting. You get to skip all these steps when you hire dedicated resources from an outsourcing agency. You just share your requirements with the agency, and they get back to you with the most suitable candidate for the role. In most cases, these dedicated professionals possess experience working on projects similar to yours in the past, which is why they can promise a swift turn-around time as well. 
• Easy scalability: Business experiencing a massive influx of new clients and projects? No worries. You can always rely on an offshore agency to furnish you with certified email marketing consultants to manage the increased workload and scale up your operations effortlessly.

Outsourcing Trends You Need to Know in 2023

While no company is strange to the practice of outsourcing, it is vital to keep in mind that its trends evolve yearly, corresponding to the events defining said year. Previously, we talked about the factors that will push businesses to view outsourcing through a unique lens in 2023. Below, we list out a few trends you are likely to encounter while hiring dedicated resources this year.

Increased Emphasis on the Location of the Offshore Agency

More and more companies these days are looking to hire dedicated email developers, campaign managers, automation experts, and other resources from offshoring agencies that are located in the geographical vicinity of their headquarters. The primary motive behind doing so is to avoid the possibility of cultural clashes and to protect the professional environment from any kind of turbulence. Other than that, it also helps them avoid massive time zone differences that occur while working with resources located many seas farther from them. And if at all you’re partnering up with an offshore agency in a faraway location, ensure that they are available to work in your time zone. 

Searching For Niche Talent

In 2023, businesses are more than happy to look past a room full of generalists in favor of a handful of specialists. And why wouldn’t they? With competitiveness in the market rising with every passing day, specialists help organizations claim the spotlight for themselves. Embracing outsourcing makes hunting for specialists more convenient for them, for now, they are free to comb through a global talent pool and cherrypick individuals who are best suited to their requirements.

Forging Long-Term Relationships With Offshore Agencies

In uncertain times, such as these, business continuity is downright priceless. Searching for a reliable outsourcing agency is tough work, to begin with. And when you have found one, it doesn’t make any sense to sever ties with them, does it? By building long-term relationships with reputable agencies, you allow yourself to grow familiar with their modus operandi, ensure a constant churn of high-quality professionals, and smoothen your entire operational workflow.

Evaluating Agency’s Commitment to Data Security

When you partner up with an outsourcing agency, you share a ton of sensitive data with their dedicated professionals. With cybercrimes getting increasingly sophisticated with every passing day, you must ensure that your agency has robust data security measures in place to keep undesirable security breaches at bay. Further, to ensure that no important trade secrets are made public, draw up a watertight NDA between your company and the recruited resources.

Wrapping It Up

These are trying times for businesses. To tide over, you need to adapt deftly to the ever-changing circumstances, something that outsourcing can immensely help you with. Now that you know what offshoring trends are in vogue, we hope you are able to devise action plans with ease.

The post How Will Hiring Dedicated Resources be Different in 2023? appeared first on Email Uplers.