I am willing to bet that your agency has tried most of the available marketing approaches – print, email, banners, text ads, event sponsorships, on-site marketing, social media, SEO, etc.

I am also willing to bet that you are not sure what worked (gave you the best results). But, if you are like most marketers you probably will say that Email Marketing is perhaps the most effective (cost/benefit wise).

While we help hundreds of agencies with our multi-disciplinary approach (all of the available digital marketing tactics), let’s talk about the most relatable – email marketing.

As we zoom in to Email Marketing as a strategy we find that most marketers use one or many approaches –

1. Outsource the list and campaign management
2. Do some client marketing in-house – through providers like Constant Contact.
3. Buy Lists and dabble with in-house marketing. Many folks get burned with this approach – destroying their domain and IP reputation.

In-source versus Outsource

In a whitepaper/study ("The Secret to Email Delivery," July 2008), published by Forester Research, around 90%-95% of all email sent is considered spam.

This makes the job very challenging for ISPs and spam filter providers. It also makes the job very difficult for email marketers. Interestingly, the volume of spam increases during holiday periods, and this reduces open rates across the board - regardless of sender, content, reputation or positive engagement of the recipient.

ISP's are paying attention to how often a sender sends email as well. If you send too often, you will see poor results. Send infrequently and the same happens, you get dinged. So, there is a balance between maintaining a clean list, send patterns, the value of the content and how you handle negative engagement and abuse reports.

Going a full circle, in the old days - marketers didn't have to worry too much about domain or server reputation, list management and a whole bunch of other constantly changing environment variables. They could, with relative ease, manage things in house. But, then complaints could destroy your in house networks reputation and pretty soon, your day-to-day operations emails would not get delivered to customers. So, in house is not much of an option any more.

When things got more complicated, there was a need for do-it-your-self (but mostly outsourced, the in-source/out-source option) services like Constant Contact. You in-source your list management, but outsource the actual sending campaign. But, soon, these service providers were forced to bar you from sending if they got any complaints through their ISPs. So, regardless of whether your list is clients, subscribers, partners - if complaints came through, you were stuck.

So, that, coupled with 'spam traps', 'honeypots' and other anti-spam techniques completely rules out purchasing a list. Purchasing a list is just not a good idea all around.

That leaves only one real option, outsource to a reputable company that has a track record of innovation, inbox delivery and is industry focused.

A provider that –

• Sources and maintains the subscriber list.
• Has ISP grade infrastructure
• Has world class service and support capabilities.
• Handles all the IT related management that comes along with email marketing.

That provider is us – http://completemarkets.com/pages/advertisercontact.aspx - get in touch – we will help get measureable results from email marketing!