Studies suggest the average cost per lead (CPL) for Facebook ads is $102, LinkedIn ads are $75, and social media marketing is $58. Scaling these campaigns gets expensive fast.
Email marketing can get you an average CPL as low as $3. However, cold email marketing is still a new frontier for many businesses. That’s where email marketing services come into play.
By the end of this article, you’ll be able to answer the question: Should I outsource email marketing services to an agency, or can I do it myself?
What is an Email Marketing Service?
There are two schools of thought about email marketing services. One refers to them as part of SaaS (software as a service), and the other to agencies offering them.
Email Marketing Software
Email marketing software is cloud-based platforms that automate the email marketing process. You can use it to build customizable templates, automate sending, and lead management.
The best email marketing services allow you to segment leads, personalize emails using custom variables, and streamline everything from prospecting to sales outreach.
Agencies Offering Email Marketing Services
One of the most significant advantages of email marketing is that you don’t have to do it yourself. You can easily outsource to an agency offering email marketing services. All that’s left for you is to meet with the leads the agency generated for you via email marketing and close the sale.
What to Look for in Email Marketing Services
There are several types of email marketing. B2C email marketing is an entirely different game than B2B email marketing. But, there are overlaps between the fundamental features, such as:
- Email sending automation
- A/B testing features
- Dynamic, personalized email copy
- Lead management features
- List segmentation
- In-depth analytics and reporting
- Email warmup
Outsourcing To Agencies: What Email Marketing Services Should Be Included?
Email marketing has many moving parts. You might burn your budget when your team lacks the in-house expertise to run campaigns. If you're looking to outsource to an agency offering email marketing services, consider the following:
Expertise and Experience
Find agencies with a proven track record of success in email marketing within your niche. Email copy that worked for commercial real estate might not translate well in B2B SaaS.
Always check the agency’s case studies. Ensure data is from actual campaigns. Look for reviews and testimonials on their site and social media groups or forums.
Consider having them vouched for by members of their community. For example, dozens of people offer email marketing services in Instantly’s Facebook group.
If you find someone offering email services, there’s a high chance that other members have worked with that person before and can vouch for them.
Services Offered
Agencies can offer different email marketing services depending on your needs. But as a rule of thumb, you need to find agencies that provide these fundamental services:
- Campaign Strategy: Agencies must create sales cadences and follow-up strategies and run you through sustainable ways to scale sending volume.
- Lead Generation: Does the agency have a quality lead source? Are they buying leads in bulk or tailoring lead generation to match your ideal customer profiles?
- Email Copywriting: Personalized emails should be standard practice. Email copy must align your unique selling proposition to your prospect's needs.
- List Management: What CRM are they using to manage leads down your pipelines? Do they track and handle all inboxes, replies, and segmentation?
- Automation: Agencies need automation tools to scale campaigns as their lead lists grow sustainably. Can they automate bulk sending, replies, or A/B testing?
Technology and Tools
What’s included in the agency’s tech stack? This can determine the quality of their campaigns. Are they using one of the best cold email marketing software available? These tools offer essential features for streamlining and automating campaigns.
Ensure their tools have robust analytics, A/B testing, automation features, and lead management. These tools should also align with your business needs. Ensure agencies aren’t charging you extra for using tools you don’t need.
Pricing Structure
Agencies offer different pricing structures. Some charge a flat fee for email marketing services, while others take a percentage of the revenue from email campaigns.
If you’re looking for an entirely done-for-you (DFY) email marketing service, agencies could charge you for the infrastructure setup and the monthly service fee. Some agencies charge for the setup of the monthly service fee and get a revenue percentage.
Another common pricing structure is Setup + Pay Per Lead or Pay Per Meeting. This works best in most cases because agencies get paid per booked meeting, and closing the deal will be up to them. If you’re struggling to close, there may be issues with sales team management.
Client Support and Education
The agency you choose should be available whenever you have questions about the email campaigns they’re running for you. If you have requests or want to look into campaign data, you wouldn’t want an agency that takes a week to respond.
Agencies should also be knowledgeable about all the fundamental email marketing best practices. For example, an agency should tell you when and how to scale into large-scale email marketing campaigns.
Large Scale Email Marketing Services: Costs & Considerations
Even with the best personalization, email outreach is still a numbers game. Once you succeed on the small scale, the next logical step is to increase sending volume. Here’s how it's done:
Setting Up Cold Email Infrastructure For Large Scale Outreach
A large chunk of the upfront costs for large-scale email marketing is setting up the infrastructure to support bulk sending. Agencies charge between $2,000 to $10,000+, depending on volume.
That should include the cost of domains, setting up authentications and forwarding, and email warmups. You need to scale with domains to achieve a high monthly sending volume.
Each domain should have three sending accounts, each capable of sending 30 cold emails daily. Let’s say you want to send 10,000 emails monthly. That equates to about 500 emails a day.
To send 500 emails daily, you’d need 17 inboxes running (500 emails per month/30 daily sending volumes). That means you’d want to buy and set up six domains for cold outreach.
Domain Authentications
Buying domains isn’t plug-and-play. You must set up DMARC, DKIM, SPF, and Forwarding to get the authentications required to send and receive emails.
Authentications can get a bit technical, so letting agencies handle the infrastructure setups can result in high upfront costs. This is where you can save costs with Instantly’s DFY service.
We’ve established that you’d need six domains to send 10,000 emails monthly. Instantly charges around $12 - $15 per domain per year. You’d need $90/year or $7.5/month for the domains.
After you place your order, Instantly takes about 24 to 72 hours to finish setting up domain authentications, forwarding, and inboxes and propagating the DNS records. All that’s left is for you to add leads to your Instantly campaign and build an automated email sequence.
Prospecting, Qualification, and Verification
Finding prospects that fit your ideal customer profile takes time. The process typically involves going to LinkedIn, using filters, and looking at a company website to find the right email.
Do that a couple more times a day and start building your email list. Then, you’d have to run that email list through an email verification tool to weed out the bad contacts.
Instantly B2B Lead Finder reduces this prospecting process to minutes. You get access to over 280 million pre-verified B2B leads and use advanced filters to find prospects that fit your ICP.
Lead Finder’s Hyper Leads plan lets you export 10,000 verified leads for just $169/month. You only pay for verified leads. You can also enable the Evergreen feature that saves your search criteria and automatically adds new leads that match it to running cold email campaigns.
Cold Email Outreach Automation
The best part about cold email is that campaigns can be run on autopilot with the right tools and strategies. Most agencies offering email marketing services set up domains, add campaign leads, run automated email sequences, manage inboxes, and monitor results.
You could do that at a fraction of the cost with Instantly. With the Hypergrowth plan, which costs $77.6/month, you can send up to 100,000 emails monthly, giving you plenty of room to scale.
With Instantly, you can build entire campaigns and personalized email sequences with just a few clicks. You just need to create a campaign, add your leads, and go to the Sequences tab. On the bottom left, you’ll find the AI Sequence Generator button.
Instantly prompts you to enter key details about your services, unique selling propositions, or case studies. Then, it automatically creates an entire cold email sequence, complete with follow-ups, custom variables for personalization, and spintax.
Lead Management
Prospects often go with the business that responds to their queries first. That’s why lead management is essential in any large-scale cold email campaign. Email marketing services must have (CRM) tools built for email marketing.
This allows agencies to create custom sales pipelines, get a 360 view of each lead through the customer journey, and forecast potential sales revenue reports for your businesses.
If you want to do this yourself, try Instantly’s Dealflow CRM. It’s the best CRM tailored specifically for cold email marketing. There’s no need to hire virtual assistants to manage lead engagement or reply to leads. Dealflow can do this for you with Unibox.
It centralizes all inboxes from all campaigns for easy management. Unibox also has an AI email assistant that responds to positive prospect replies. The AI learns the context of the email and will only respond if it’s confident with the information.
Email Marketing Services: SaaS Vs Agencies
Outsourcing email marketing to an agency and doing it yourself with the help of email marketing SaaS are valid options for growing your business at scale.
This all comes down to convenience vs. affordability. Do you have the time to learn the nuances and technical aspects of email marketing? Do you have the budget to outsource to an agency? To help you find the best option, let’s look at the pros and cons of each:
The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Email Marketing
Outsourcing works for both small and medium businesses (SMBs) and enterprises. If you’re running a small business, you’re probably juggling between multiple tasks.
Agencies offering email marketing services can take the weight of cold outreach. They can handle prospecting, outreach, and sales lead management, allowing you to focus on closing sales and other dollar-productive tasks.
The issue now becomes cost. As mentioned, the upfront costs of setting up the infrastructure required to run cold outreach campaigns at scale can be expensive. You must also consider the monthly fees for maintaining campaigns and lead management.
The Pros and Cons of Using Email Marketing Services
With the right email marketing service software, even beginners can quickly succeed with cold outreach. For example, if you don’t know how to authenticate domains and set up inboxes, you can opt for Instantly’s DFY service.
The costs of the tech stack needed to run campaigns would also be significantly lower than outsourcing to an agency. Let’s break down the costs for a 10,000/month email sending volume.
Hypergrowth: $77.6/month for 10,000 leads
Hyper Leads: $169.3/month
DFY Domain Setup: $7.5/month for six domains and $85 for 17 inboxes ($5 per inbox)
The total cost for running cold campaigns within Instantly is around $339.4/month. Let’s say you have a 3% reply rate (300 replies) and get 150 opportunities from those replies. That means your campaign's cost per lead (CPL) is around $2.26.
Key Takeaways
Through sustainable, scalable, and personalized outreach, email marketing services can help businesses overcome growth plateaus. You can outsource email marketing to agencies or do it yourself with the help of email marketing software.
Whether you’re an agency looking for the most scalable tool for email marketing or a business trying out cold email outreach for the first time, Instantly has you covered. Try Instantly today.
