Outsource Email Marketing – What You Should Know

Written by: Chris Donald

Published on April 26, 2023

10 Mins read

Key Takeaways:

  • Outsourcing email marketing helps businesses overcome expertise gaps, ensuring better deliverability, segmentation, and on-brand campaigns.
  • It’s a cost-effective way to access premium tools, proven strategies, and expert insights without building an in-house team.
  • Scalable systems and faster implementation allow brands to grow efficiently while focusing on strategic business goals.
  • Choosing the right partner means evaluating goals, expertise, deliverability processes, and transparency to ensure long-term success.

Email marketing is one of the most popular marketing channels.

For every $1 you spend, email marketing drives an ROI of $36, which is higher than most marketing channels you’re probably already using.

In fact, 30% of marketers agree that email marketing delivers the highest ROI among all other digital marketing channels.

And it’s no surprise that 58% of people check their email before social media

But, it doesn’t matter how effective the channel is, reaching the right people, at the right time, while also maintaining personalization and relevance is equally important. 

As established, email is a very important part of your marketing strategy, but sometimes a business is not entirely capable of handling the end-to-end process. Small details that may seem trivial can actually make a huge impact. Did you know –  

Such setbacks could be the result of something as simple as a lack of expertise, or maybe you’re just short on time. This is where outsourcing comes in.

In this blog, we will understand what outsourcing email marketing services is and how you can choose your best email marketing partner. 

What are Outsource Email Marketing Services?

To put it simply, to outsource email marketing is to hire an external professional or team to handle all of your business’s email marketing campaigns and help you actually land in inboxes (not the spam folder). 

For starters, you send weekly/monthly emails to engage your customers, so you can handle it by yourself. But what happens to your email marketing efforts when peak sales and the holiday season hit? What happens when you don’t want your customers to merely engage, but you want to convert leads and build a customer base with your email campaigns? 

This is when you hire an experienced email marketing team/professional or partner with an email marketing agency to meet all your needs and help you grow. When you outsource, they handle all email marketing operations for you, like – 

  • Creating an email marketing list with a deep understanding of your audience.
  • Developing a successful email marketing strategy.
  • Coming up with interesting subject lines and email designs to captivate your audience.
  • Emails that echo your brand voice, provide knowledge, and help you convert leads.
  • Tracking performance and planning strategies for future email campaigns accordingly, and much more

Do you Actually Need to Outsource Email Marketing?

Well, if you’re happy with the results your in-house email team brings, then you don’t email marketing outsourcing. You don’t even need the rest of this guide.

But if you are not so happy or you are an SMB or a Startup trying to find your feet in a competitive space, outsourcing email marketing could be a wise business decision for you. You could consider outsourcing when – 

  • Your in-house team lacks ESP-specific experience or specialized skills. 
  • You start spending more time on email marketing than on your overall strategy.
  • Your brand needs to scale quickly because of seasonal peaks or new acquisitions. 
  • Your email campaigns are getting delayed or are providing inconsistent results. 
  • You need advanced analytical skills to significantly increase your ROI. 
  • The brand needs to improve ROI without buying advanced tools. Outsourcing is comparatively cost-effective. 

Benefits of Outsource Email Marketing 

When you get experts to handle your email marketing services, here’s what you stand to gain – 

Access to specialized expertise (and fill internal gaps)

Even after so many years of email marketing being a prominent source of marketing, there are still so many businesses that are either not implementing it the right way or don’t have effective email marketing strategies for it. So, if you’re not already experts, then understanding how to handle everything from segmentation to automation can take up a lot of time and, ultimately, affect your business.

When you finally decide to outsource, you actually get people who do this every single day. They know what works, what doesn’t, and why. Thus, you end up with – 

  • Audience segmentation that actually converts.
  • Creative subject lines that don’t make your emails land in spam. 
  • Emails that are on brand and perform better. 

This way, you and your in-house team are now able to focus on the bigger picture and work on other strategies.

Saves money (And honestly, sanity)

When you think of outsourcing, the first thing that probably comes to mind is “increased budget”. But, training your in-house team to become skilled email marketers and getting access to specialized premium tools might actually cost more.


And if you’re thinking of building a new team, then that would require salaries, benefits, and time and energy to train new staff. You’ll spend many more hours fixing mistakes rather than working on proven strategies. 

So, outsourcing to the right email marketing agency is automatically a more cost-effective option. It will help you reach your marketing goals and give your already efficient team time to work on new goals and strategies. 

Deliverability management (better and faster results, better targeting)

You probably have the best internal resources in the world. Their wit and writing skills definitely contribute to business growth. But, even so, when your smart-written emails don’t land in the right inbox, it’s all a waste. 

Deliverability is something that most brands get wrong if they don’t have the right resources and expertise. Every single detail, from sender reputation to authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), matters. 

When you have an outsourcing partner, you get a team that knows it all. They – 

  • Maintain an audience list and remove contacts that don’t want to hear from you. 
  • Set up domain authentication. 
  • Focus on audience segmentation for better engagement. 
  • Monitor reputation scores and emails going into spam. 

Scalability

Email marketing constantly changes. 

  • Your target audience grows.
  • The number of sales you send increases.
  • Your email campaign strategy changes.

What worked for your initial 1000 customers may not work for the next 10,000. While staying relevant to this large list of customers may seem a bit difficult, it doesn’t have to be (if you let the experts handle it).

And, outsourcing is the way to go. Doing so, you allow your brand to grow. In fact, you can partner with white label agencies like InboxArmy, which will help you with email campaign management and expand your services.

For example, you’re an e-commerce company and are looking to increase revenue. You’re struggling with problems like lost revenue, list management, and abandoned carts. Your product is top-notch, and your brand is well acclaimed, but the problem lies with email marketing and building a successful campaign. A white label agency could help with on-brand professional design, along with strategic broadcast campaigns that could solve all your problems. And soon, you’ll see a remarkable turnaround. 

Easy to implement

Building an internal email program from scratch could take months. It involves a tedious (and expensive) process of choosing the right email marketing software and designing templates according to the brand. On the other hand, your outsourced email marketing specialists will have everything in place. 

They can onboard you quickly, audit your existing setup, and start improving results with strategy development almost immediately. Because they know the process inside out, it results in seamless implementation of email marketing programs.

And once that happens, your team will have time to focus on things they excel in, like social media marketing or any other form of digital marketing. 

How to Outsource Your Email Marketing and Find the Right Partner

For a successful email marketing campaign and all your future email campaigns to be successful, it’s important to have an experienced team. Finding the right partner is a strategic decision. One wrong decision, and it could lead to a backlog of time and money. Here are some things you should look for when you choose an email marketing service provider – 

  • Figure out your goals first: Before you even think about outsourcing, the most important thing is to understand your own business needs first. Do you want to increase revenue in the next 6 months, or do you first want to develop a strong customer base? 
  • Check all the services they offer: When you figure out goals and have prospective choices, you must check the services they offer. If those services align with your requirements, you’re one step closer. 
  • Shortlist from your preferences and check for expertise: Ask your potential partners to show their previous experience with some credible proof of effective campaigns. Understand team members and the tools they use. 
  • Check for costs: Depending on the expertise, credibility, and number of team members, different white label agencies will have different price points. Choose the one that is closest to your budget. 
  • Decide what you want to outsource: Once you have partnered with an email marketing agency, you can start by delegating smaller tasks. You don’t have to give away the entire program; it takes time to build trust. So, start small, hand over a design, or set up automation. Make sure your chosen team matches your internal brand requirements. 
  • Set clear communication and collaboration standards: A successful partnership will run on defined processes, and when you and your email service provider are on the same page. Conduct weekly and monthly business reviews. Create a roadmap for flows and segmentation plans for your audience. 
  • Don’t lose control: It’s great if you already trust your agent entirely, but as a business owner, remember to keep control. Keep track of the budget, tone of your brand, and any kind of approvals required. Your brand = your vision. 

Remember to check all the warning signs in your outsourced team before you finalize. See if they – 

  • Have no measurable case studies
  • No clear deliverability process
  • Lack of in-house technical capability
  • Vagueness in reporting
  • Contract terms that make their exit expensive for you

Once you have everything cleared, you’ll end up with a partner who understands you and your brand, and you’ll achieve great results together. 

Conclusion

Outsourced email marketing is not about “handing off” responsibility. It is about plugging the organization into specialized experience and proven playbooks to unlock your brand’s revenue potential. For large brands, where scale, governance, deliverability, and brand control matter, outsourcing selected parts of email operations or fully outsourcing to an external agency can accelerate growth and reduce risk.

Before committing, define measurable goals, run a short pilot, and demand transparency in metrics and data ownership. The right partner will build and send campaigns, but will embed itself into the organization’s measurement system.

If the organization is still unsure whether to outsource everything or part of email, consider a phased approach: start with a pilot focused on deliverability or one revenue-driving flow, then expand the scope once trust and results are proven. HubSpot and other industry leaders recommend retaining core strategic oversight when internal teams are mature, otherwise, look to full-service partners for rapid scaling.

Chris Donald

Chris Donald

About Author

Chris sent his first email campaign in 1995. He’s worked directly with Fortune 500 companies, retail giants, nonprofits, SMBs and government agencies in all facets of their email marketing and marketing automation programs. He’s also a BIG baseball fan, loves a good steak, and is mildly obsessed with zombie movies. For more information follow him on linkedin LinkedIn Icon

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    We hired InboxArmy to redesign Salesforce Marketing Cloud emails. The goal was to create a new master template that matched branding using industry best practices. After we signed the SOW, we had a couple discovery calls, submitted our brief and branding document. Once we were on the same page, InboxArmy did design in batches, we had 3 rounds of reviews and once all was finalized IA coded and implemented the templates for us in MC.

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