Email marketing is one of the most fruitful outreach channels, but it does require a serious amount of time and expertise to execute email campaigns. In addition, it encompasses almost every touchpoint of company-customer interactions, and hence, coping up often turns overwhelming. In such conditions, the dilemma of whether to outsource or not due to inherent reservations on disclosing your marketing operations. Today, I will share my two cents on how to decide whether you should hire in-house or outsourced email developers. Let’s begin.
4 Factors That Should Influence Your Decision
There are a few important elements that impact this decision. Take a look:
What Type Of Requirement Do You Have
When deciding whether to outsource or hire in-house, the first step is to outline the requirements. Determine your email marketing campaign requirements and the number of emails you’ll need to create in a certain amount of time. It is preferable to outsource email development projects if you need to develop email templates frequently or have to execute email campaigns every week.
Skill Set
Email development needs to be fast-paced, but even an entire team takes a full week to develop a single template. And if you want to keep up with the latest trends, you’ll need to ensure that your team members have the necessary skills. If you need high-quality email templates that come with interactive features and other value additions, outsourcing becomes imperative due to its scalability and broad access to the talent pool.
Sustainability and Expenditure
Make a strategy for how you’ll allocate your funds. Your maximum budget, estimated delivery periods, quality and features of the email templates, degree of automation, and other tools required in the process will give you a broad overview of the better alternative.
This understanding will reveal if you can add somebody to your payroll or if outsourcing is a better option. The main difference between these two methods is that you may pay for specific tasks completed when outsourcing, but you must consider the full CTC when hiring an in-house developer.
Maintaining control
Control is one thing you should never compromise on. You’ll need to prepare a detailed briefing for your outsourced email marketing agency, including campaign objectives and timeframes. It also implies that you’ll need to have a comprehensive quality assurance system to guarantee that everything is functioning smoothly. When your reputation is on the line with every email, you’ll want to be sure they perform their job correctly. In-house hiring has a natural upper edge in this case.
Advantages And Disadvantages Of Outsourcing
Every coin has a flip side, and it is important to know what those are:
Advantages
You get scalable and flexible solutions. You can hire email developers as required without any upfront investment or long-term commitment.
It is cost-effective. Since there are no hidden costs or overheads associated, the overall costs are lower than work delivered.
It gives access to a global talent pool. A specialized email marketing agency is more likely to recruit quality talent from across the globe and do so correctly.
Disadvantages
- Intellectual property may be compromised. Sharing your business plans and marketing activities’ insights can pose the risk of getting your internal documents leaked. Signing an NDA can help mitigate this risk.
- False freelancing profiles might be detrimental for your professional needs. Check out their profiles on social media platforms and review/rating sites. Avoid working with anyone who doesn’t have any reviews or can’t be discovered on the internet.
- There may be communication barriers. Freelancers operate in several diverse zones and on a variety of schedules. On top of that, maintaining correspondence with all clients may not be their strongest skill. With an agency, you can have an SLA to avoid such troubles.
Also read: What are The Best Tips for Email Marketing Success?
Pros And Cons Of Hiring
Here are some of the benefits and drawbacks of in-house recruiting to help you make the best option for your company.
PROS
- Face-to-face discussions can increase engagement among staff working on the same project, thereby speeding up progress. These face-to-face meetings can assist in generating new enthusiasm, which can lead to greater ideas.
- When you can provide a wage and opportunities for advancement, in-house workers are less likely to leave. These workers may also be more invested in the company’s long-term voice.
- Intellectual property is more likely to be kept private. Individuals can also sign a non-compete agreement, which prevents them from stealing inspiration with them if they leave the firm.
CONS
- Quality talent can be difficult to come by, especially in smaller cities. The job market may already absorb the majority of the top talent.
- Employees may expect medical perks. Remember that these fees may add up quickly, whereas a freelancer charges a fixed rate.
- Finding, interviewing, and negotiating a new employee can take time, and the process might have to be repeated if an individual leaves. It may be costly to onboard new staff and requires training.
Why Is Outsourcing Better Than In-house
When you consider the time, resources, overhead, and other costs of developing in-house campaigns, outsourcing to an experienced email marketing services provider is typically a more effective (and often less expensive) option. Their marketing proficiency, creative talent, coding expertise, and delivery experience are likely to benefit you more.
Outsourcing email marketing allows you to maximize your efforts in a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective way.
Limited internal resources and a lack of plan were the top obstacles for marketers when questioned about the most important barriers to successfully executing automated email marketing campaigns. Outsourcing to an email services provider can alleviate both of these problems (along with a slew of others).
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Wrap Up
I think I have cleared most of your doubts on whether you should hire in-house or outsource your email marketing operations to a team of HTML email developers. In-house hirings are more suitable for corporations with deeper pockets, but they require consulting from experts in many cases. Depending on your requirements and stature as an organization, you can decide while outsourcing is always a strategically good alternative.
