Email Marketing Agencies

Email marketing agency selection quick guide and tips

Here is a quick word about finding the best email marketing agency.
Marketers often ask me “What do you think are the best email marketing agencies?”
Immediately the next question pops up:
Best email marketing agency, sure, if there is such a thing. But best in what?

Realize there are different shapes and sizes of email marketing services firms.
It helps a lot to first know the type of agency you are looking for.

So, let’s take a look.

Types of email marketing agencies:

Here are some types of email marketing agencies to get a good impression of what you are really looking for and get your juices flowing.

B2B email marketing companies

B2B email marketing companies are specialized in helping B2B firms get the most out of their email programs. B2B is often different than B2C, as you have to deal with maybe longer decision times, CRM and personal sales follow up. If you are in B2B and looking for an email marketing agency, be sure they have some B2B experience.

Full-service email marketing agencies

Full-service email marketing agencies can take away all or a big part of your email marketing work. They might still have their own strong points but are used to manage email marketing programs end-to-end.

That means in-house creative, design, strategy, etc. If you are looking for the best email marketing management companies, consider ones that have a full-service offering, even if you don’t need all the services.

Email advertising companies

This is an oddball category, but people are looking for companies to help them with email advertising. Think about renting an email list, promotions in publications or pushing out content through publishers channels.
We haven’t included this category here (yet). But the skills often fall together with the next category email acquisition companies.

Email Acquisition Companies

This agency is on the prowl. They do lead generation (either with or for you). Improving email sign-ups from your site (CRO) is a skill all top email marketing agencies should be able to do. Yet running a good email acquisition campaign takes knowledge of more channels and the network and templates to do so.

Biggest email marketing companies

If you are running a big email marketing program (think international, global or ridiculous high volume) there are agencies that can help you out. But typically you are looking at the biggest email marketing companies for these that are able to manage email marketing campaigns with that scale.

Marketing Automation Agencies

Marketing Automation Agencies are specialized in setting up marketing automation campaigns. Sure. Think about life-cycle emails and event-triggered emails. If they do the strategy work as well, they help refine marketing Personas and content marketing. In B2C e-commerce think about all the triggers around welcome, shopping cart, etc. There are automation agencies that work tool agnostic or specialize in one or two tools.

Email Platform specific email marketing companies

Some of the best email marketing agencies are partners and mostly work with a few tools they are expert in. They usually partner with the biggest email marketing software platforms or some of the more elaborate (and complex) tools. Some examples of specific email software agencies:

MailChimp agencies
Mailchimp agencies are going for big and small. MailChimp is the most popular email marketing software platform, but most of their clients are SMB. So there is plenty to do there.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud agency
Salesforce is an interesting piece of marketing software. The CRM and Marketing Cloud can do the most complex things, making managing them also a specialist task.

Hubspot Marketing agencies
Hubspot agencies/partners often have an inbound marketing approach. Hubspot sales CRM and Marketing fit nicely together. Hubspot has a certification program, but don’t be fooled not all certified companies know WTF they are doing.

Caution here: if you are looking for the right email marketing software for your company – an exclusive software partner will most likely advise you to use… riiiiight. The tool that they are specialized in, so that makes them less fit to help you in a software selection.

Email deliverability agencies and experts

These often compact agencies or single experts are specialized in email deliverability. Making sure that the email hits the inbox. They are able to solve deliverability (email goes to spam!) problems. Think about managing on-premise or their own servers, or otherwise once there is some real concern / problems with email deliverability, blacklisting, etc.

Email creative agency slash email campaign companies

These agencies excel in creative email marketing campaigns. Think about the concept, template design, and coding. Maybe you are looking to get a template designed (one-off) or have a custom email campaign that is outside of what you typically do.

About this email marketing agency list.

If you are looking for an Agency to handle your Email Marketing Campaigns, it is hard to choose or compare email marketing agencies well. They should be specialists and experts in their field.

We set out to make this a list of the best Email and Marketing Automation Agencies out there. Is one missing that according to you should definitely be on here? Let us know.