The idea of outsourcing your email marketing sounds great. I mean, think about it: you’re doing the part of the work you love, working with clients, and someone else is handling the marketing.  

Until you realize you’ve accidentally given yourself another job. 

Let’s say you hire a copywriter, but you have to give her the topics and the talking points every month.

You task your VA with scheduling the emails, but you’re responsible for making sure she has the copy, links, images, and instructions she needs.

Maybe she runs analytics and hands you a report full of percentages with arrows pointing up or down. You still have to figure out what it all means and what you should do differently next month.

Technically, you’ve outsourced your email marketing.

Which is fine if the only thing you wanted was to outsource execution.

But if you actually want to stop being responsible for email marketing, you need someone who can take responsibility for keeping it moving without waiting for you to tell her what to do next.

That’s what I mean when I say I take email marketing off your plate.

And no, you don’t hand me your passwords, and we never speak again. It means our communication becomes a strategic collaboration instead of you having to micromanage me.

If you’re like me, you grew up hearing “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. I still catch myself saying it from time to time, so I can understand how handing over that much responsibility can feel scary.

Especially when it means trusting someone else with the voice and reputation for a business you’ve built. 

Calling your business “your baby” may be a cliché, but there’s a reason people say it. It’s your name on the emails. Your reputation. Your clients. Your livelihood. 

So yes, the idea of handing email marketing to someone else sounds fantastic.

Right up until you actually have to hand it over.

Then your brain starts going:

But will she sound like me?

Will she understand what I actually do?

What if she says something I would never say?

What if she promotes the wrong thing?

What if something goes out and I don’t know about it?

And suddenly, outsourcing only sounds like a good idea in theory.

But the answer isn’t to white-knuckle your way through handing your business to someone and hoping for the best.

You need to trust that what’s happening is happening without having to be responsible for making it happen.

And you might be wondering what it actually looks like to have someone take email marketing off your plate without taking you out of your own marketing? 

Let me show you.

You give me context, not assignments

Managing your email marketing means I need the big picture of what’s happening in your business, not the week-to-week decisions.

If you’re launching a new offer in October, I need to know so we can work it into the existing content strategy or change the CTAs.

If you suddenly have three openings next month, clients keep asking the same question, you’re noticing a shift in what people seem to care about, or you’ve decided you never want to promote a particular service again, I need to know that too so I’m not making those decisions one email at a time. 

I can plan the larger conversations we need to have with your list around it. I can look ahead at what you’re selling, what else you’re publishing, what your audience has been hearing from you, and what they may need to understand before the next promotion lands in their inbox.

So instead of figuring out what to send every time an email is due, we already know what each email needs to contribute along the way.

You don’t need to map all of that out for me. You need to make sure I know enough about the business to map it out for you.

But notice what I’m asking you for.

Information about your business. Not instructions for how to market it.

You don’t have to come to me and say:

I think we should send an email about this next Tuesday.

Here are the five points I want you to cover.

Can you mention this offer at the bottom?

And then maybe we should send another email about this the following week?

You know your business better than I ever will, but I need access to that knowledge to make good decisions on your behalf.

I’ll ask you a question, then sit back and listen as you explain what you think about it. Because I’m not only listening for the information you’re giving me. I’m paying attention to how you give it to me.

The specific words you use. How you structure an explanation when you aren’t trying to “write copy.” Whether you tell a story to make your point or get straight to it. Where you get emphatic tells me one thing, while a long pause to think about an answer tells me something different.

Even the things that don’t technically translate to the page tell me something.

If you’re talking with your hands and getting increasingly emphatic as you explain something, I’m not going to turn around and write an email that sounds restrained and buttoned-up. That energy needs to make it onto the page somehow. Probably in the form of 3 or more exclamation points. 

If you pause before answering to choose exactly what you mean, I’m not going to manufacture a hot take just to make the email more interesting. That thoughtfulness is part of your voice too.

I’m not just mining our conversations for phrases I can steal. I’m looking for patterns.

Your cadence. Your word choice. How you explain something you know inside and out. What you think needs more explanation, and what you consider so obvious you give it a passing mention.

Because your voice is more than a collection of recognizable phrases and communication habits I can sprinkle over otherwise generic copy and call it “you.”

I need to understand how you think, not just how you sound.

If something isn’t clear, I ask another question. I don’t fill in the blank with what I think you probably meant and turn my interpretation into your opinion.

That enables me to write on your behalf. 

Once I understand how you think, how you communicate, and what’s happening in your business, it’s my job to figure out what the email should do with that information.

You give me the context.

I turn it into email marketing.

Your email strategy becomes more sophisticated without becoming more work for you

Sending regular emails is one thing.

But as your list grows, there are opportunities to be more intentional about what happens after someone subscribes and what they receive from you, based on what you know about them.

Maybe someone downloads a lead magnet about one specific problem. You don’t want to send her the exact same follow-up as someone who joined your list another way.

Maybe you have an offer specifically for men. You’re not going to send that to the women on your list because it’s not relevant.

If someone has already purchased from you, continuing to send her emails written for people who have never worked with you makes absolutely no sense.

This is where things like segmentation and tagging become useful.

But they’re a huge missed opportunity because they take time to set up and manage. It’s much easier to send every email to everyone than to keep track of what subscribers are interested in, how they joined your list, what they’ve purchased, or where they are in the relationship with your business.

So even when the technology is sitting right there inside their email platform, a lot of business owners barely touch it.

Instead of treating your list as a single group who all need to hear the same thing at the same time, we can use what we know about your subscribers to make better decisions about what they receive. And when the offer is highly relevant to the reader, they are more likely to buy. 

But it isn’t enough to just add someone’s name to a subject line or introduction and call it relevant. Adding someone’s first name to an email is a form of personalization. 

Personalization and relevance aren’t the same thing.

You need both.

I hate when I subscribe to a list, and their email greets me with “Hey Sara Kotila.”

Nothing says we really know and care about you quite like addressing me by my government name.

That’s the kind of thing I can catch and clean up for you.

Relevance makes sure the person receiving the email has a reason to care about what we’re sending, not just that we put the right name in the first name field.

If you offer several services, not everyone on your list is necessarily interested in all of them. Someone who has already worked with you may need a different conversation than someone who’s been quietly reading for six months. And if a subscriber has repeatedly shown interest in a particular problem, we can use that information rather than pretend we know nothing about her every time we hit Send.

The difference between the two is that personalization helps an email feel like it was sent to a person. Relevance helps it feel like it was sent for a reason.

This doesn’t mean creating 47 different emails every week or segmenting your list to hell just because Brenda clicked a link once in February.

There needs to be a reason for the complexity.

Part of managing your email marketing is knowing when segmentation would actually improve what we’re doing—and when we’re just creating an elaborate system because your email platform technically lets us.

The same goes for automations, which can get complicated surprisingly fast.

Your welcome sequence might be straightforward: someone downloads your lead magnet, gets tagged based on what she downloaded, and receives a series of emails introducing her to your business.

But what happens when she clicks a link showing she’s interested in a particular service? Does she keep getting the same emails as everyone else, or does that action tell us something about what she might need next?

What happens if she becomes a client halfway through a nurture sequence? Does she keep getting emails trying to convince her to hire you for something she already bought?

Once you start accounting for different behaviors, interests, purchases, and stages of the customer journey, a seemingly simple automation can turn into a web of conditional if/then logic that says, “If this happens, do this. If it doesn’t, do that. If she does this other thing, send her over here instead.”

And if you’ve ever tried to build one of these yourself, you already know how quickly I’ll just set up a little automation turns into What in the name of sweet baby Jesus have I done?

You start with a perfectly reasonable plan

Or maybe you never get that far.

You open the automation builder, realize you’re going to have to learn how all of this works before you can build the thing you came here to build, and close the tab and decide that’s a problem for Future You.

That’s how a lot of useful automations end up permanently living on the “I really should set that up someday” list.

Setting all of that up takes time. So does testing it, troubleshooting it, and making sure someone hasn’t accidentally been condemned to email purgatory because one tag didn’t fire correctly.

As your business changes, those systems need to change and be maintained, too. 

The welcome sequence you wrote two years ago may be sending people to an offer that barely resembles what you sell now. A lead magnet may attract plenty of subscribers but drop them into a follow-up sequence that goes nowhere. An automation may technically still be functioning perfectly while strategically being as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

“It’s automated” doesn’t mean “we never have to think about it again.”

Managing your email marketing means I’m looking at the systems too.

We can test what works instead of relying on somebody’s “best practice”

There’s no shortage of people on the internet willing to tell you exactly how your emails should work.

Use short subject lines.

No, use emojis

Emojis are destroying civilization.

Put the CTA at the top.

Never put the CTA at the top.

Send Tuesday morning.

Actually, Sunday night is the secret.

Some of those recommendations may be backed by broader email marketing data, but it’s mostly what works for that particular marketer and their audience. 

None of it tells us what your audience will respond to.

A/B testing (sending two versions of the same email, with one change between them) provides useful information.

• Maybe that’s changing the subject line.
• Maybe it’s the way we position an offer.
• Maybe it’s a different CTA.
• Maybe it’s the colors.

But testing too many things at once is where A/B testing can go off the rails pretty quickly. The key is changing one thing at a time.

If Version A has a different subject line, CTA, button color, and offer angle than Version B and it performs better, congratulations. We have learned…absolutely nothing.

We know one version worked better. We don’t know what or why.

But before we test anything, we need to ask:

Do we actually care about the answer?

Your email platform may let us test everything from subject lines to button colors, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

If people are opening your emails but very few are clicking through to an offer, I’m less interested in whether a blue button gets three more clicks than a green one and more interested in what’s happening between the subject line and the CTA.

The test worth running is the one that answers the question: what would actually help us make a better decision?

And over time, those small pieces of information can help us build a much clearer picture of what works for your list instead of blindly following whatever someone announced was an email marketing best practice for their list.

You don’t have to figure out what the results mean

You have to know how your email marketing is performing before you can decide what to do with it.

I’m not going to just dump a report in your lap and walk away.

On the other hand, just because one email is getting fewer clicks than expected doesn’t mean we need to hold an emergency meeting and rethink your entire marketing strategy. Sometimes an email underperforms. Sometimes one knocks it out of the park. Neither tells us very much on its own.

We need to look for patterns and consistency.

And even then, a bigger number isn’t automatically a better result.

We have to look at what that particular email was supposed to accomplish.

If I’m sending you to a new blog post, I care about whether people click through and read it. If we’re talking about an offer, I’m paying attention to whether people are moving toward that offer. If I end an email with a question to understand what your audience is thinking, a handful of thoughtful replies may tell us more than an impressive open rate where zero people answered the question.

But I don’t want people to unsubscribe. 

Unsubscribes aren’t automatically bad news.

Obviously, if half your list stages a mass exodus, we’re going to investigate.

But someone deciding your emails, services, or point of view aren’t for her isn’t necessarily a problem. A smaller list of people who actually want to hear from you is more useful than a bigger one full of people who stopped paying attention three years ago but haven’t bothered to hit unsubscribe.

If I notice patterns, I want to know why they might be happening and whether we should do something differently because of them.

Are certain topics consistently getting more replies? Are people opening emails about an offer but rarely clicking through to learn more? Did one CTA perform noticeably better than the way we usually ask people to take the next step? Are subscribers regularly dropping off at the same point in an automated sequence?

And sometimes the useful information isn’t that something performed particularly well or badly. It’s that the results raise another question worth investigating.

That could mean changing the way we’re positioning an offer or adjusting part of an automation before we screw with something that may be working perfectly fine.

Having data doesn’t mean we need to react to every number.

I’ll tell you what I think it means and give you three recommendations for what we could do next.

Your only job is to pick one.

“Can’t I just send emails and be done with it?”

You might be thinking, Do I really need all these extra steps? Can’t I just send an email and be done with it? 

Sure. 

But whenever something needs to happen, you have to be the one who makes it happen.

When I was a massage therapist, I remember being nervous about adding online booking to my website because I didn’t want to lose control of my schedule. 

What if I had large gaps between appointments? 

What if a new client no-shows?

I quickly realized I could set it up to prevent things like that, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions because people could book appointments while I was with another client, out living my life, or dead asleep.

There was something ridiculously exciting about waking up to three appointments that hadn’t been there the night before.

But the bigger win was everything I didn’t have to do to get those appointments.

I wasn’t listening to voicemails between clients, calling someone back, missing her, waiting for her to call me again, comparing schedules, and playing three rounds of phone tag before finally finding a Tuesday at 2:00 that worked.

New clients could book themselves, and I was able to take a deposit to prevent no-shows. 

Then my welcome email automatically went out with her intake paperwork, which meant we weren’t spending the first ten minutes of the appointment filling out forms.

None of those things changed the massage.

They changed how much of my involvement was required to get someone onto my table.

That’s how I think about all the other pieces of email marketing too.

So yes, you absolutely can send an email and be done with it.

But automation, tagging, segmentation, testing, and the systems behind your emails give us opportunities to make email marketing more effective.

Hiring someone to take it off your plate makes it less dependent on you while still making it work for the business.

Do I really need to outsource all of this?

Maybe not.

If you’re happy with what you’re doing now, it’s getting done consistently, and you don’t want anything more from email, there may be absolutely no reason to change anything.

But maybe you’ve reached the point where you want email actively managed without being the person responsible for making it all happen.

You may be doing a damn good job of it. You’d just rather have that time available for client work or other priorities in your business.

The better question is whether managing your own email marketing is still the best use of your time.

You get to decide what stays on your plate 

If what you need is someone to write emails after you tell her exactly what you want them to say, there are copywriters who can do that.

If what you need is someone to load finished copy into your email platform, a VA may be exactly the right person.

But if the reason you’re outsourcing email marketing is that you don’t want to be responsible for running it anymore, handing off individual tasks only gets you part of the way there.

My full-service email marketing retainer is for the business owner who wants to be involved in her marketing without having to manage it.

You keep me in the loop about your business.

I keep you in the loop about how your email marketing is helping to grow your business.

So you can stop thinking:

Shit. I need to do something about email.

And know someone already is.

If after reading this post, you’ve decided you’re ready to hand off your email marketing, let’s start the conversation. Tell me about your business and what you’d like to get off your plate in my inquiry form.