The Agency +1 Model and why it works
Before you hire a FTE for more support, you should strongly consider an agency retainer instead.
I get asked a lot about how, in the early years of Grammarly, I was effectively the only DRI on the email channel for years before expanding the team.
There is a lot of context to unpack and a major caveat to this statement.
Grammarly’s email channel scope was, in fact, enormous, and so was our customer growth. This obviously meant a large database to manage.
I managed transactional and marketing emails at scale. I set up over a hundred triggers and journeys. And I had many manual or semi-manual recurring programs and campaigns.
I sliced, and I diced. I was online for quick sprints during holidays to get things out that couldn’t easily be scheduled for various reasons.
But the truth is. I was never alone.
In fact…my biggest secret is nothing novel. I had a trusted email agency partner that scaled up with my operational needs.
The agency partnership was perfect for me because I never lacked ideas & vision on the creative and strategic side. I just needed support for all technical matters so that I could keep my focus on our customers and drive the program forward.
And boy, did we ever have technical needs. Partially because I really liked to push the envelope on what email is capable of.
Also, I’m not sure if you’ve ever used Salesforce Marketing Cloud. But if you are not careful, you can get lost in there pretty quickly and create a real mess of things.
So, let’s inspect the benefits of a Lead + Agency model. I’ll also discuss when internal team expansion can be the right investment.
Why & When The Agency Model Works
Let’s say you’ve been building out your lifecycle channels and programs for about a year. And, per usual, you are starting to get taxed by the operational load.
You and your manager agree that you have $10k per month to invest. And you start discussing bringing on a more junior generalist to take over.
This is where many startups go wrong. They index towards FTE or part-time generalist contractors to wear all the hats.
Someone to be scrappy…just like you have been!
The truth is, a retainer for the same budget with a really good email agency (let’s focus on an email shop for the purposes of this article) can provide you with much more leverage than another generalist.
My personal playbook is to let the agency take over all the technical work that has probably drained you and your in-house team of engineers, who likely hate working in your ESP/MAP.
The technical work can look like this:
Setting up & QA of journeys
Code ad-hoc emails
Code design systems/content blocks of emails
Version and sandbox to production management for quality control
Customer segmentation setups
Deployments, reporting
Backend coding of more sophisticated emails that use personalization
Investigations and resolution of issues/errors
Email accessibility & dark mode optimization
Data pipeline scoping and implementation
Many of the shops that offer this type of work are also full-service and can fill in creative gaps (copywriting and design) if that’s not an area for strength.
But my personal preference is to keep creative in-house (likely with shared resources) and then punt all the tedious technical work to your agency. And then to grow together as the program grows.
What Happens if You Hire Mini You(s) Instead?
No matter how talented and ‘scrappy’ this mini you is, you are probably hiring to alleviate short-term pain points instead of investing in a more effective and efficient model.
You’re also not teaching this person how to scale and delegate responsibly if you don’t provide them with leverage and the ability to focus on strategy instead of just in-the-weeds execution.
You may now be living in a world where you have two masters-of-none and are shipping things just to check boxes rather than making sure those things are as strategic and as wonderful (from a creative and effectivity standpoint) as possible for the benefit of your customers and your longitudinal success.
So, When Should You Hire In-House?
My push is to expand your team in-house when any of the following is true:
You are being groomed to have more scope or move into a new role
Your program has gotten so large/broad that you want to create specialization and need more strategic owners of certain verticals, offerings, and/or audiences.
You need someone to take over servicing requests and/or more operational work because the sheer volume of projects happening in unison is significant.
You are expanding into new channels.
Your program ROI is massive, and you want to make proactive investments in areas of growth you believe in
In other words, when you need more strategic leverage to drive things forward and offset any balance issues with day-to-day operations.
I’m certainly missing items here, and there can be a lot of nuance. But I’d rather keep this guidance digestible.
Two referrals for email agency support
I have two strong referrals to share that I have direct experience working with. In addition to all of the technical, operational, and creative support I’ve listed above, both of these agencies offer implementation and migration support to the respective platforms they have deep expertise in.
For SFMC Support
Digital Additive out of Atlanta, GA. They were the agency of record for Grammarly from 2014-2023 and the relationship went away only for circumstantial reasons. Namely, Grammarly moved from SFMC to Iterable.
Just last week, DA was acquired, but I’m told 100% of the agency is being retained, including leadership, and the biggest change is they will no longer be SFMC only as the consulting firm that bought them (ZS) offers broader platform support.
For Iterable, Braze, Klaviyo, Customer.io, Sendbird & More Support
Ragnarok is the new email agency partner that Grammarly is trusting now that the team is up and running on Iterable. And they’ve hit the ground running to match our speed of needs.
Just like with Digital Additive before, Ragnarok augments the Lifecycle team’s technical and day-to-day operational needs by setting up journeys and campaigns and providing additional support where needed.