Stefan, you raise good points to consider when deciding whether to engage a full service vendor or doing the work in-house. It’s important, though, to weight the cost of both scenarios. The decision to execute in-house has a cost attached as well in that you need to hire people internally with the right experience and expertise. For organizations that have already invested in their internal team, I agree that they should execute in-house and engage an experienced agency to review and recommend improvements – as you have suggested.
However, it’s important to note that if you don’t already have the resources in-house it may not pay-off to hire full time for execution. Full service vendors bring a lot of experience and expertise and the right vendor can work as an extension of a smaller marketing team.
Additionally, on the point of automating email communications for regular campaigns, it’s important to distinguish that a full service vendor doesn’t always mean manual deployments. A good vendor will work with your team to determine which campaigns could work best as automated programs and work with you to implement. For organizations that don’t have a lot of experience in launching automated programs it is probably best to work with a vendor that has done it before. Automated programs are typically cost effective to run through ESP’s.
Lots to consider 🙂