Email marketing consultant needed

We are a 30+ yr old small business that syndicates content to newspapers. We been relying on a small sales team who each send their own emails to the leads on their list. So there is not much consistency in the sales messages that go out...and these days, a diminishing number of sales. We want to start doing a much better job with email marketing - both sending more effective, regular emails to our current lead list (we have about 30k contacts in our database), and to expanding our list. We have sent "blasts" to our entire contact database before with little result. So now. we want to find a freelancer/consultant to guide us through this process so we do it the right way over the long term rather than just sending a handful of blasts. This is not a direct online sale. A person would not read our email and click to buy. We are offering a service, not selling a physical product. We want to interest them in the benefits and value of syndicated content, and have them schedule a call (best) and/or visit our website for more info (and from there, schedule a call!) Our audience/clients are individuals in the PR/corporate communications/marketing space: people who work at PR agencies and who have PR/communications/marketing titles at companies, associations and nonprofits. We do have a basic CRM - Salesmate - that we would also want to figure out integrations with. And, we want advice on what platforms to send the emails [login to view URL] as you can see, we have lots of questions and are looking for a consultant we can work with to develop and execute our email marketing campaign in the right way. In your proposal, let me know how you would approach helping a "beginner" company like us to enter the email marketing space.