Why Sell Email Marketing

Email is the perfect addition to your agencies offering for a number of reasons:

Email marketing gets results for your clients

With Facebook boasting over 1 billion active users per month and Twitter boasting 255 million, it’s understandable if your clients think social media is the best channel to be marketing their business.

But what you don’t see so frequently touted are the statistics on email usage. According to Radicati, the total number of worldwide email accounts was 3.9 billion in 2013, and projected to be 4.9 billion by 2017.

This means that there are 3x more email accounts than there are Facebook & Twitter accounts combined.

On top of having a larger reach, email is more effective at driving conversions as well.

In fact, the average click-through rate of an email campaign is around 3% (of total recipients), whereas the average click-through rate from a tweet is around 0.5%. This means you are 6x more likely to get someone to click-through to your website via email than you are from Twitter.

So although social may be all the rage, email marketing is a much more effective way for your clients to be marketing their business. By making it available as a service your agency offers, you can help clients get the kind of results that will make them want to work with you again and again.

Email marketing increases agency margins

As you’re likely aware, agency margins are thinner than ever.

In fact, recent studies have shown that the top 50 agencies in the UK are experiencing the lowest profit margins in over 7 years.

A key factor in these declining margins, particularly for boutique agencies, is the need to be consistently spending time and money trying to win new projects.

Unlike website or logo design, which are inherently one-off projects, email marketing services enable you to work with your clients on an ongoing basis and earn revenue each time you help them send a campaign (which can often be every month).

This reduces the need to spend time and money winning new projects, and increases your margin by allowing you to focus on doing high-quality, billable work for clients.

Email marketing allows you to earn recurring revenue

If you’re like most agencies, majority of your revenue comes from project-based work like developing websites.

This can often be difficult to manage as you have very little cash flow predictability and you need to be constantly attracting new projects in order to maintain revenue and pay overheads.

But what if you could start earning recurring revenue for your business?

Certain email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor allow you to white label the product as your own and add a markup to the prices.

This means that you can sell the platform as your own and earn revenue every time your clients send a campaign on your version of the platform.

In fact, agencies like yours have earned over $25 million in recurring revenue simply by reselling Campaign Monitor to their clients and getting them to send their campaigns through the platform.

Email marketing is a fantastic service to be offering your clients. It gets results for them while helping generate revenue for you.

But what exactly can you offer your clients in the realm of email marketing?

Let’s take a look at a few of the things your agency might be able to offer clients:

1. Create their email marketing strategy

If you’re like the majority of agencies, you primarily work with small businesses in your local area. These people are experts at what they do, but might not exactly know a lot about email marketing strategy.

This is where you can help. As a digital expert, you can help your clients:

• Set goals – You can work with your clients to understand their business, where the opportunity for growth lies and what the goals of email marketing could be. For some, it could be to drive more sales from existing customers, while others may want to convert more leads into paying customers. By understanding your client’s business and the opportunities in front of them, you can help them set email marketing goals that will drive their business forward.
• Identify the right campaigns to be sending – Based on the goals you set and the nature of your client’s business, you can work with them to identify what campaigns they should be sending. For instance, a carpet cleaning company may be interested in driving more sales from existing customers, so a newsletter with content on the importance of regular carpet cleaning could be a great way to do that. On the other hand, a clothing retailer is going to be better served by sending promotions & sale campaigns to try to drive people into their store. By understanding your client’s goals and business model, you can help them identify what campaigns they should be sending.
• Plan the content to send – Sending emails requires content, and depending on your client’s email marketing goals and wider business model, you can work with them to help identify the right content they should be sending to help get the desired results from their email campaigns.

2. Set up their lists and integrate their website

As an agency, you likely have a lot of technical expertise in-house.

This expertise allows you to offer setup & integration services to help your clients get set up on their email marketing platform of choice.

This could include:

• Creating their account on the chosen platform
• Gathering & uploading their subscriber lists
• Adding subscribe forms to their website
• Integrating their CRM, eCommerce or accounting software to automatically send customer information to the email tool
• Much more

3. Provide a reliable email marketing tool

On top of providing email marketing services, agencies like yours can actually offer an email marketing tool to clients as well.

Using the agency features built into email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor, you can rebrand the product, set it up on your own domain (I.e. email.myagency.com) and provide it to clients as if it’s your own email marketing tool.

You can use the simple agency interface to manage all your clients in one place, and each client gets their own login that allows them to manage their lists, send campaigns and view reports by themselves (if they so desire).

When it comes to billing, you have multiple options that allow you to work with your clients however you choose. Agencies using Campaign Monitor can pay for the tool directly and bill clients independently, or can choose to add a markup to the base prices and let our billing system handle everything on your behalf, including transferring the profits from your clients campaigns into your bank account each month.

4. Design and develop a template

One of the benefits of email marketing is that businesses can deliver messages and offers to their subscribers complete with their branding, beautiful imagery, prominent calls to action and more.

To help make creating these campaigns easy for end users, email tools like Campaign Monitor allow the creation of branded templates that end users can simply drag and drop content into.

Using the technical expertise and design prowess agencies like yours have in-house, you can design and develop beautiful email templates that your clients can simply drop content into and send out.

5. Create and send campaigns

Despite how easy email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor make it to create & send an email campaign, there are still going to be a number of clients who prefer to get their agency to do it for them.

This is a great opportunity for your agency to provide valuable services to your clients. You can take their campaign ideas and content and turn them into beautiful, on-brand email campaigns ready to be sent to subscribers.

You can even send test campaigns to your clients for free to get their approval before sending it out to their subscriber lists.

6. Report on campaign success

One of the biggest benefits of email is how measurable it is.

For every campaign you send, you can see how many people opened it, how many people clicked, and even drill down to the exact parts of your email campaign people interacted with.

On top of that, with Campaign Monitor’s built-in Google Analytics integration, it’s easy to see what happened after the click as well, including how many people arrived at the website from the campaign and exactly what they did there.

This is incredibly valuable information, and you can feed it back to your clients after each campaign you send to show just how much value your agency’s email marketing services are contributing.

7. Set up automated email workflows

These days, the best businesses are moving beyond just sending one off campaigns and starting to look at creating automated email workflows that send campaigns to the right people at the right time.

For instance, you could setup any number of the following automated email campaigns to help drive sales for your clients:

• Welcome Emails – Set up an automated email that welcomes new customers or subscribers when they join a list.
• Reminder Emails – Set up automated emails that get sent to customers to remind them of upcoming important dates, like service due dates for their car, or that their payment plan is expiring.
• Lead Nurturing Emails – Set up a series of automated emails that get sent to people who make an enquiry about your client’s products or services, educating them on why they need what your client offers and increasing the chance they’ll become paying customers.
• Event Reminder Emails – Set up a series of automated emails in the days leading up to a specific event being organised by your client, reminding attendees that the event is coming up and increasing the chances they’ll attend.

With in-house design and technical skills, your agency is in a great position to offer email marketing services that can help grow your client’s revenue.

But how do you charge for these services so you can improve revenue for yourself as well?

There are a number of models through which you can charge your clients for email marketing services. The right one will depend on your business and how you generally prefer to work with clients, but some ideas include:

1. Hourly rate

Usually best for bespoke email marketing work, you can charge your clients your standard hourly rate to do things like gather and upload their email lists, integrate their website or CRM, design & develop a template, etc.

2. Pre-packaged setup

Usually best for clients who will want to send their campaigns themselves but just need help getting started, you can offer a setup package that includes gathering and uploading their email list, building their template, and training them how to use the email marketing tool to send campaigns.

These setup packages are usually charged on a flat rate and start at around $500 depending on where the email list needs to be pulled from, what kind of templates they require, etc.

3. Full service

A great option to offer clients who want to do email marketing, but don’t feel they have the time or knowledge to do it themselves.

This kind of offering usually includes setting up their account (gathering and uploading their list, building a template, etc) but then also creating and sending campaigns on their behalf and reporting back on the results.

This kind of full-service offering is most commonly charged as a monthly fee based on the number of campaigns being sent and is a great way to secure your agency some reliable recurring revenue that you can depend on.