Why Sell Email Marketing as an Agency, and How to Package and Price Services

Email marketing is an excellent offering to have in your service menu as a standalone option or as a complement to other digital marketing services you currently offer your clients.

Email marketing gets results for clients

We’ve seen many marketing channels and new tactics rise and fall in popularity over the years. But email marketing has stood the test of time, consistently driving remarkable results and ROI. It’s one of the most universal, flexible, and effective options available for brands. 

Best of all, email is one of the most measurable, attributable marketing tools. When you’re doing email marketing attribution right, you can easily track and demonstrate the impact it’s having on the bottom line.

That’s good news for your clients, of course. And it’s also great news for your agency. If you can prove you’re bringing value to the relationship, it makes you ‘sticky,’ paving the way for renewed contracts and upsell opportunities.

Clients are willing to invest in a channel they know works. According to a June 2020 survey by Merkle, 51% of marketers at major US and UK brands said their email marketing spending increased, and just 16% of respondents reported a decrease.

By offering email marketing as a service, 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

In recent years, agency margins have taken a downward turn. Greater global competition for services and insourcing trends have driven down pricing from years ago, and margins now hover around 18%.

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

Unlike website or logo design, which are inherently one-off projects, email marketing enables your agency to work with your clients on an ongoing basis and earn revenue each time you send a campaign on their behalf.

This reduces the need to constantly spend time and money trying to win new projects and allows you to focus on doing high-quality, billable work for clients. And email marketing is accessible and affordable to start and maintain. You effectively do more with what you already have. It’s a win-win.

Ultimately, we went with Campaign Monitor because we felt that the platform was extremely innovative and perfectly aligned with our goals. The app offers an entire portfolio of templates, but we also have the freedom to code and implement our own. 

– Ryan Austin, Director of Email Marketing 

Email marketing is a perfect source of recurring revenue

Email is forever, and there’s always another campaign to be sent. New promotions, updates, and especially recurring communications, like newsletters, are perfectly suited for regular email sends.

Email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor allow you to markup prices and bill your clients directly to account for the unique services your agency provides. You can customize the Campaign Monitor interface with your own branding and settings to give it a special, proprietary look and experience.

This means that you can sell the platform as your own and earn revenue every time your clients send an email campaign on your version of the platform. Agencies have earned millions in revenue simply by reselling Campaign Monitor using the platform to manage and send their email campaigns. It really is that easy!

Click here for tips and ideas for pitching email marketing to your clients.

Email marketing is a lucrative service to offer. It drives revenue for your agency while driving results for your clients. Let’s take a look at a few of the services within email marketing that your agency can offer clients:

1. Create an email marketing strategy.

As a digital marketing expert, you can help your clients plan their email marketing strategy and sell it as a service by:

• Setting goals: You can work with your clients to understand their business, where opportunities for growth are and what the goals of their 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 clients’ businesses and the opportunities they have, you can help them set email marketing goals that will help drive growth.
• Identifying email campaigns to send: 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 and promotional campaigns to try to drive people to their website or brick and mortar location. By understanding your clients’ goals and business model, you can help them identify what campaigns they should be sending.
• Planning the content to send: Sending emails requires content, and depending on your clients’ email marketing goals and wider business model, you can work with them to help identify the right content they should send to help get the desired results from their email campaigns. Creating compelling content is a challenge for businesses of all sizes.

2. Set up email lists and integrate with other apps.

As an agency, you likely have a lot of technical expertise on your team.

This expertise allows you to offer integration services to help your clients get set up with the email service provider (ESP) of choice.

This could include:

• Creating an account with the chosen provider
• Gathering and uploading subscriber lists
• Adding subscribe forms to their website
• Integrating a CRM, ecommerce or accounting software to automatically send customer information to the email provider
• Recommend email apps and integrations to help accomplish their goals.

3. Provide a reliable email marketing tool.

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

Using the agency features built into email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor, you can private-label the product as your own, set it up on your domain, and provide it to clients as if it’s your email marketing tool.

You can use the simple agency interface to manage all your clients in one place, and give each client a login that allows them to manage their lists, send campaigns, and view reports.

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 choose to add a markup to the base price and let our billing system handle everything on your behalf, including transferring the profits from your clients’ campaigns to you each month.

4. Design and develop email templates.

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 email campaigns easy for end users, email tools like Campaign Monitor enable the creation of branded email templates that end users can simply drag-and-drop content into.

Using the technical expertise and design prowess agencies have, you can design and develop beautiful email templates that your clients can simply drop content into and send out. Once you’ve established a suite of templates, you can make sure brand standards are maintained throughout with a few simple steps even if other (less creatively-minded) people want to get into the tool and start sending campaigns.

The feedback we get when our clients use Campaign Monitor for the first time is how simple it is to execute their campaigns when compared to other email server providers.

– Orchard

5. Create and send campaigns.

Campaign Monitor makes it super easy to create and send email campaigns, but there are always going to be clients who prefer to have you do it for them. For accounts that want you to take a more hands-on approach, we make taking the reins yourself seamless and fast.

This is an awesome opportunity for you to provide valuable services to your clients. You can take their email 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 subscribers.

The reason we’ve been with Campaign Monitor all these years is because of quality. Campaign Monitor’s emails look the best, are easy to design, and the platform helps keep us organized.

– Wonderful Union

6. Set up automated customer journeys.

These days, the best businesses are moving beyond sending one-off email campaigns and are using marketing automation to create powerful automated customer journeys that send the right campaign to the right person at the right time.

Marketing automation is as easy as setting a trigger, defining the rules, and creating the content.

You can set up any number of customer journeys using marketing automation to help drive results 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.
• VIP offer emails: You can set up emails that automatically send a series of special offers to your clients best customers once they’ve reached VIP status by reaching a certain spending threshold, or another trigger you define.
• Lead nurturing emails: Set up a series of automated emails that get sent to people who make an inquiry 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 organized by your client, reminding attendees that the event is coming up and increasing the chances they’ll attend.

7. Report on campaign success.

One of the biggest benefits of email marketing 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 report it back to your clients after each campaign you send to show how much value your agency’s email marketing services are contributing.

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

But how do you charge for these services so you can improve revenue for your agency as well? All clients want to know—what is the cost of email marketing?

There are a number of models through which you can charge your clients for email marketing management. 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 custom or ad-hoc 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 services pricing

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 email template, and training them to use the email marketing tool to send campaigns.

These setup packages are usually based on a flat rate fee depending on where the email list needs to be pulled from, what kind of email templates they require, etc. And of course, you’re free to offer supplementary creative, analytics, and strategic work as they develop and grow their program!

3. Full-service email marketing packages

Full-service is a great option to offer clients who understand the value of email marketing but don’t want to do it themselves or want to put it completely in the hands of a true expert (that’s you!).

A full-service option usually includes setting up their account (gathering and uploading their list, building an email template, etc.) but 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 an excellent way to secure reliable recurring revenue you can depend on.