Why Sell Email Marketing, and How to Package and Price Services

Chapter 1

Why sell email marketing?

Email marketing is the perfect complement to other digital marketing services you currently offer your clients.

Email marketing gets results

Facebook has nearly 2 billion active users per month, and Twitter has approximately 319 million, it’s understandable that your clients may think social media is the best channel to market their businesses. But trying to market on these channels can be risky as you are always at the mercy of their algorithms that can change at a moment’s notice.

But with email marketing, you have much more control, and your potential reach is massive. According to Radicati, the total number of email accounts worldwide in 2017 is 4.9 billion and is projected to be 5.6 billion by 2019.

There are 3x more email accounts than there are Facebook & Twitter accounts combined.

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

You are 6x more likely to get someone to click-through to your website via email than you are from Twitter.

So although social media still gets a lot of attention, email marketing is a much more effective way for your clients to market their businesses. 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. Studies show the top 50 agencies in the UK are experiencing the lowest profit margins in over seven years.

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. You effectively do more with what you already have. It’s a win-win.

Email marketing allows you to earn recurring revenue

Many 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.

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 over $25 million in recurring revenue simply by reselling Campaign Monitor using the platform to send their email campaigns.

Chapter 2

How to package email marketing services

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:

• Set 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.
• Identify 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.
• Plan 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.

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 apps and integrations to help accomplish their goals.

3. Provide a reliable email marketing tool.

On top of providing email marketing 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 yours 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 can 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 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.

“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 is 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.

This is an awesome opportunity for you 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 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 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 email 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.

Chapter 3

How to price email marketing services

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?

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

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

3. Full-service

Full-service is a great option to offer clients who understand the value of email marketing but don’t want to do it themselves.

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 that you can depend on.