Email marketing is one of the most flexible, versatile, and effective options in the marketing toolkit, able to deliver outstanding results on its own or fit seamlessly into larger strategies. It’s a high-value, accessible service that almost any agency can incorporate into its offerings to attract new clientele, grow your accounts, and make your shop as sticky as possible.
Best of all for agencies, email ROI is highly attributable, meaning it’s easy for you to show exactly how much revenue you’re bringing in and keeping you an essential part of their marketing program.
Once you’ve added email marketing as part of your agency business services, you can start encouraging your current and potential clients to make use of it. Here are our top 5 ways to encourage your clients to get started with (or refocus on) email marketing.
1. Offer these statistics to prove that email marketing works.
The biggest selling point for email marketing is simply that it works! Email marketing gets business results, and gets them for less cost than other marketing methods.
Explain to your clients some of these highlights:
- Emails are a great way to get in closer contact with customers. It doesn’t rely on your customer remembering to visit your site, or seeing a print advertisement. It’s the ultimate 1:1 engagement channel.
- You can personalize emails to suit the particular interests of that customer, instead of sending a generic brochure.
- You only pay for people you are actually sending to, instead of blasting a message out to the world at large.
- It’s easy to scale. Whether you’re just reaching out to a handful of subscribers or engaging a list of millions, email can keep up and grow with your business.
- Email marketing is calculated to return $42.00 for every $1 spent in ROI. That’s an incredible ratio.
- Once you start delivering results, don’t forget to record your success into compelling stories. Build case studies highlighting results and use them as prime sales collateral.
2. Track the results from email marketing to connect results to specific campaigns.
One of the frustrations with many marketing activities is that it can be hard to tell what works, and what just costs money. When you conduct email marketing with a tool like Campaign Monitor, you can see what works at a glance—and what doesn’t.
Show your clients some of the detailed, in-depth reports you can provide on key email marketing metrics. You might even go further; set up a sample account, and let them click around and see some real reporting.
If something isn’t working, they’ll find out and be able to tweak it immediately, at low cost. This is a potentially huge saver of time and money.
Don’t forget to explain your approach to email marketing testing. Show them how you never stop pushing for better results and have a systematic approach to helping them optimize their campaigns.
3. Manage email marketing with ease.
If your client has tried email marketing in the past, they may have been overwhelmed by unsubscribe requests or bounces coming back to them. Or they might have tried a system that was difficult to learn and frustrating to use. Not all email technology is the same, and some email platforms are more intuitive than others.
You can offer something better: Automated processes that handle all the tedious subscribing, makes sure people can get off the list when they want to, and keeps track of emails that bounce. Ask them how much time they used to spend doing those things, and what they could achieve if they spent that time being creative, innovative, and analytical instead.
If your client or prospect is relatively new to email marketing, it can be intimidating to get started. Use a tool that comes with prebuilt high-performing email templates and an easy drag-and-drop interface. A what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach is far more approachable to these clientele.
4. Emphasize the flexibility of email marketing.
Take some time to think of a few ways your specific client could use email marketing. Propose a few low-risk, high-reward ideas they could use to get started and see results quickly:
- Could they feature a different product each week, and offer special prices to frequent buyers?
- Maybe they can have case studies of customers using their service, and can segment their lists to send them to other potential customers in similar industries.
- Could they email customers who have been out of touch for a little while, and ask if they have any suggestions?
- Revisiting their triggered emails, like their welcome series or order confirmations, could deliver big gains.
- A big promotion centered around an upcoming holiday relevant to their product is an easy way to be creative and help get clients excited about committing before that window of opportunity closes.
You want your clients excited about the possibilities! If you put some effort in first to start them off, they may come up with some even better ideas on their own.
5. Show them a working example of your email marketing services in action.
One final thing you might try would be to include a sample email design with your web designs. A lot of digital marketing can seem theoretical and difficult to visualize. Seeing their brand in action as an email could be much more convincing and inspiring than graphs and slideshows.
Wrap up
Why not send a sample email to your client, with their own branding on it? P.S. you can do this FREE through Campaign Monitor, and should only take you a few minutes to mock up.
We’d love to hear any comments on other techniques that have worked for you or you plan on trying. Any pitching ideas we’ve missed?
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