Despite its position as one of the oldest digital channels, agencies love email marketing.
At least, they love it for their clients. A recent survey shows agencies recommend using email to their clients more than any other digital channel.
Chart from The Impact of COVID-19 On Digital Agencies: A Survey Report
It’s not hard to understand some of the reasons why:
- Year after year, email consistently provides some of the highest marketing ROI you’ll find anywhere
- It’s easy to attribute email’s contribution to the bottom line and prove your value to clients
- Email marketing is the perfect “gateway service” to get accounts in the door and create opportunities for future upsells
- You can ramp up quickly and start delivering results fast
- Infinite scalability makes it suitable for clients of any size, whether they’re SMBs with small, exclusive mailing lists or a multinational corporation that reaches millions of inboxes every week
But even though email marketing is often a bread-and-butter service offering for their clients, agencies seem to struggle to make it work for their own business growth strategy. Email marketing only generates about 2% of new agency leads for marketing agencies, according to a study from Promethean Research.
Now might be a good time for marketing, creative, and advertising shops of all kinds to re-evaluate the way they approach agency email marketing. In the wake of COVID-19, many are struggling to attract new business. Research from Uplers shows 47% of agencies have experienced a decrease in marketing leads.
Email offers a low-risk, potentially high-reward avenue to make up some of that difference. With intelligent use of some of the best templates for agencies, you can elevate your email program quickly and easily.
Agency email marketing: Unique challenges for a unique industry
Several aspects of conventional agency email marketing make it different from other industries. This, at least in part, helps to explain why agencies have historically struggled with it:
- You have to take your own medicine. As an agency, you’re expected to be the experts on good marketing practices, from creative and content to best practices, design, coding and more. If you’re advising clients and prospects to do one thing, but your own emails don’t follow that advice, you’re eroding your own credibility.
- Small, targeted audiences. Agency email marketing is a focused affair. As is with the case of many B2B brands, target audiences tend to be very sophisticated and discerning. If you’re not on your A-game 100% of the time, they’ll notice.
- Your emails double as marketing and sales collateral. Showing off your best work is a cornerstone of promoting an agency’s new business strategy; it captures attention and establishes social proof. Agencies need to approach their own email marketing with just as much care and thought as any other part of their sizzle reel.
With unique challenges come unique opportunities.
Agencies that find a way to stand out in the inbox will outshine lackluster competitors. The best templates for a marketing agency inspire clients and reflect the authority and innovation your agency needs to get new business.
Email templates vs custom coding
If you’re positioning your agency as a smart, creative, innovative marketing partner, an obvious question might arise: Why use email templates at all? Why not build something special every time you need to send an email that really shows off what you can do and blows away your recipients?
There are a few important factors to consider when weighing your options.
- Saving time and resources. Using a prebuilt template designed by experts can save endless hours of production and testing. That’s time and talent you can keep focused on being innovative, analytical, and delivering a phenomenal customer experience (or just sending more emails). With a powerful email marketing platform, you can customize a template and get started in a minute or less.
- More customized doesn’t always mean better. There’s a reason some templates stand the test of time and get used time and again: they just work. Even your brightest, most clever ideas may end up falling flat when it comes to the measurements that matter.
- Provide an error-free user experience. Email is infamously finicky; you need to account for the large-and-growing list of devices and email clients your message may be opened on. Custom work introduces more room for mistakes, which looks especially bad if you’re trying to pitch email marketing to clients. The best email templates for agencies will work every time, no matter how or where they’re opened, so you can send with confidence that your message will look good and perform as expected.
There’s a time and a place for custom-built emails, but that approach should be reserved for special projects and campaigns that require something unique.
As a compromise, a good email template will be flexible enough to handle heavy customization anyway. Adapt the templates you choose to your own brand and messaging needs, or use an intuitive email template builder to craft something that’s just right for you.
The best templates for a marketing agency to keep in its toolkit
When beginning or ramping up your agency’s email marketing, start with a few essentials that will cover most of your bases and give you the flexibility to adapt your program as needed.
The welcome email
First impressions are always a big deal, especially in B2B marketing where relationships, trust, and reputation are paramount.
Whether it’s a single send or a series of emails, it’s important to give new subscribers a red carpet experience. Set the tone for the kind of engagement they can expect from you, and give them a reason to keep opening future emails.
It doesn’t have to be complicated or fancy to make an impression. Sometimes, as this example from MBB shows us, a simple hello and an invitation to engage further is enough to establish a connection.
Need to clean up your digital welcome mat? Start with the best welcome email templates for agencies and get up and running in just minutes.
The newsletter
The newsletter is an essential component of lead nurturing and account development. It keeps your agency top of mind and acts as a powerful way for you to share updates and new content.
The best agency email newsletter templates need to be flexible. It has to be able to adapt to various updates and content you want to share. As this newsletter from Firebelly illustrates, an agency newsletter often includes blogs, product updates, awards announcements, client case studies and more.
Building a newsletter for your agency, even a very elaborate one, can be fast and easy with a prebuilt email newsletter template.
The promotion
Promotional emails are tricky for agencies. It can be difficult to translate typical promotional tactics that work for consumer brands, like limited-time sales or hot new product features, over to the traditional agency business model. Contract terms and pricing that can vary wildly from one account to the next don’t always accommodate a promotion that would be sent to your entire mailing list.
That said, a smart promo can certainly be a useful tool in getting that first contract signed or growing an account up to that next tier.
Once you’ve thought of a promotion that makes sense for your agency and clientele (like this one from Taylor Brands), package it in one of these templates optimized for deals and offers to get the best possible results.
The survey
Want to know what your clients think of your performance? What about the kind of content your leads would find most valuable?
You don’t have to speculate. Sometimes the easiest way to find an answer is to just ask. And as this example from Taylor Brands shows, there’s no better way to directly bring important questions to clientele than through the inbox.
Guarantee a good response to your survey by starting with one of the best feedback email templates.
Wrap up
As you look for ways to attract new business and build relationships for your agency, email is a smart, accessible, affordable way to get started. The best email marketing templates for an agency make designing captivating, effective emails a breeze, even if you’re working with limited resources. Don’t forget to include these core templates in your toolkit:
- A welcome email template to establish a connection and keep new subscribers coming back
- A newsletter email template to share news and updates with clients and nurture leads
- A promotional email template to highlight a special offer and drive short-term conversions
- A survey email template to gather important data and learn more about your audience
The agency perspective is baked into our DNA—and our code. See how Campaign Monitor makes it easy to manage your accounts and orchestrate campaigns, all from one dashboard.