How selling email marketing services can help grow your agency

As an agency, you probably know that margins are thinner than ever. You’re likely experiencing the pain first hand.

It’s a problem affecting the entire industry. In fact, recent studies have shown that the top 50 agencies in the UK are experiencing the lowest profit margins in over 7 years.

So how can you grow your own agency through these tough times?

In this post, we’ll help you understand what email marketing services you can offer clients, show you different ways to monetize them, and ultimately highlight how selling email marketing services can grow your agency.

What email marketing services can your agency offer clients?

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 world of email marketing?

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

1. Email marketing strategy

If you’re like most 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 repeat sales from existing customers, while others may want to use it to convert 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 to their store. By understanding your client’s goals and business model, you can help them identify what campaigns they should be sending.

2. Email setup and integration

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

This expertise allows you to offer setup & integration services that 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
• Authenticating their emails for better deliverability
• And much more!

3. Provide a reliable email marketing tool

Using the agency features built into email tools like Campaign Monitor, you can actually offer your clients a reliable email marketing tool. You simply 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.

Each client gets their own login that allows them to manage their lists, send campaigns and view reports by themselves (if they so desire), and you get a customized agency interface that enables you to manage all your clients accounts in one place.

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 themselves 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. Template design and development

One of the benefits of email marketing over other marketing mediums 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. Campaign creation & sending

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 you 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. Campaign reporting

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.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. Automated workflow setup

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.

You can help your clients make the most of email automation by developing a number of automated email workflows for them. Some ideas include:

• 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 they are due for their next dental appointment.
• 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.

How can you monetize email marketing services?

With the necessary design and technical skills in-house, 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 increase revenue and grow 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 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 $1000 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 grow their business through 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.

In conclusion

Offering email marketing services as part of your agencies broader offering is a win for both your clients and your agency.

The incredible effectiveness of email marketing will help drive sales & revenue for your clients, and the extra, ongoing revenue generated from providing email services will help you grow your agency.