Email Marketing for Agencies & Campaign Best Practices
- It’s important for agencies to have a clear strategy and goals for their email marketing campaigns.
- Personalization and segmentation are key components for successful email marketing campaigns.
- A/B testing and analyzing data can help agencies optimize their email marketing strategies.
Have you recently started an agency? If so, email marketing might just be the smartest thing you could possibly do to drive growth, increase retention, and spread the word about your business.
But how can you tap into this channel and run successful email marketing campaigns for your agency? Let’s take a look at examples and best practices.
Understanding email marketing for agencies
Email marketing is a powerful strategy for agencies, enabling direct communication with clients and prospects. Unlike generic email blasts, agency email marketing is uniquely tailored to address specific client needs, showcase expertise, and build lasting relationships.
Definition and unique tailoring
Email marketing for agencies involves creating and sending targeted emails to engage clients, promote services, and share valuable content.
Agencies leverage email marketing to:
Demonstrate expertise: Share industry insights, case studies, and success stories to position your agency as a thought leader.
Nurture relationships: Maintain regular communication with clients to keep them informed and engaged, fostering loyalty and trust.
Generate leads: Use personalized emails to attract potential clients by addressing their pain points and offering tailored solutions.
Importance of customization
Customization is key when it comes to effective agency email marketing. Tailoring emails to individual clients or segments can significantly increase engagement and conversion rates.
Here’s how:
Personalized content: Use client data to create personalized messages that resonate with their specific needs and interests. This could include referencing past projects, industry trends, or personal milestones.
Segmented lists: Divide your email list into segments based on criteria such as industry, client size, or service needs. This allows you to send targeted content that is more relevant and valuable to each group.
Dynamic content: Incorporate dynamic content blocks that change based on the recipient's behavior or preferences, ensuring each email is uniquely tailored to the individual.
By focusing on customization, agencies can create email marketing campaigns that are not only informative but also highly relevant and engaging. This approach helps build stronger client relationships, drives higher engagement, and ultimately contributes to business growth.
Choosing the right email marketing software
Picking the right email marketing software is essential to running successful campaigns.
The right software should be user-friendly, offer a range of customization options, and provide strong analytics capabilities so you can track your progress and tweak your strategy accordingly. With the right tool in place, you can quickly and easily create powerful email campaigns that effectively reach your target audience.
Here’s what you need to know about selecting an email marketing software that work with the marketing strategies you’ve designed.
Must-have features
Some features are nice to have, while others are essential, such as:
Email segmentation: Segmentation is important for personalizing your messages. Without it, you won’t be able to send relevant emails to the right people. Make sure your chosen email marketing tool allows you to segment your audience as minutely as possible, so you can send highly targeted campaigns.
Automation: Automation is key for running successful email campaigns. Look for software that offers an intuitive automation builder, so you can quickly and easily create automated workflows.
A/B testing: Not sure which type of subject line performs best? A/B testing can help you determine which option is best for your specific target audience, so you can double down your efforts on that and get better results. Research email marketing software that offers A/B testing capabilities.
Email templates: Good email templates are essential for creating attractive, effective emails. Search for software that offers customizable and responsive templates, so you don’t have to design your emails from scratch.
Integrations with other tools: Email marketing doesn’t work in a vacuum. It’s important to have software that integrates with other tools like social media, analytics, and eCommerce platforms. This will enable you to access additional data points and create more powerful campaigns.
Deliverability: Deliverability is crucial for successful email marketing. Make sure your software has strong deliverability rates and a good reputation with ISPs, so your emails reach the inboxes of your target audience.
Customer service: It’s important to have a customer service team who can help you set up your email campaigns quickly and answer any questions you may have. Make sure the software you choose offers a knowledgeable customer service team which can help you make the most of your campaigns.
Cost: Finally, consider the cost of the software. While you don’t want to go too cheap, you also don’t want to overspend. Find a tool that offers all the features and support you need at a price that fits your budget.
By choosing an email marketing software with these must-have features, you can ensure your campaigns reach their full potential and drive engagement with your target audience. With the right software, you can maximize ROI and create powerful, effective email marketing campaigns.
10-step guide to successful agency email marketing
No matter which email marketing tool you may choose, there are certain best practices you should follow to ensure success.
1) Set your goals
You can’t measure success if you don’t have goals. Start by defining your email marketing goals, then break them down into smaller, achievable objectives.
Your goals for email marketing campaigns could include:
increasing website visits
increasing conversions
improving engagement
educating your potential customers
upselling existing clients
2) Consider the buyer’s journey
With your goals established, consider the buyer’s journey funnel. How do your leads become clients? Identify the different stages your leads go through and determine where you can incorporate email marketing.
For example, if you aim to increase sales during Christmas, create a funnel that generates interest before the holiday season. Be sure to mention upcoming discounts, additional services, or other incentives based on the buyer journey stages.
Remember, personalization is essential in the buyer’s journey. Your leads or clients expect personalized emails that build a strong relationship or lay the groundwork for one.
3) Build an email list
With your goals set, it’s time to get people to sign up for your email list. The best way to do that is with an optin form, which you can embed in blog posts or landing pages. Ensure that you’re not tricking people into signing up, but promise them value-based emails delivered at certain intervals to their inbox.
Building a list of subscribers who are not interested in your content will lead to low open rates that are not beneficial. Instead, you want highly engaged subscribers that make lead nurturing easy.
We’ve developed a dual-track approach to list building. While we run targeted acquisition campaigns, we simultaneously monitor engagement patterns of new subscribers. Recently, when launching a client’s industry newsletter, we initially captured 2,000 new subscribers through downloadable guides, but focused on the 40% who consistently opened and clicked—they became our benchmark for future targeting.
In order to maintain a valuable email list, send a welcome email that introduces them to your services, but also tells them what to expect next.
4) Segment your audience
Audience segmentation is one of the most important steps in email marketing. The more you know about your potential customers, the better you segment your audience, and the more you can tailor messages to them.
This matters because even if you only have one buyer persona, people are at different stages of their buying cycle:
Some have just signed up for your blog newsletter;
others landed in your newsletter list from a lead generation asset;
a few have already been on your website and read some of your content; and
others are already buying customers.
I enjoy making the sign-up process more engaging by using interactive elements like quizzes or preference checkers. For example, asking, “Answer these 3 questions to get a personalized guide” turns the sign-up into an engaging experience that attracts quality leads while gathering valuable data. This approach makes the process feel more fun and adds value immediately. Offering something tailored to their needs helps me attract leads who are genuinely interested and ready to engage. It’s a great way to grow my list and keep subscribers excited about what's coming next!
All of these segments should receive different email campaigns. Batching all of them together basically means you speak in terms that are too general, so people can very easily lose interest. Segmenting them, however, helps you make email inboxes similar to meeting up with a friend—you are on the same page regarding the context.
One way you can segment your audience successfully is by integrating your email marketing tool with other software applications. For example, if you use SPP, you can segment your email based on purchases made, for instance. Likewise, if you run a newsletter signup form, you can segment those readers based on their interests.
5) Grow your list
Your email list is never big enough, and here’s why: people subscribe to email lists relatively easily (particularly if there’s an incentive involved). Engaging them, however, is an entirely different animal. Some may be busy, so your email will collect dust at the bottom of the inbox. Others may save it for later—only to never return to it.
If email marketing is one of your main growth channels, you need to consistently work on growing your email list. The more people there are in your list, the more likely it is that more of them will engage with your content (and eventually buy from you too).
Sure, you should work on trying to increase your open rates, click-through-rates, and conversion rates. But you should also never stop growing your list.
6) Choose your email design
Just like in fashion, less is more in email design too. A simpler email design makes it all feel more conversational, removes distractions from your readers, and makes it easier for them to recognize the message. What’s more, simpler email design can help you move past the spam filters, thus improving your email deliverability.
The reason this happens is because spammers used to send images via email, to bypass spam security checks. Modern spam detector algorithms consider an abnormal image-to-text ratio spammy. Therefore, too many images can throw your email campaigns into the recipient’s spam.
Another important thing to consider is making sure your email looks good on all devices. Complex or not, your email designs should be usable, clickable, and easy to read, regardless of whether it’s opened on a mobile phone, tablet, or desktop.
7) Automate your funnels
One of the main benefits of email marketing is automation. When done correctly, you can use automation to create personalized campaigns triggered when someone takes a specific action (like subscribing to your list or buying a service).
Two key components of email automation are autoresponders and workflow automation. Autoresponders automatically send pre-written emails based on specific triggers, such as a new subscription or inquiry, ensuring timely responses without manual effort.
However, workflow automation extends beyond basic autoresponders, offering more sophisticated and personalized email sequences. Workflows can be tailored to guide clients through various stages of their journey, from onboarding to project completion. For instance, an agency might set up a workflow to send a series of welcome emails introducing their services, followed by periodic updates on industry trends, and finally, requests for feedback or reviews.
Implementing email automation workflows allows agencies to maintain consistent communication, nurture leads, and build stronger client relationships. By automating these processes, agencies can focus on strategic tasks while ensuring that every client receives personalized, timely, and relevant information. This not only enhances client satisfaction but also drives business growth through increased engagement and loyalty.
8) Create lead magnets and incentives
On average, we receive more than 130 business emails per day. Let’s assume it takes on average three minutes to read one email. That means we’d spend 6.5 hours reading emails every day.
These numbers may feel like an exaggeration, but the idea is we’re being bombarded with emails from every corner of the internet. People rarely want to subscribe to yet another email in their inbox, just for the sake of it.
So, to get more people into your email list (and thus, receive your emails), you should build lead magnets and offer incentives. These offers are hard to resist and help you overcome the noise in someone’s inbox.
My approach is quality first, supported by precise tactics to ensure growth and engagement. Expanding the list starts with lead magnets designed for a very specific audience. For example, instead of offering a generic eBook, I’ll create a ”5-Step email automation workflow template” for marketers or a “Budget optimization tool” for small business owners. These resources are tied to actionable value, solving niche pain points.
They could be anything from free content pieces (ebooks, cheat sheets) to discounts for subscribing or even an invitation for a webinar. Incentives are not only great for increasing engagement with your emails but also for boosting conversions too.
9) Nurture your leads
One of the best ways to use email marketing for your agency is by lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is the process of building a relationship with your potential customers even before they purchase from you.
To be successful, you need to provide valuable content and insights without asking for anything in return (just yet). This way, when they’re ready to buy, they’ll be more likely to turn to you rather than a competitor.
Lead nurturing emails can include blog posts, tips and tricks, case studies, newsletters or other relevant content sent straight to the reader’s email inbox. One of the recent approaches is that you can even add a QR Code to you emails to increase interaction and track your email campaign better. The goal is to move the reader through their buying cycle until they take action and become paying customers.
10) Track & analyze email performance
Effective email marketing for agencies requires meticulous tracking and analysis of performance metrics to optimize campaigns continuously. By monitoring key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates, agencies can gain insights into the effectiveness of their email strategies.
Utilizing sophisticated tools like Google Analytics, Mailchimp, and HubSpot enables agencies to conduct in-depth performance monitoring. These tools offer detailed analytics dashboards that track user engagement, identify trends, and provide actionable insights. For instance, A/B testing different subject lines or email content can reveal what resonates best with your audience, driving higher engagement.
The process of analyzing email performance is iterative, involving constant refinement based on data-driven insights. Agencies should regularly review performance data, adjust strategies, and test new approaches to improve outcomes. This ongoing analysis ensures that email campaigns remain relevant, engaging, and aligned with evolving client needs, ultimately enhancing the overall impact of email marketing efforts.
Summary
Email marketing is a vital tool for digital agencies, offering a reliable way to drive leads and sales. While it requires effort to build a list, adhere to data privacy regulations, create engaging designs, automate campaigns, and nurture leads, the results are invaluable. Unlike social media trends or advertising algorithms, your email list remains a consistent asset. By continuously engaging and treasuring your email list, you can achieve lasting success in your marketing efforts.
