A Solid Email Marketing Program For Agencies to Land New Business
Did you know that when implemented the right way, email marketing has an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent?
Are you achieving this ROI at your agency when it comes to your email marketing efforts?
Since I run The Campfire Circle, an agency that grows and optimizes agencies, I do a lot of email marketing for my clients and myself, which means I have a ton of insights to share so that you, too, can achieve this ROI with your own email marketing program.
Keep reading to transform email marketing at your agency to land more business.
Start By Warming Up Your Email Address
First things first. An email marketing program is useless if the majority of your emails end up in spam. And this can happen pretty easily.
To ensure the deliverability of your emails, it’s important to warm up your email address. You can do this with an existing address or create a new one for your email marketing efforts.
Warming up an email address manually is close to impossible. But there are tools that automate this for you. I personally use lemwarm after testing out and researching my options. They are affordable, and once you sign up, it only takes a few weeks to warm up your email address.
Once warmed up, your emails have a much higher rate of staying out of the dreaded spam folder.
Choose An Email Marketing Platform
You may already have an email marketing platform, and that’s great!
If you don’t, there are a plethora to choose from.
If you have the budget for something super comprehensive, I recommend HubSpot.
If you’re looking for something more affordable that works well and has the basics, I recommend Active Campaign.
However, I encourage you to do a Google search to find the email marketing platform that fits your agency’s needs and budget.
Your email marketing platform will allow you to automate emails, segment contacts, view reporting on the status of your efforts, and more. All very important things!
Cold Email Outreach The Right Way
Based on my own experience, cold emails don’t directly land new business. So don’t use cold outreach to send a sales pitch and ask contacts to book a meeting with your agency right away.
However, cold email outreach is still effective when leveraging an asset and establishing thought leadership. Each email will focus on a topic beneficial to your target audience, and at the end, you can provide a CTA to book a call with your agency to discuss how your agency can deliver on the pain points you address with your email content.
Acquiring Email Addresses
When it comes to acquiring email addresses to leverage with your email marketing efforts, there are a few options.
Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is a valuable resource housed on a landing page that prompts your audience to fill out a lead capture form with their email address to access your resource. Examples include eBooks, webinars, industry reports, white papers, and more. You can read more about lead magnets here.
The gist is that you spend time promoting the landing page of your lead magnet to get as many people to fill out your form and provide their email addresses as possible.
You’ll synch your lead capture form to your email marketing platform so that all the people who fill out the form go into a nurturing campaign which I will address shortly.
Purchase a List
Purchasing a list of email addresses is a little controversial. However, with email marketing landing my agency more business than any other channels, I personally think it’s a good strategy as it has worked well for me.
The key is to avoid sending a sales pitch about your agency and drip your list with thought leadership emails to establish credibility.
There are many services out there to purchase lists of email addresses. I’ve used a few and think Lake B2B delivers the best value for the investment.
I’ve also hired people on UpWork to put together lists manually, and this option is super affordable, but in my experience, you have to try out a few people to find ones that deliver quality lists.
Offer a Subscription Option on Your Website
Whether it’s your blog or newsletter, make it easy for people who visit your website to enter their email addresses to receive your newsletter and/or blog posts.
A simple banner image with a subscribe or sign up button will do the trick and bring in email addresses for people already interested in your agency. When you implement an email marketing program to nurture these people, these people convert really well.
LinkedIn offers lead generation forms that can be utilized in sponsored content campaigns. These forms allow you to collect email addresses from LinkedIn members directly through the platform.
You can create targeted ads that lead to these forms, offering something of value in exchange for their contact details. This is particularly effective for agencies looking to reach decision-makers or specific industry professionals on LinkedIn. It streamlines the process of collecting email addresses by integrating directly with LinkedIn's advertising platform and leveraging its extensive user data.
Dripify
Another option to leverage LinkedIn is to use a tool like Dripify. Dripify automates LinkedIn connections and messages to these connections. It also provides email addresses for the people you connect with, giving the platform many benefits for your agency.
Segmenting and Nurturing Leads
Segmenting your leads will make your email marketing way more impactful, as it will allow you to tailor your messaging to resonate with different segments. Here are some popular ways that agencies tend to segment their leads:
Company size
Budget
Industry
Lead source
Job role
Once your leads are segmented, it’s time to nurture them. Always lead with thought leadership and include a CTA at the end of each email to either reply to your email with questions or to book a call with your agency. I personally recommend never sending a sales pitch.
You want to keep your contacts engaged, but you also don’t want to overdo it. So I recommend 2 emails per week.
When I nurture leads for The Campfire Circle, I set up an automated drip campaign that sends the lead four thought leadership emails as soon as they’re added to my email marketing platform. I then segment those leads and put them on my relevant lists, so they receive timely emails twice weekly. In fact, you’re probably reading this blog post because I emailed it to you, as I do with all my blog posts.
Don’t Forget About the Clients You Already Have
I’ve seen many agencies stop sending emails to leads because they come on board as clients. However, sending them one email per week with your blog posts or timely updates keeps your agency on their minds and offers opportunities to upsell them.
Not to mention, dripping content to your current clients reminds them of your expertise and this simple communication leads to higher client retention rates.
Do you know you could be more strategic with your email marketing but don’t have the time? Running email marketing programs for agencies is one of our many services at The Campfire Circle, and you can contact us here to discuss how we can transform your efforts.
