This blog will help you understand, How you can start your own email marketing business without any major investments.
Email marketing, for decades, has been one of the most successful means of approaching clients. Even now, email marketing generates around $42 per every dollar spent on it, which means a titanic 4,200% ROI for businesses.
This is why businesses all around the world still opt for email marketing as one of the most significant means of approaching customers.
But what does this all mean for you?
There’s a huge demand and profitable prospect for email marketing in businesses and you can join the tracks as a B2B freelancer or an agency.
If you’re interested in starting an email marketing business, here’s all you need to know.
Table of Contents
What Does An Email Marketing Business Offer?
Running an email marketing business, you will be offering B2B services by running email marketing campaigns for different businesses. This means you will be conducting email marketing of businesses that will pay you a monthly charge to be your client.
I have been running email marketing campaigns regularly in my job as a Digital Marketer. Usually, an agency sends out 2 email campaigns per week for a specific product or niche. This may vary based on client requirements and our goals too.
Some common types of email marketing campaigns for a business are:
- Welcome Emails
- Email Newsletters
- Dedicated Emails
- Lead Generation Emails
- Referral Emails
- Testimonial Requests
- Discount/Offers Email
- Upselling Emails
- Sponsorship Emails
- Re-Engagement Emails
- Re-Engagement Emails
Why would a business need this? Because many businesses lack the proper resources, expertise, or time to run an email marketing campaign themselves.
With almost every aspect of business operations being outsourced, from sales lead generation to HR recruiting, email marketing is also a very popular in-demand service that is often outsourced by businesses.
What You Need To Start An Email Marketing Business
Here are the total resources that your business may need:
Hardware Requirments:
A decent Laptop with an Internet Connection
Much like every freelance work, an email marketing business can also be set up with just a laptop or a PC and an internet connection.
Software Requirments:
You will require good email marketing tools for this as well to send those bulk email campaigns and then manage them.
Here is a email marketing tools list:
- HubSpot Email Marketing
- SenderSendinblue
- Omnisend
- SendPulse
- Benchmark Email
- Mailchimp
- MailerLite
Just to share my experience, I personally use SendIn Blue as my go-to email marketing tool these days. It is fairly simple and quick and gets the job done.
As your business grows, you may fall in need of more resources, but if you’re starting out alone, that’s all you should need for now.
Revenue and Cost Model Of A Typical Email Marketing Business
The cost model of email marketing businesses varies on the size that they deal with.
For a solo venturer, the only cost that your email marketing business would directly deal with is the subscription fee of an email marketing tool.
Email marketing tools cost around $9 to $299, depending on the package you opt for.
The revenue model of an email marketing business directly relates to the subscription fees you charge your clients for conducting their email marketing campaigns.
Typically, email marketing agencies charge around $300-$2000 per month per client.
If you’re starting out on your own, you should expect your price to be very competitive and affordable which could help you penetrate the market and win clients.
Starting An Email Marketing Business
To start things off, you need to reach out to businesses that might be interested in what you sell. If you’re starting with fewer resources, it would be best to approach small businesses first.
The best way to approach this would be to generate a contact list for potential clients that may be interested in your services.
Step 1: Generating A Contact List
In the first step, you’ll spend a good amount of time browsing for businesses that can be considered potential clients.
Remember, your contact list should only include businesses that NEED your services. This means you should only add businesses that have a general idea of how helpful email marketing is and the client’s product can be advertised through email marketing.
I have written a detailed guide on 20 ways to collect email addresses from your prospective clients, give it a read if you want ideas.
With those filters, feel free to browse the internet. Scroll around Google Maps and social media pages. List out contact details of all the businesses that fill out your requirements, and once you have a big enough list, at least 20 prospects approx., feel free to head over to step number 2.
Step 2: Approaching Your Clients
Now take your contact list out and free up a good amount of time to approach them all, one by one. This could either be by calling their phones or sending an email over their email address.
Before sitting down to make cold calls or cold emails, it is recommended to first write up a good selling script.
You would probably know how to write good emails if you’re looking forward to starting up an email marketing business.
Keep it short. Concise. Have a very appealing subject line and a very intriguing call to action.
But cold-calling scripts work a little differently. Here, you will be talking live to a person and would have to make a deal in under 5 minutes.
A cold calling script would be more informal than an email, would include a persuasive dialogue that gets the receiving end interested, would have a section of rebuttals which you think clients may ask you and the answers to them, and the end with an appointment of a meeting where you can discuss the matter in a deeper length.
After approaching a large number of clients, you should be able to close a deal with someone. If not, keep your head up and repeat the process with different niches, locations, and businesses until you close a deal!
Pointers That Will Help You Close Clients
- Here are some persuasive points of statistics that could convince businesses to follow through with your email marketing business:
- Email Marketing Campaigns on average generate an ROI of 4,200%! That means $42 for every $1 spent making it totally worth it.
- Email continues to be the top channel for content marketing with both B2C and B2B marketers. 87% of B2B marketers and 77% of B2C marketers use it to nurture their audience.
- Average orders from emails value 3x more than from social media.
- 72% of people prefer being approached for promotions through emails.
- Emailing is 40x more effective for customer acquisition than Facebook or Twitter.
- B2C marketers that invest in automated emails enjoy conversion rates as high as 50%.
- Email subscribers are 3x more likely to share content on social media.
Step 3: Getting An Email Marketing Solution
Once you close a deal, you would be expected to send emails regularly to a large number of clients, on behalf of your client business.
This would require you to get a mailing service to provide.
Different emailing software has different features that you can make use of. It is recommended to start with the cheapest package and then upgrade as you feel the need for better resources.
Some clients may even sponsor your subscription for the email marketing solution, but this would mean you would get a low charge for your services.
Here is a list of some of the most popular email marketing tools with prices:
| Mailchimp | $0-$299 |
| HubSpot | $0-$800 |
| Sendinblue | $0-$599 |
| Sender | $0-$208 |
Step 4: Working With The Client
Once you do find a client, you will be expected to run their email marketing campaign which could include all or some aspects of the following:
- Writing content
- Scheduling emails
- Building templates
- Automating emails
- Approaching a mass amount of client base
The most common email marketing campaigns that businesses run are:
- Sales Lead Generation Campaigns
- Customer Retention Campaigns
- Newsletter Campaigns
Furthermore, you could also be expected by a business to show insights on how successful the email marketing campaigns are with statistics and analytics.
Step 5: Measuring Your Email Marketing Business
Finally, you will need to measure your email marketing business growth, success, and progression.
This is done for two reasons. Firstly, to understand and adapt to the customers of your clients you send emails to (how they’re responding to your emails and if that needs and changes), and secondly to show your clients the success of the email marketing campaigns you run (through statistics and analytics, which will help your clients stick with you).
To track the progress of your email marketing business, a good email marketing solution should provide you with the following factors of success.
Open Rate: How many recipients open your emails
Click-through Rate: How many recipients click the link promoted in an email
Conversion rate: How many recipients become customers of the business as a result of the email
Bounce Rate: How many emails never reach the recipient
Unsubscribe Rate: How many recipients unsubscribe from the campaign as a result of the email
Summing Up
This is all the information you will need to know on starting an email marketing business.
A few words of motivation: this niche has a huge demand as more and more businesses are seen to be outsourcing email marketing campaigns lately. Secondly, the business can be started from just a laptop, and if success follows you, can be turned into an email marketing solution providing an office owned by yourself!
Wait no more and get right to it then. Good luck!
