Originally published on July 15, 2019. Last updated September 24, 2021.Customers need more than a discount offer to inspire them to make an online purchase. Offering your customers information about your company through an email funnel not only increases brand awareness, but also helps to increase customer trust in your brand.Research reveals that investing in an email marketing sales funnel will ensure that you reel in customers. In fact, 59% of customers said that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions and over 50% buy from marketing emails at least once a month.This poses a great opportunity for businesses to take advantage of email marketing for long term success. So, how can you build out your sales funnel? The first step is understanding what a marketing funnel is.
What is a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is every step that transitions browsing visitors to buying customers. This system is set to attract visitors and convert them to your services.When buying an item online, there are specific steps customers take before deciding on a purchase:
Search the product online
Sift through links that have that product
Find the product you want
Add that product to your cart
Finalize the order
Many times, customers take a few additional steps before finalizing their purchase, such as visiting the about page or reading reviews on the product, if available. But when it comes to your business’s marketing funnel, prioritize tracking the main steps of the customer journey to see what’s converting visitors into customers.
Stages of the marketing funnel
Marketing funnels have 5 main stages:
Awareness. If customers don’t know about you, they won’t be able to buy from you. This is where you capture your leads and begin a positive customer relationship.
Tip: Put yourself out there through blogs, search engines, social media channels or ads. Make your brand known to customers. Introduce yourself and tell customers more about your product or service through giveaways, webinars or informational emails.
Interest. This is where you delve into the “why” of your product or service. Why is what you have to offer important and worthwhile?
Tip: Capture leads and explain the “why” through informational landing pages that include targeted videos and detailed product descriptions that could relieve a customer’s hesitation. Then nurture those leads through your email campaigns.
Consideration. After interest is solidified, it’s time to learn more about your customers. Start building personalized content to better connect and reel in the customers. Personalized content is said to generate 58% of all revenue for businesses.
Tip: Nurture your leads to pinpoint exactly what your customers are looking for. Include touchpoints to better understand your customers needs and use CTAs after each touchpoint to solidify that what you provided is meeting that need.
Purchase. After nurturing your leads, customers near the bottom of the funnel where they are considered sales qualified. Meaning it’s time to push customers to invest in your product or service.
Tip: Ask your customer to purchase and encourage them with customer reviews and bold CTAs like, “Buy now” or “Register today.”
Retention. Ok, so the customer bought from you once...but what is keeping them loyal to your brand? Customers remain loyal if what you’re providing them with is consistently valuable.
Tip: Now that you converted a visitor into a customer, start planning how to keep them around. The more loyal the customer, the better ROI you are going to receive long term.
What is an email marketing sales funnel?
An email marketing sales funnel is a sequence of emails that work to move customers forward through the customer journey. Strong email marketing funnels have three key ingredients: offer something of value, prove authority and motivate customers with a call to action.Following this process will make selling easier because you are essentially prepping your customer. It encourages you to take time to build and nurture the relationship between you and your customer, while also attracting new customers by educating them further on your business’s value and expertise. This way you give customers a genuine nudge to make the purchase, which will be much more successful than something generic and sales-like.
Stages of the email marketing sales funnel
When done right, your email marketing sales funnel will strongly convert visitors into paying customers. Here are the three stages:
Stage 1: Add Value
In this first stage, introduce the unique value your brand offers. In this example from MarketingProfs the value is in a free, downloadable guide to lead generation. Depending on your brand, other types of value emails could include educational resources, gifts, ebooks or other trustworthy resources.The key here is not to do any selling. Instead, attract the customer to your brand without asking for anything in return. This is the stage to get clear on each step of your funnel and what your intentions are for each step so you ensure to bring a valuable experience to customers. For example, an email offering high-level content for free helps assure subscribers that they will benefit from the relationship with your brand. Notice the copy in this example doesn't push any selling.
Stage 2: Build Authority
Use your second email to convey authority, ideally by establishing your brand as a source of thought leadership. Make it known that your brand is a practical solution to the customer’s problem. At this point, you still haven’t convinced your customer to buy from you, so create targeted emails to impress them. Send emails that play on their interests or demographic. This way they will feel more connected to your brand and be more inclined to buy from you.In this example, MarketingProfs invites readers to join a digital marketing forum, which impresses customers through a targeted email. This shows that the brand understands their customers’ needs and so they confidently offer those customers their expertise that is relevant to those needs. There are many ways to nurture leads and make customers feel welcome while leaving room for a conversion later, but it’s always wise to show your audience that they are able to rely on your brand.
Stage 3: Pitch your Call to Action (CTA)
Now that you’ve established your brand as a valuable resource with impressive expertise, it’s time to go in for the sale. In the previous email, MarketingProfs mentioned their digital marketing forum without pushing the sale, but the copy and graphics in this email transform into a more sales-like tone. Here, MarketingProfs talk money directly with the customer and even offer a compelling discount. They aren’t too pushy with the sales and graphics, but they give the perfect nudge.
How to build an email sales funnel
Creating a strong email sales funnel includes finding the right strategy for your business. Email automation services will help make the entire process less complicated, but before automating comes a bit of a building.Strategically plan out and test multiple email design elements to see what your customer base responds best to. Here are the steps and design elements to build a successful email marketing sales funnel.
Observe customer behavior. How long are customers spending on particular parts of your email or website? What are they clicking on? Knowing this information gives you a customer persona to target.Tip: Focus on the way you design your CTAs (color, size, shape), how you incorporate visuals (GIFs, emojis, memes) and hyperlinks (color, typographical emphasis). What elements intrigue your customers and make them actually want to read and click through?
Draw customers in. Reel in customers with valuable, personalized content. Segmenting your emails is the best way to consistently grow your email list.Tip: Gear your subject line (tone, characters) towards your customers’ personalities. Include copy that sounds more human than salesy, do so by adding humor or witty sarcasm to the subject line. Showing off your personal style let’s customers know that you took time to craft a more personable email. This is a way to care about the customers’ journey, making them feel more connected to your brand.
Nurture with valuable content. Use landing pages or other valuable content to stand out as a leader amongst competitors. This is the best way to capture leads before going in for the sale.Tip: What type of content do your customers gravitate towards? Do they prefer more text-heavy emails to image-heavy? Do they respond best to a multi-column layout email or a single-column?
Develop an email drip campaign. Drip email funnels are a sequence of automated emails that are sent according to circumstance. Meaning they will be sent due to triggers or it will be a particularly scheduled campaign. So each action by the customer will trigger a specific email reaction by you. Begin building your email drip campaign by questioning what your customer pain points are, what they want to know about your business and how are you going to reel them in.
Retain your customers. Nurture your leads after customers purchase from you to build a trusting connection with them. Use social media, giveaways, exclusive offers and authentic thank you emails to develop that bond.
Each email of your campaign will take on different forms, be sure to test these strategies and design elements. When it comes to email design, no matter what, make sure to include bold CTAs, compelling copy, and relatable graphics. These elements are the glue to a solid campaign that will drive conversions.
Design with BEE Pro
Ready to give it a try? BEE Pro offers a collection of templates to help you easily create a sales funnel email sequence or even a welcome email funnel. Build your campaigns using endless customization options, add your brand colors, visuals, create eye-catching CTAs and make use of the extensive image library. So get designing to reel in those customers!
Discover the perfect email banner size for your campaign with our comprehensive guide, including design tips, best practices, and inspiration to enhance your emails.
Every marketer knows that branding, visually engaging branding, matters. In a recent HubSpot survey, 20% of marketers reported to see a direct correlation between their design choices and an increase in email engagement.
In email marketing specifically, one of the first design elements a recipient views is your banner, making it crucial to grab the attention of the reader at first glance. An email banner should effectively convey your message, resonate with your audience, and be responsive regardless of what device your recipient uses to view your emails.
Let's discuss email banner best practice to follow that will ultimately lead to improve results of your email campaigns.
What is an email banner?
An email banner is a strategic design element element that appears at the top of your emails to catch the immediate attention of your reader. Sometimes called an email header, your banner is where you’ll introduce the main purpose of your email, like that amazing sale you’re advertising or the product launch of the century, and reel in customers’ so they scroll through the rest of the email.
Your email banner is your chance to make a fantastic first impression. Let’s explore the best email banner sizes and best practices to keep in mind.
Ideal email banner sizes
It is an outdated solution to automatically set all email banners to a width of 600px. With screen sized of both mobile and desktop devices varying so widely, it's important to ensure your email banner size is responsive for optimal viewing experience.
For desktop users, a banner 650-700 pixels wide and 90-200 pixels tall is ideal
For mobile users, the ideal banner is 350 pixels wide and up to 100 pixels tall
These updated dimensions follow responsive design best practices allowing email banners to render properly in a variety of email clients and devices. Responsive design allows your email design to automatically adjust to the screen size of a customer’s device.
PRO tip: using an email design template that is already built to be responsive makes following this best practice a breeze.
Impact of email banner size on campaign performance
A banner that’s poorly sized could become distorted when customers open it in their Gmail, Outlook, or whatever email platform they use.
This makes your email look less professional and it can also be harder to read so it doesn’t get your message across as well. A poorly sized email banner can also affect the user experience. If the banner is too wide, for example, it forces customers to scroll horizontally and it doesn’t allow them to see the entire banner in one view.
Not only do these issues affect the overall experience customers have with your email but they can also squander the excellent engagement opportunity that a well-designed email banner can be. According to Opensense's data, email banners can have 5-10% engagement rates, a significant enhancement compared to the average click-through rate of 1.4% in emails.
Best practices for email banner design
Your banner size is an important part of designing an effective email banner, but it’s one of many. Check out these best practices to make your email banner even more powerful in garnering the engagement of your recipients.
File size: Any image in your email, but specifically your email banner, should be of high-quality. The ideal image should be download as a PNG at a resolution of 72dpi at 40kb or below.
Inverted pyramid: This "rule" in email design relates to adding the most important information at the top, working your way down to the least important information. When designing your email banner, make sure it clearly communicates the most important message in your email.
Brand consistency: As important as it is that your email banner makes a positive impression and communicates the main purpose of your email, it also should align with your brand. Make sure the design uses your brand colors, logo, or other aspects that make it consistent with your brand’s visual identity.
Text: Your banner needs to communicate your message, but less is more. Keep your copy sparse so it isn’t visually overwhelming and so the focus stays on your core intention. Ideally, 45-75 characters on a line is the sweet spot.
Email-friendly fonts: Make sure you use email-safe fonts that render reliably on major email platforms.
Accessibility: You want your banner’s message to reach as many customers as possible, and that includes customers with disabilities. Make sure to include accessibility features like using alt text so viewers with visual impairments can understand your message and using color combinations that viewers with color blindness can see.
Interactivity: Your email banner doesn’t have to be just a plain image or text. Consider making it interactive, such as with a GIF or a video that grabs your viewers’ attention.
Testing: You can follow all the rules for proper email banner size and design, but it’s still important to test it in action to make sure it shows up the way you want it to. Always send yourself a test email and see how that test email looks on different devices and platforms before you send it to your subscriber list.
For inspiration, check out these excellent email banners. This one from Beefree's template catalog clearly communicate the purpose of the email, remains consistent in branding throughout and plays with visual and text hierarchy to guide the reader's eye.
This other email banner uses a navigation bar to keep the reader in the brand's ecosystem allowing readers to learn more about the marketing agency. This simple, yet effective email header communicates clearly the purpose of the email using imagery and text and has a clear CTA to lead the reader to complete the desired action without needing to scroll.
When creating a strong email banner, it’s just as important to avoid doing the wrong things as it is to do the right things. Watch for these common pitfalls in email banner design:
Over-designing: Your email banner is prime real estate in your email, so of course you want to make the best use of that real estate. If you try to cram too much into that banner, though, you may lose your core message entirely because viewers don’t know where to look.
Hard-to-read fonts: Your email banner is a wonderful place to get creative and build visual appeal, so of course you want to use fun design elements and fonts. But at the end of the day, the purpose is to send a message, so make sure the ornamental fonts you use are still clear enough that they’re easy to read.
Lack of responsive design: We’ve touched on this above but it’s also a common misstep that’s worth mentioning. Considering that 46% of emails are opened on mobile devices, every email and banner you create must be responsive to maintain its visual quality on any email platform.
Leveraging Tools for Email Marketing Banner
There’s a lot to consider as you’re designing an email banner, but we have great news: there are tools that can make it easier.
Take Beefree for example. Our extensive email template library has over 1,700 pre-built templates that already use banner design best practices like responsive design, minimal text for maximum impact, and proper sizing. Our HTML email editor makes it easy to customize these designs for your brand and messaging.
I’ve been a fan for years. There’s nothing like seeing fantastic messages designed by some of the world's best brands to inspire you. Perhaps as well-known as the website are the newsletters from Really Good Emails: witty, funny, and packed with great articles and best practices.
So when Mike Nelson, one of the founders of Really Good Emails (RGE), reached out to me months ago, I was all ears.
Mike and his partners had been volunteering their time on the RGE project for almost ten years and had decided that it was time to switch gears. To deliver more value to their millions of visitors, RGE needed more time, money, and full-time focus.
One thing they found in surveys is that RGE users wanted to “turn saved emails into customizable templates” and use them in any email tool. As it turns out, that’s exactly what people do with Beefree’s no-code email builder: create millions of emails monthly for all sorts of use cases in virtually every industry. They even create those emails inside hundreds of other applications where our tools are embedded.
Mike clearly had the right idea, and I’m so glad he and his co-founders reached out.
We started talking and sharing ideas and a vision for the future of RGE. There was a lot of alignment. We believed then—and even more strongly today—that a collaboration between RGE and Beefree could make the art and science of email creation more accessible, more inspiring, and simply, more fun.
Our plans for the future
If you’re an RGE fan and have never heard of Beefree, our goal is to shorten your path from inspiration to creation. Over the next several months, we will work on various ways to make that happen.
If you’re a Beefree fan, we will add more inspiration to your email design process. You’ve seen the 1,700+ templates in our catalog. Now, we’ll leverage the 15,000+ designs on the RGE site to give you creative superpowers.
If you’re involved in email creation at all, the key point is this: by bringing together RGE's vast email catalog with Beefree's intuitive design tools, we will provide new ways for you to close the gap between finding inspiration and creating something valuable from it.
I've always believed that inspiration is the precursor to creation. Seeing a design that clicks with you, that sparks that "Aha!" moment, is crucial. And Really Good Emails has been that source of "Aha!" for many, including myself. Incorporating RGE's treasure trove into Beefree's ecosystem feels like a natural step toward enhancing the creative process for our community.
Bringing Beefree and RGE together
From a product point of view, you will start seeing integrations between RGE and Beefree. We’ll start small and get fancier over time. They will start shipping soon, and we’ll keep you posted.
While that’s in the future, there are things we can deliver to you today.
First, the Pro features on reallygoodemails.com become FREE for all, starting immediately. At Beefree, we love removing friction and agreed with our friends at RGE to start there. So, create new collections, add your favorite emails, and use the Chrome extension. It’s all free now.
Secondly, Unspam is back. It was hard for an all-volunteer team to host and grow this special email event. We have zero intention of changing the nature and objectives of the event, but we’re excited to support it and help it grow. Justine Jordan - Head of Strategy & Community at Beefree - took the lead on that, co-hosting Unspam 2024 in her own, authentic way.
Third, I'm super excited to welcome Mike Nelson and Matt Helbig from RGE to the Beefree team. They have a lot of innovative ideas around the future of Really Good Emails, and we can’t wait to collaborate with them. Matthew Smith and Matt Cook will help as strategic advisors.
We live in a world where email continues to be the favorite channel for companies to communicate with their subscribers and for people like you and I to hear from our favorite brands (e.g., here and here). In this world, you - email creators - play such a crucial role.
You are the key stakeholders for both RGE and Beefree. Hundreds of thousands of you use our tools every month. Through Unspam and many other initiatives, we want to increase investment in email makers and creators.
We need to do so to continue building products that make sense and are truly helpful: successful products only come from a lot of deep listening. We want to do so because we are part of the same community, and there’s no healthy RGE & Beefree without a thriving community.
I know it’s cliché to say it, but we truly believe this is a case where the whole has a real chance of being greater than the sum of the parts. Our tools - combined - will deliver a greater amount of value to you. Our efforts - combined - will have a greater impact.
Give us a bit of time to execute all of this, and keep us honest as we do so. If you have questions, we maintain a FAQ here and welcome your comments and feedback by emailing community@beefree.io.
With heartfelt enthusiasm, optimism, and anticipation for what’s to come,
Delve into the email marketing best practices that can empower digital agencies to harness the full potential of emails. From crafting compelling content to leveraging automation and segmentation, these practices are essential for driving engagement, nurturing leads, and achieving remarkable results
For fast-paced digital marketing agencies, it's common to focus on nurturing and expanding your clients' businesses, that you leave little room to promote your own services. While this is unintentional, this oversight may be hindering your agency's growth potential.
That's where email marketing comes in as a game-changer forbusy agencies. With email creation becoming more intuitive, powerful, and 37% of brands increasing their email budgets it's clear to see that email continues to grow as an effective marketing solution.
Let's delve into the best practices that can elevate your agency's email marketing game and unlock new avenues of success.
Why email marketing benefits digital marketing agencies
With 4.3 billion email users, email continues as a sustainable, cost-effective, and high-converting solution to effortlessly balance client acquisition and client retention.
This single strategy enables targeted outreach to engage and move audiences through different stages of the buyer's journey. For new audiences, email marketing can be used to show them your work, promote services, and reasons to work with you. For customer loyalty and retention, email can be used to upsell and/or communicate the consistent value you bring to your clients.
Email marketing presents a lucrative opportunity for marketing agencies of all sizes to thrive and grow. By consistently engaging potential clients and ensuring your presence remains prominent, you establish top-of-mind recall for marketing services.
#1: Segmentation to keep the balance
As your organization grows, you will notice that your audience has a wide range of interests depending on their demographics, business, and needs. Segmentation involves dividing your email list into different groups based on specific criteria, such as industry or stage in your client acquisition journey.
Segmentation enables you to send targeted and personalized content to each group, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of your campaigns and ROI. For example, if you have a segment of subscribers who are interested in social media marketing, you can tailor your emails to provide them with valuable tips and resources in that area.
Seer Interactive, for instance, is a digital marketing agency serving a variety of audiences from digital marketers who need to stay up to date on best practices to prospective customers. You can see in the example below how Seer differs their emails based on the audience.
Email for digital marketers:
Focuses on speaking to digital marketers who are interested in learning more about how to improve their services, what's new in the industry, and new tools and solutions.
Email for potential clients:
The second email targets potential clients who are likely in the discovery phase of what an agency does. Seer provides some insights to help the reader make more informed decisions with comparisons, a checklist, and an article with what to expect. This email, while does not directly promote Seer's services, let's the reader know that this agency is here to help keeping them top of mind.
Segmenting your audience using the customer journey funnel
As mentioned earlier, one of the most beneficial aspects of email marketing for agencies is the ability to maintain balance between client acquisition and customer retainment. In our professional experience, the best way to do this is to map out your customer journey and plan out how each stage serves your audience and of course moves them through the journey. While your client’s journey may vary depending on your services, but typically it entails the following:
Awareness: In this stage, prospects have heard your name but are just getting to know who you are. This is where you can create a sequence of emails for them to get to know your agency, the services you offer, and what makes you unique.
Consideration: This audience is weighing their options about the best marketing agency for them. This is where you will likely begin to provide statistics about the returns you’ve achieved for other clients or share testimonials.
Decision/conversion: This is the stage when prospects just need that final push to take action and sign on as clients. In this stage, you can offer incentives or a free trial of one services.
Loyalty: This is the stage when a business has signed on as a client or made a purchase and your goal is to retain them. You’ll want to send these clients loyalty-boosting content like announcements about new products, appreciation for their support, and informative content that is helpful to them.
Ultimately, segmentation is a great way to keep your subscribers engaged and drive client acquisition and retention. Once you have a clear understanding of your client journey and the goals at each stage, now it's time to grow your email list.
#2: Building and growing your email list
To maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, it is essential to first start building a quality list of people who are interested in what you have to offer and say.
Make it easy to subscribe: Whether you're using a form on your website or a landing page, make sure that your process is simple. Only ask for only essential information, ideally only up to three. Some suggestions are name, email address, and a question that could help you segment them into groups such as "are you looking for an agency?" This simple question could help segment new subscribers to cold vs. hot leads. Don't forget to use a clear CTA that communicated what the next step is.
Leverage social media: Promote your email list on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Twitter/X to reach a wider audience and encourage sign-ups.
Offer valuable incentives: Provide something of value, such as appealing discounts on a client’s first service or exclusive content like a guide to social media marketing in exchange for people signing up to your email list.
Regularly clean your list: While building and growing your email list, it is important to regularly examine your subscribers and remove those who are not engaging. This helps maintain a healthy list and ensures that your metrics accurately reflect subscriber engagement.
Don’t forget existing clients: Add your existing clients to your mailing list so they can stay up to date on your latest services and offers. Additionally create a segment of former clients who have not engaged with your agency in a while. This segment is perfect for targeted emails meant to re-engage them, like personalized information about where they left off in the process and a call-to-action button for them to jump back in.
Provide compelling content consistently: Deliver content that is interesting, informative, and valuable to keep subscribers engaged and to make them more likely to tell others about your mailing list. The friends they tell may become subscribers and eventually clients.
Keep these best practices in mind to build a high-quality subscriber list who are genuinely interested in your brand.
#3: Designing high-converting emails
The effectiveness of your email campaigns is directly influenced by the design choices you make. Research shows that visually appealing designs can significantly enhance engagement rates.
Email design best practices
Strategic design choices not only make your emails more appealing, but also drive higher conversions.
Personalize your emails: HubSpot ranks message personalization as one of the most effective strategies for email marketing. Tailor the content based on their interests or past interactions with your brand, such as by including a section for recommended services. This increases engagement and makes your emails more relevant.
Use professional and high-quality visual design: Use high-quality images and graphics that support your message and reflect your brand's identity. A visually appealing email is more likely to capture attention and encourage click-throughs. In fact, according to Campaign Monitor, communications with visuals receive 650% more engagement than those without.
Include a clear call-to-action (CTA): Wordstream found that one CTA in your email can garner 371% more clicks and over 1600% higher sales. Your CTA should be prominent, concise, and action-oriented. Make it easy for recipients to understand what they need to do next, whether it's making a purchase, signing up for an event, or downloading a resource.
Maintain consistent branding: Ensure that your email templates align with your brand's colors, fonts, and overall visual style. Consistency helps build recognition and reinforces trust with your audience, and according to GaggleAMP, customers who feel connected to your brand account for 37% of revenue and spend twice as much.
Design for mobile devices: According to eMarketer, over half of emails are opened on mobile devices. Be sure your emails are mobile-friendly so they still look clean and engaging for your recipients.
Leverage email templates
Email marketing templates are a great asset for your email design. Many email marketing tools offer pre-designed emails that you can easily customize to suit your needs and brand guidelines.
By using pre-built templates, your agency can significantly reduce the time and effort required to create engaging emails, ultimately boosting your return on investment (ROI) by maximizing the impact of your email marketing efforts.
Ensure responsive, mobile-optimized, HTML email design
When designing your marketing emails, designing in HTML helps ensure that your emails will be readable in nearly any email app (like Gmail, Outlook, and so on) and device. Fortunately, you don’t have to be an HTML coder to create HTML emails.
Now a days, there are many tools that offer an easy-to-use design interface so you can design your emails and export the HTML the solution builds for you. These tools, streamline and make the design process more efficient, without the need to have any knowledge on HTML or CSS.
By utilizing an HTML email design tool, such as Beefree, not only can you enjoy the peace of mind that your emails will render well, but you also benefit from a solution that helps you and your agency save time, increase productivity, and get more done with less resources.
However, not all HTML email builders are made equal.
#4: Choosing the right email marketing software for your agency
A stellar email campaign starts with effective and productive email marketing software. When choosing email marketing software, it's important to consider factors such as ease of use, customization options, integration capabilities with other tools, and more.
Factors to consider when choosing email marketing software
How do you determine which of the many email marketing tools is the best fit for your agency’s needs? Here are some important factors to consider while you weigh your options:
Check out the features: Every software has its own collection of features like scheduled sending, automated options for sending a series of emails, personalization, design capabilities, and so on. Compare tools and their features against your list of must-haves.
Examine the pricing: Cost matters in your ROI. Pick a service that fits your budget.
Consider other capabilities: Some tools offer email marketing along with other helpful services like social media ads, website analytics, and so on. Consider whether there are email marketing tools that will also replace some of your other software.
Try A/B testing: If you’re able to try out multiple email tools at the same time, consider sending a few campaigns with each tool to see if one performs better than the other.
Weigh the integration capabilities: Consider email marketing platforms that may integrate with some of the other tools you use, like your client management system. This applies to email tools that integrate with other email tools too, like BeeFree which provides a user-friendly way to design your emails and smoothly send them with nearly any email sending platform
Preview emails: Check out examples of what other businesses have created using each email tool.
Read reviews and research: See what other businesses (and especially other marketing agencies, if possible) have to say about each tool.
Recommended email marketing tools
Here's a quick rundown of some recommended email design tools that can help maximize your ROI:
Benefits: Targeted emails improve ROI and overall marketing strategy. HubSpot's AI can help with segmentation and crafting tailored emails for each recipient.
Benefits: ActiveCampaign is ideal for businesses with a focus on customer relationships. It offers extensive automation and tracking capabilities for a more personalized approach.
Beefree
Key features: Specializing in HTML email design, with an extensive catalog of email templates to use and a drag-and-drop email editor for complete customization
Benefits: While emails cannot be exported via Beefree like the above, Beefree integrates with all major email sending platforms for easy use with your favorite software. Additionally, the application offers free and cost-effective plans to help you get started.
To ensure you're choosing the right tool, consider your organization's unique needs, the tool's capabilities, and how well it integrates with your existing marketing tech stack.
#5: Automating Your email marketing efforts
Leveraging automation in your email marketing strategy can significantly enhance your outreach efforts and improve your email marketing ROI. By automating certain aspects of your email campaigns, you can ensure timely and targeted communication with potential clients, increasing the likelihood of engagement.
Automation allows you to schedule emails to be sent at optimal times and personalize content based on user behavior. This not only saves time and resources but also maximizes the impact of your emails. There are several ways that your agencies can incorporate automation, but here are some:
Sending an email to clients who started but didn’t complete your inquiry process.
Automated welcome series for new clients that introduces them to your work process.
Automated follow-ups for webinars, events, or meetings.
Benefits of email marketing automation
Increased efficiency: With automated emails, you can reach a larger number of clients or reach clients more reliably without having to manually send individual emails.
Engagement and lead nurturing: Marketing automation sometimes offers advanced features like lead scoring and nurturing. You can segment your audience based on their behavior or interests, ensuring that they receive relevant content tailored specifically for them.
Advanced user segmentation: Automation allows you to segment your email list based on various criteria such as demographics, purchase history, or engagement level. This enables you to send personalized messages that resonate with each segment of your audience.
Increased conversions: By sending targeted and timely emails through automation, you can significantly improve conversion rates. Whether it's encouraging a purchase or promoting an upcoming event, automated emails can help drive more conversions for your agency.
#6: Tracking and measuring for success
To ensure the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts, it is crucial to track and measure key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. This data helps you recognize trends, such as what designs or content resonate the most with your clients, and help make informed decisions for your next campaign.
Important metrics to track
Here are some key metrics that you should track throughout your agency’s email marketing campaigns.
Open rate: Shows the percentage of recipients who opened your email out of those who received it. It gives insight into the effectiveness of subject lines and sender names.
Click-through rate: Measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within your email. It helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your email content and call-to-action.
Conversion rate: Tells you how many recipients took the desired action after clicking through your email. In the case of a marketing agency, that action could be filling out your website’s contact form.
Bounce rate: Tracks the percentage of emails that were not delivered to recipients' inboxes due to invalid or non-existent email addresses.
List growth rate: Allows you to assess how quickly your email list is expanding so you can adjust your acquisition strategies accordingly.
Email sharing/forwarding rate: Measures how often recipients share or forward your emails to others. It can indicate whether your content resonates with your audience and has potential for increased reach.
Unsubscribe rate: Monitors the percentage of recipients who unsubscribe from your emails after receiving them. High unsubscribe rates may indicate issues with targeting, content relevance, or frequency.
Unlocking the power of email marketing for agencies
Digital marketing agencies have a unique business model and a unique use for email marketing. Unlike many businesses, you aren’t trying to use your email marketing to make a quick sale or appeal to impulse buyers. You’re trying to establish a genuine and ongoing connection with potential clients and show them the concrete value you can bring to their businesses. Agency-specific strategies like those above can help you make the most of every email you send.
Want a more efficient way to create compelling marketing emails? The Beefree "Business" plan is the perfect solution for growing agencies to scale their email marketing processes and campaigns. Start your free 15-day Business trial today!
1. How can email marketing help digital agencies maximize their ROI?
Email marketing helps digital agencies maximize their ROI by allowing them to reach a targeted audience, build relationships with clients, and drive traffic to their website or landing page.
2. What are some best practices for email marketing in digital agencies?
Some best practices for email marketing in digital agencies include segmenting the audience according to interests or needs and other factors, personalizing emails, creating compelling subject lines and content, optimizing for mobile devices, and analyzing campaign data to make improvements.
3. How often should digital agencies send emails to their subscribers?
The frequency of sending emails will depend on factors such as the industry, target audience, and goals of the campaign. However, it is generally recommended to maintain a consistent schedule that provides value without overwhelming subscribers.
4. What metrics should digital agencies track to measure the success of their email marketing campaigns?
Digital agencies should track metrics such as open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates to measure the success of their email marketing campaigns.
5. Are there any legal considerations when conducting email marketing for digital agencies?
Yes, there are legal considerations when conducting email marketing. Digital agencies need to comply with anti-spam laws like the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States and GDPR in Europe by including clear opt-in/opt-out options, providing accurate sender information in each email sent, and following other guidelines.
Discover the perfect email banner size for your campaign with our comprehensive guide, including design tips, best practices, and inspiration to enhance your emails.
Every marketer knows that branding, visually engaging branding, matters. In a recent HubSpot survey, 20% of marketers reported to see a direct correlation between their design choices and an increase in email engagement.
In email marketing specifically, one of the first design elements a recipient views is your banner, making it crucial to grab the attention of the reader at first glance. An email banner should effectively convey your message, resonate with your audience, and be responsive regardless of what device your recipient uses to view your emails.
Let's discuss email banner best practice to follow that will ultimately lead to improve results of your email campaigns.
What is an email banner?
An email banner is a strategic design element element that appears at the top of your emails to catch the immediate attention of your reader. Sometimes called an email header, your banner is where you’ll introduce the main purpose of your email, like that amazing sale you’re advertising or the product launch of the century, and reel in customers’ so they scroll through the rest of the email.
Your email banner is your chance to make a fantastic first impression. Let’s explore the best email banner sizes and best practices to keep in mind.
Ideal email banner sizes
It is an outdated solution to automatically set all email banners to a width of 600px. With screen sized of both mobile and desktop devices varying so widely, it's important to ensure your email banner size is responsive for optimal viewing experience.
For desktop users, a banner 650-700 pixels wide and 90-200 pixels tall is ideal
For mobile users, the ideal banner is 350 pixels wide and up to 100 pixels tall
These updated dimensions follow responsive design best practices allowing email banners to render properly in a variety of email clients and devices. Responsive design allows your email design to automatically adjust to the screen size of a customer’s device.
PRO tip: using an email design template that is already built to be responsive makes following this best practice a breeze.
Impact of email banner size on campaign performance
A banner that’s poorly sized could become distorted when customers open it in their Gmail, Outlook, or whatever email platform they use.
This makes your email look less professional and it can also be harder to read so it doesn’t get your message across as well. A poorly sized email banner can also affect the user experience. If the banner is too wide, for example, it forces customers to scroll horizontally and it doesn’t allow them to see the entire banner in one view.
Not only do these issues affect the overall experience customers have with your email but they can also squander the excellent engagement opportunity that a well-designed email banner can be. According to Opensense's data, email banners can have 5-10% engagement rates, a significant enhancement compared to the average click-through rate of 1.4% in emails.
Best practices for email banner design
Your banner size is an important part of designing an effective email banner, but it’s one of many. Check out these best practices to make your email banner even more powerful in garnering the engagement of your recipients.
File size: Any image in your email, but specifically your email banner, should be of high-quality. The ideal image should be download as a PNG at a resolution of 72dpi at 40kb or below.
Inverted pyramid: This "rule" in email design relates to adding the most important information at the top, working your way down to the least important information. When designing your email banner, make sure it clearly communicates the most important message in your email.
Brand consistency: As important as it is that your email banner makes a positive impression and communicates the main purpose of your email, it also should align with your brand. Make sure the design uses your brand colors, logo, or other aspects that make it consistent with your brand’s visual identity.
Text: Your banner needs to communicate your message, but less is more. Keep your copy sparse so it isn’t visually overwhelming and so the focus stays on your core intention. Ideally, 45-75 characters on a line is the sweet spot.
Email-friendly fonts: Make sure you use email-safe fonts that render reliably on major email platforms.
Accessibility: You want your banner’s message to reach as many customers as possible, and that includes customers with disabilities. Make sure to include accessibility features like using alt text so viewers with visual impairments can understand your message and using color combinations that viewers with color blindness can see.
Interactivity: Your email banner doesn’t have to be just a plain image or text. Consider making it interactive, such as with a GIF or a video that grabs your viewers’ attention.
Testing: You can follow all the rules for proper email banner size and design, but it’s still important to test it in action to make sure it shows up the way you want it to. Always send yourself a test email and see how that test email looks on different devices and platforms before you send it to your subscriber list.
For inspiration, check out these excellent email banners. This one from Beefree's template catalog clearly communicate the purpose of the email, remains consistent in branding throughout and plays with visual and text hierarchy to guide the reader's eye.
This other email banner uses a navigation bar to keep the reader in the brand's ecosystem allowing readers to learn more about the marketing agency. This simple, yet effective email header communicates clearly the purpose of the email using imagery and text and has a clear CTA to lead the reader to complete the desired action without needing to scroll.
When creating a strong email banner, it’s just as important to avoid doing the wrong things as it is to do the right things. Watch for these common pitfalls in email banner design:
Over-designing: Your email banner is prime real estate in your email, so of course you want to make the best use of that real estate. If you try to cram too much into that banner, though, you may lose your core message entirely because viewers don’t know where to look.
Hard-to-read fonts: Your email banner is a wonderful place to get creative and build visual appeal, so of course you want to use fun design elements and fonts. But at the end of the day, the purpose is to send a message, so make sure the ornamental fonts you use are still clear enough that they’re easy to read.
Lack of responsive design: We’ve touched on this above but it’s also a common misstep that’s worth mentioning. Considering that 46% of emails are opened on mobile devices, every email and banner you create must be responsive to maintain its visual quality on any email platform.
Leveraging Tools for Email Marketing Banner
There’s a lot to consider as you’re designing an email banner, but we have great news: there are tools that can make it easier.
Take Beefree for example. Our extensive email template library has over 1,700 pre-built templates that already use banner design best practices like responsive design, minimal text for maximum impact, and proper sizing. Our HTML email editor makes it easy to customize these designs for your brand and messaging.
I’ve been a fan for years. There’s nothing like seeing fantastic messages designed by some of the world's best brands to inspire you. Perhaps as well-known as the website are the newsletters from Really Good Emails: witty, funny, and packed with great articles and best practices.
So when Mike Nelson, one of the founders of Really Good Emails (RGE), reached out to me months ago, I was all ears.
Mike and his partners had been volunteering their time on the RGE project for almost ten years and had decided that it was time to switch gears. To deliver more value to their millions of visitors, RGE needed more time, money, and full-time focus.
One thing they found in surveys is that RGE users wanted to “turn saved emails into customizable templates” and use them in any email tool. As it turns out, that’s exactly what people do with Beefree’s no-code email builder: create millions of emails monthly for all sorts of use cases in virtually every industry. They even create those emails inside hundreds of other applications where our tools are embedded.
Mike clearly had the right idea, and I’m so glad he and his co-founders reached out.
We started talking and sharing ideas and a vision for the future of RGE. There was a lot of alignment. We believed then—and even more strongly today—that a collaboration between RGE and Beefree could make the art and science of email creation more accessible, more inspiring, and simply, more fun.
Our plans for the future
If you’re an RGE fan and have never heard of Beefree, our goal is to shorten your path from inspiration to creation. Over the next several months, we will work on various ways to make that happen.
If you’re a Beefree fan, we will add more inspiration to your email design process. You’ve seen the 1,700+ templates in our catalog. Now, we’ll leverage the 15,000+ designs on the RGE site to give you creative superpowers.
If you’re involved in email creation at all, the key point is this: by bringing together RGE's vast email catalog with Beefree's intuitive design tools, we will provide new ways for you to close the gap between finding inspiration and creating something valuable from it.
I've always believed that inspiration is the precursor to creation. Seeing a design that clicks with you, that sparks that "Aha!" moment, is crucial. And Really Good Emails has been that source of "Aha!" for many, including myself. Incorporating RGE's treasure trove into Beefree's ecosystem feels like a natural step toward enhancing the creative process for our community.
Bringing Beefree and RGE together
From a product point of view, you will start seeing integrations between RGE and Beefree. We’ll start small and get fancier over time. They will start shipping soon, and we’ll keep you posted.
While that’s in the future, there are things we can deliver to you today.
First, the Pro features on reallygoodemails.com become FREE for all, starting immediately. At Beefree, we love removing friction and agreed with our friends at RGE to start there. So, create new collections, add your favorite emails, and use the Chrome extension. It’s all free now.
Secondly, Unspam is back. It was hard for an all-volunteer team to host and grow this special email event. We have zero intention of changing the nature and objectives of the event, but we’re excited to support it and help it grow. Justine Jordan - Head of Strategy & Community at Beefree - took the lead on that, co-hosting Unspam 2024 in her own, authentic way.
Third, I'm super excited to welcome Mike Nelson and Matt Helbig from RGE to the Beefree team. They have a lot of innovative ideas around the future of Really Good Emails, and we can’t wait to collaborate with them. Matthew Smith and Matt Cook will help as strategic advisors.
We live in a world where email continues to be the favorite channel for companies to communicate with their subscribers and for people like you and I to hear from our favorite brands (e.g., here and here). In this world, you - email creators - play such a crucial role.
You are the key stakeholders for both RGE and Beefree. Hundreds of thousands of you use our tools every month. Through Unspam and many other initiatives, we want to increase investment in email makers and creators.
We need to do so to continue building products that make sense and are truly helpful: successful products only come from a lot of deep listening. We want to do so because we are part of the same community, and there’s no healthy RGE & Beefree without a thriving community.
I know it’s cliché to say it, but we truly believe this is a case where the whole has a real chance of being greater than the sum of the parts. Our tools - combined - will deliver a greater amount of value to you. Our efforts - combined - will have a greater impact.
Give us a bit of time to execute all of this, and keep us honest as we do so. If you have questions, we maintain a FAQ here and welcome your comments and feedback by emailing community@beefree.io.
With heartfelt enthusiasm, optimism, and anticipation for what’s to come,
Massimo Arrigoni
CEO, Beefree
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