How to charge your clients for email marketing
Like most services a web designer can offer their clients, there are many different ways to approach charging your clients for email marketing. At MailBuild, we're in a unique position in that we speak with designers charging their clients for email marketing all day every day. Over the years I've seen a huge range of billing approaches taken, some which make sense and others that seem plain crazy.
We occasionally get asked by customers how they should charge their clients for their services. The truth is, there's no one approach that works for everyone (you knew I was going to say that, right?). Having said that, out of the different models I've seen over the years, there are a few that make the most sense. The purpose of this guide is to present you with some of these options and let you work out which approach suits you and your client's budget best.
The popular areas to charge for
Over the course of pitching to your clients, designing them a template, getting it delivered and then measuring the results, there are a number of points where you have the opportunity to charge for your services. Of course, most designers won't charge for all of these areas (though some do), these are just examples of what can be deemed billable work.
1. Template Design (flat fee or hourly rate)
This one's pretty straightforward, just like designing a single page site or a landing page, you charge your client for putting the concept (or concepts) together, then coding the approved design and finally testing that design in the most popular email environments.
2. Delivery (usually dependant on the number of recipients)
This is where the range of billing approaches starts to surface. Here are a few of the more popular billing approaches for covering delivery fees:
- Charge your client a flat monthly fee that covers any campaigns delivered that month
- Charge them based on a pricing bracket for the number of subscribers being sent to. For example, 2,000 to 5,000 recipients is $150.
- Charge them a set per/recipient fee. For example, 4 cents/recipient with a flat delivery fee on top, such as $10.
3. Reviewing the results (flat fee or hourly rate)
Once the campaign has been delivered, the designer reviews the reports and makes recommendations to the client to improve or maintain results for subsequent issues. For example, you might have tried a different design approach for the newsletter's "featured product" which yielded a 17% better click-through rate. This is explained to the client and further recommendations might be made.
4. Subsequent changes to the template (flat fee or hourly rate)
Obviously each campaign you send for the client will include new content. These changes can be made much more cost effectively than the original template design. If the client approves any recommendations you made after reviewing the results of a sent campaign, these may also be included in any updates you make. Because of this, 3 and 4 or often billed as a single item.
5. Other services we've seen designers charge for
While the 4 areas above are the most commonly billable areas of email marketing, I've seen designers also charge for the following separately:
- Testing the design in popular email environments.
- Cleaning and importing the client's subscriber list into their account.
- Adding list subscribe forms to the client's web site.
- Processing bounces and unsubscribe requests for the client (even though we do this automatically).
- Giving the client access to web-based reports on the results or sending them a print-based version of the reports (usually a set monthly fee).
- List and image hosting fees (even though we offer this for free).
Billing your clients with MailBuild
MailBuild's automated billing system allows your clients to pay for their campaigns using their own Visa, MasterCard or American Express card. We handle all your invoicing automatically and each client now has a detailed billing history in their account.
MailBuild also allows you to set your own rates for each client. Each time they send a campaign, they'll be required to pay at the marked-up rate you specify. We'll collect any profit you make over and above our standard rates and then send it to you via PayPal at the end of every month.
Try and keep it simple
From our own experience charging clients for email marketing and also the feedback we get from our customers, it seems that simple is almost always better than complex. Splitting the costs into template design and delivery costs is about as granular as most of our customers get and that model seems to work best for most.
Hitting your clients with fees for every little detail in the process can certainly be a profitable way to offer email marketing, but you're also running the risk of confusing some customers. Worse still, you may end up alienating some customers by giving the impression you're trying to milk them for everything they've got (even if you're not).
Finally, email marketing is often sold to clients as part of a wider package that might include a web site or some paid search advertising. Billing for the range of these services can get complicated pretty quickly, so the simpler you keep your email marketing component the better.
