The Power of Deliverability and Marketing Automation for Agencies: Why You Can’t Ignore Email Marketing

Every digital agency eventually faces two core struggles: driving consistent customer engagement and ensuring steady revenue growth for yourself and your clients.

Fortunately, some tricks can help you quickly achieve all that and more. Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to connect with customers and build brand loyalty. DMA reports that an average ROI for an email marketing campaign is $44 for each $1 spent! Impressive, right? 

But so are the challenges marketing agencies face when it comes to email marketing. 

Email marketing challenges marketing agencies face

With the increasing number of emails sent every day, it’s becoming more difficult for brands to cut through the noise and stand out in their customers’ inboxes.

The most common struggles fall into 5 main categories: 

Struggling with email deliverability

Getting emails delivered to customers’ inboxes can be a major challenge, as many emails end up in spam folders or get blocked by email filters. Research shows that the average worldwide deliverability rate is 80% (which is 10% less than what we’d consider “good”!). while approximately 8% of emails end up in spam folders, and 16% more are blocked and recognized as spam by ISP gateway servers. 

For example, imagine you sent out newsletters to your clients’ email lists only to find that a significant percentage of the emails end up in recipients’ spam folders or are blocked by email filters. This could result in a lower open rate and click-through rate for the campaign, which may affect your relationship with your client.

Maintaining customer engagement

Customers are bombarded with emails daily, so capturing their attention and keeping them engaged with your email campaigns can be difficult.

For example, if you created a series of engaging email campaigns for your clients, but soon learned that open and click-through rates start to drop off after the first few emails. This could indicate that you need to refresh your content strategy or find new ways to keep your client’s audience engaged.

Achieving personalization

Customers expect personalized content that speaks directly to their needs and interests. However, creating customized campaigns can be time-consuming and require a lot of data analysis, especially when you must take care of several clients’ contacts simultaneously.

For example, you may have multiple clients with different target audiences, making it difficult to create personalized email campaigns for each one. This could result in campaigns that feel generic or irrelevant to the audience, leading to lower engagement rates.

Scaling campaigns

As agencies work with more and more clients, it can be challenging to scale email campaigns to meet each client’s unique needs and goals.

You may take on more clients than you can handle, leading to difficulties in scaling email campaigns to meet each client’s unique needs and goals. This could result in campaigns that feel rushed or poorly executed, leading to lower engagement rates and potentially damaging your agency’s reputation.

Measuring success

It can be difficult to measure the success of email campaigns, as there are a number of metrics to track and analyze, and different clients may have different goals and definitions of success.

You may struggle to measure the success of email campaigns, as different clients may have different goals and definitions of success. For example, one client may prioritize click-through rates, while another may care more about overall conversion rates. This could make it challenging for you to demonstrate the value of your services to your clients.

To succeed at building email marketing campaigns for each of your clients, a digital agency requires a profound understanding of their clients’ needs and interests, as well as the tech stack, to achieve the desired results. After all, here, you’re not only responsible for your own campaigns’ success. You need to see all of your clients grow and excel as well. 

How can marketing agencies get the most out of email marketing? 

The answer is pretty simple. 

Of course, you can go ahead and chase each of the 5 challenges at once, but it usually means dispersing attention and less impressive results. Instead, we suggest tackling one or two issues at a time. 

And the best place to start would be to focus on improving your overall email deliverability with the help of marketing automation software. 

Marketing agencies must pay attention to these crucial components of successful email campaigns. High email deliverability rates and effective marketing automation strategies allow creating personalized and targeted campaigns that engage customers and deliver real results. 

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of email deliverability and marketing automation and see how partnering with the correct platforms can help you satisfy your customers’ needs and achieve success faster. 

Understanding deliverability in email marketing

Email deliverability refers to the ability of an email message to successfully reach the intended recipient’s inbox without being blocked or filtered into a spam or junk folder. 

In other words, it’s a metric that shows how effectively an email campaign delivers the message to the customer’s inbox. After all, what’s the point of sending an email if it could never reach the person you planned it for? 

For marketing agency owners, deliverability is a crucial component of successful email campaigns, as it determines how many customers will actually receive and engage with the email. 

What affects email deliverability

There are many reasons why your email could get lost on its way or blocked by the recipient’s email provider. We’ll try not to get too technical here. 

The most popular factors that affect email deliverability are: 

the quality of your email contacts list the content of the email itself email address authentication and reputation email filters and spam blockers used by email providers. 

By prioritizing email deliverability, you can ensure that your clients’ emails reach the right inboxes and achieve the desired results.

How to improve email deliverability

As you can see from the list of the most critical factors that affect your deliverability rates, 3 out of 4 are under your control. That’s why a reasonable email deliverability rate is often expected to be 95% or higher. Most brands would actually love to go after 99%+, but more on that in a few moments. 

But the more emails you’re sending, the higher the chance that more of them will bounce. That’s why it’s always best to keep in mind these email deliverability best practices: 

Pay close attention to your contact list hygiene. Any email marketer knows – that the quality of your contacts is the crucial success factor for your email campaign. Of course, we refer to list segmentation that ensures your subscribers only get content most relevant to their interests. But also, let’s not forget about list management, i.e., removing contact duplicates (if any), identifying spam traps, or simply ensuring you only engage with active subscribers. Fortunately, you don’t have to do that manually, as plenty of automated services are dedicated solemnly to email list hygiene (like Alfred!) Make sure you email clients with the most relevant content. Everything, from the subject line to a header image and a final signature, needs to be optimized to let the email service providers (ESPs) know that the information you’re sending will be valuable to the recipient. Stick to a consistent schedule in your sending and make sure people expect to receive emails from you unless you’re looking forward to receiving some hearty spam complaints and damaging your domain reputation. Work on your domain reputation and authentication. Simply put, if the email provider sees that many people don’t open your emails, it is more likely to stop delivering it to them completely. To avoid that, try using a custom email domain (i.e., [email protected] instead of [email protected]) and, in case you or your customers need to send lots of emails in bulk, dedicate some time to IP warmup (start sending smaller batches of emails and grow your sending over time). Don’t forget about essential authentication protocols: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC). 

If it sounds easier said than done, it’s because it is. There are, however, ways to make it easier. That’s where marketing automation solutions come in. 

How email marketing automation helps agencies improve email deliverability?

First of all, let’s get the definitions out of the way and clear up what email marketing automation is. 

When we talk about email marketing automation, we typically mean software and technology that help speed up some of the core processes of putting together, running, and analyzing an email marketing campaign. This can include everything from segmenting email lists based on customer behavior and interests to creating and scheduling automated email campaigns triggered by specific actions or events.

The many benefits of email marketing automation for digital agencies

Email marketing automation solutions can be particularly beneficial for digital agencies. 

First, it allows you to create more targeted and personalized email campaigns tailored to each customer’s specific needs and interests. For example, personalized subject lines alone can generate a 50% higher open rate for email campaigns! By automating tasks like list segmentation and triggered campaigns, you can make more efficient and effective campaigns that deliver better results for your clients.

Better yet, account managers can save lots of time and resources by automating repetitive marketing tasks, freeing up time for more strategic and creative work. This way, your clients will benefit from a fresh human perspective and flawless machine-like execution. You can truly give them the best of both worlds!

But what about email deliverability specifically?

Automation can also play a critical role in ensuring high deliverability rates for your email marketing campaigns.

By automating tasks like list management, email authentication, and reputation monitoring, marketing agencies can improve the quality of their email lists and reduce the risk of emails being blocked or ending up in a dreaded spam folder.

Email marketing automation software can also help you maintain strong sender reputations by monitoring metrics like bounce rates and complaint rates and taking action to address any issues that arise. 

Automated campaigns can be designed to adapt to changing deliverability conditions, such as changing email client algorithms, by implementing dynamic content and adjusting email sending schedules.

Basically, email marketing automation software helps digital agencies optimize email campaigns for deliverability, ensuring that your clients’ messages reach their intended recipients and achieve the desired results. 

By leveraging the power of automation, agencies can create more efficient and effective email campaigns that engage customers and drive revenue growth. This, in turn, translates into certain substantial benefits for the agency itself, such as: 

greater scalability improved performance faster client acquisition prolonged customer retention 

Just one question remains. There are lots of email marketing automation companies out there. How to keep track of all your clients’ campaigns and maintain a sense of control? 

Choosing a marketing automation partner program that will be right for your agency’s business model

Imagine if all your clients had different email marketing automation solutions for you to keep track of. Again, there are many. So no matter how well-integrated each platform is, it’d put your digital agency in quite a pickle. 

That’s why your best bet here is to make a choice for your clients and invest in a solution that would satisfy most of their needs – a single platform for all your email marketing efforts.

How to choose the best marketing automation platform?

At this point, you may be wondering how to ensure your chosen platform will be the best. 

Unfortunately, there’s no universal answer for that. Instead, there is a set of factors you need to take into consideration while deciding on which marketing automation provider to partner up with. These factors are:

Available integrations. You may have persuaded your customers that working with your recommended marketing automation tool is the best option. Still, they likely have other essential tech stacks for their sales, customer support, and paid campaigns. So unless you’re willing to promote a pricey CRM that can tackle all these at once, your best bet would be the marketing automation provider offering the most integrations.  Easy-to-learn software. Many of these partner programs don’t expect the agency representatives to be savvy in marketing automation, yet, you still need to be able to explain to your clients how the system works and why you choose this platform specifically. Different account managers need to be able to grasp marketing automation quickly. That’s why it’s best to use software with a low entry threshold. And, when in doubt, you can always opt in for the partner program that comes with a dedicated sales and onboarding specialist from the marketing automation solution.  The marketing automation platform can handle large email-sending volumes. Let’s not forget about deliverability! Many automation providers specialize in assisting small businesses or companies with relatively modest contact lists, which is perfectly fine. But since you have several clients who are more than likely to have a few mailing lists – it’d be wise to look for a provider who knows how to achieve high deliverability without sacrificing the number of emails sent.  Revenue sharing model. Just because you will use another company’s services doesn’t mean you shouldn’t benefit from the processes. Make sure the reseller program is suitable for your agency and that the company you’re partnering up with understands your needs. For example, the GetResponse MAX Partner program is designed with marketing agencies in mind and offers up to 50% commission for the entire customer lifetime, so you can rest assured that it will be a good fit.  Reliability and credibility. Partnering up with a marketing automation solution makes you the platform’s ambassador of sorts. So, it’s only natural for you to want to represent the toolkit you can personally vouch for. There are many agency-friendly partner programs out there, but only a selected few will provide you with enough product knowledge, marketing materials, and software training for you to be able to effectively communicate its value to your customers. Some would even go as far as including the partner certification program, ensuring you’re an equal partner expert in this relationship and not just a reseller. 

So, how crucial email deliverability and marketing automation for agencies really are? 

Email marketing automation offers a proven and effective strategy for delivering high-quality campaigns that engage customers and deliver results for agency clients in a rapidly evolving marketing landscape.

Deliverability can make or break the effectiveness of an email campaign, making it essential to maintain a strong sender reputation and employ best practices to avoid spam filters. In turn, marketing automation helps agencies achieve high deliverability rates by streamlining list management, authentication, and reputation monitoring. 

What is more, with the help of automation and now AI, agencies personalize and target their email campaigns, enhancing engagement rates and driving revenue growth. 

But it’s not enough to use marketing automation to achieve high deliverability for all of your client’s campaigns. You need to be backed up by reliable experts who can provide tech support and relevant training if required.  

By partnering with marketing automation platforms, digital agencies can access cutting-edge technology and tools, allowing them to gain a competitive advantage while expanding their revenue streams.