How to Sell Email Campaigns to Clients
As a Squarespace web designer, you may be on the lookout for new ways to offer value-adding services to your clients. From copywriting and SEO work to social media management and more, these extra services can enhance your clients’ online presence while boosting your bottom line.
But there’s one valuable bonus in the Squarespace ecosystem that designers often overlook—Email Campaigns. This powerful tool empowers clients to engage current and prospective customers, plus it puts your high-quality site design to good use. By selling Email Campaigns setup as a service, you can unlock an additional revenue stream and deliver exceptional results without leaving the all-in-one Squarespace platform.
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Understanding the benefits of Email Campaigns
Squarespace Email Campaigns are more than just promotional work. They can have a measurable impact on client success across industries. When designed correctly, they create stellar web experiences and build larger communities for clients, influencing sustained, long-term growth without much oversight.
Email Campaigns integrate seamlessly with your existing work on the website, offering convenience and consistency for both you and your client. With templates, powerful automations, and an organized in-platform contact list, designing, building, and sending emails has never been more streamlined.
No matter their industry, Email Campaigns can benefit clients looking to engage with their audience, drive sales, and build brand loyalty. Email marketing can offer:
Increased brand awareness
Effective email marketing can increase the reach and visibility of client brands, products, and services. When used regularly, it can keep your client’s business top of mind for large audiences by ensuring they're in the know.
Items like welcome emails, brand updates, newsletters, and educational content help establish and maintain brand recognition for subscribers, regardless whether they make a purchase or engage. These campaigns place company logos, visuals, and narratives in customers’ inboxes and leave a lasting impression.
Stronger customer engagement
By sending regular or perfectly-timed messages, email campaigns give customers more opportunities to engage and interact with your client’s brand and content. This builds the connections and relationships that eventually lead to a conversion or purchase.
Email campaigns with promotions, events, and interactive content can encourage users to take actions like clicking, signing up, filling out forms, and more. They can also surface fun, engaging, or educational content that aligns with the subscribers’ interests to entice them to interact further.
More sales opportunities
Email campaigns can also effectively create more sales opportunities by nurturing leads, driving traffic to products or services, and encouraging conversions. Through targeted emails and regular contact, these correspondences can educate prospects, build trust, and guide users toward a purchase or action.
Brands typically rely on emails with product recommendations, promo offers, abandoned cart recoveries, user testimonials, and more to get users to convert. These offer quick access and strong incentives to purchase, streamlining the decision for new or existing clientele.
Reduced marketing spend
As a marketing channel, email marketing is significantly more cost-effective than other methods, like paid search or direct mail. Email provides a scalable approach to reaching a targeted audience, offering little risk and a high potential return on investment.
Plus, Email Campaigns offers automations to save valuable time for admins. These features use drip campaigns to automatically deliver the right messages to subscribers at multiple stages in the marketing funnel while limiting the manual work of scheduling and personalizing each message.
Better brand narratives
Email marketing is an opportunity to strengthen your client’s brand story and connect with subscribers on an emotional level. They serve as another touchpoint that can reinforce brand identity and values.
By aligning the look and feel of marketing campaigns and the website, brands can create a cohesive and consistent experience for visitors. Over time, this creates deeper relationships and a greater understanding of your client’s mission, values, and personality.
Effectively selling Email Campaigns
Like any added service, you’ll still need to make a sales pitch to your clients to bring them on board. Come prepared with the benefits for their specific brand and provide a portfolio of completed projects.
To put together an action plan for selling Email Campaigns:
1. Identify your target audience
Some clients are a better fit than others to take advantage of the benefits of Email Campaigns. Strong clients are ready to make the most of Email Campaigns if they have an established and ready audience, as well as clear goals.
In terms of industry, you may find that your best key personas for this service are:
Small business owners
These clients have a local following, a strong product or service, and word-of-mouth growth. They may want to keep customers in the know, re-engage old customers, or build a community.
Ecommerce brands
As an online shop, they have a revolving inventory, library of educational content, and list of previous clients. They may want to increase conversions, reactivate abandoned carts, or upsell products.
Startups
These founders may have an innovative solution and lots of material, but a smaller audience. They could want to use email marketing to increase awareness and engagement with their brand to build buzz.
Individual service providers
Like other small business owners, they have a local following and live off referrals from existing clients. They may want to tell brand stories, build their community, retain existing clients, and bring in new customers.
Bloggers
These educators have a long library of content and a steady audience of readers. They may look to increase clicks on newly published material or turn casual readers into loyal followers.
2. Create a value-driven pitch
To close more deals with clients, develop a value-driven proposal that centers on how Email Campaigns can help them achieve their business goals. Find ways to align the benefits of email marketing to their brand, and clearly communicate how Email Campaigns make the process seamless and effective.
To make your pitch as powerful as possible, use these tips to communicate the value of Email Campaigns to clients:
Emphasize impact
Discuss the quantifiable results that the service will have on their performance metrics. Explain terms like conversion rates, engagement, etc., and then frame their value to the business.
Demonstrate integrations
Show how Email Campaigns integrate with their Squarespace site and enable quick access to templates, visuals, client lists, and more.
Showcase savings
Highlight how campaigns can be more affordable and efficient than other marketing channels. While the upfront cost of email marketing services can be higher over time, they have a greater potential for return on investment.
Focus on efficiency
Explore how automations and personalization help business owners achieve time savings and “set it and forget it” growth. These benefits can afford them more time to focus on other areas of their business.
The following is a sample email you can adapt to pitch Email Campaigns to clients:
Subject: Enhance your website's impact with Squarespace Email Campaigns
Hi [Client's Name],
As we continue refining your website, I wanted to introduce an exciting feature that could significantly enhance your engagement with your audience: Squarespace Email Campaigns.
Integrating Squarespace Email Campaigns helps us create beautiful, cohesive email templates that match your site’s design, providing a seamless brand experience. This tool can also help you connect with your customers more effectively, promoting repeat visits and increasing conversions through targeted messages and updates.
Imagine sending automated welcome emails to new subscribers or exclusive offers to your most loyal customers. The possibilities for strengthening your customer relationships and driving sales are substantial.
If you're interested, I’d love to discuss how we can tailor this feature to meet your specific needs and further amplify your online presence.
Looking forward to your thoughts!
Best regards,
[Your Name]
[Your Phone Number]
[Your Email Address]
3. Develop a pricing model
Once the value of Email Campaigns is clear, seal the deal with a transparent pricing and packaging model that fits your working style and the client’s budget. You can charge for your email marketing services with:
A flat fee: a single lump sum for all outlined campaign work
An hourly rate: an hourly bill based on the time it takes to complete campaign work
Packaged pricing: a few options for different levels of service, each with increasing prices and number of deliverables
By projected value: a price determined by projected return on the project
An hourly retainer: a monthly invoice for a set amount of hours to spend working on various aspects of the project
If you’re working with a new client, you may want to accompany your pricing with a portfolio of email marketing work or testimonials from previous customers. This increases trust and provides more proof of your expertise and value.
Pro tip: Circle members receive a discount on new annual Email Campaigns subscriptions. Join today!
4. Integrate Email Campaigns into web design projects
For your clients, email campaigns and websites can have correlating goals. If you’re considering adding email marketing services to client projects, consider doing the following:
1. Define the goals of the Email Campaigns
Work with clients to identify their top priorities and audience for their email marketing efforts. Align these to specific measurable metrics like conversion rate, clicks, or awareness, and consider points of overlap with the website.
2. Outline a strategy
Develop rough outlines that will help achieve these goals by engaging subscribers. For example, consider welcome emails, newsletters, abandoned cart emails, and promotional emails to start.
3. Add email collection forms
Within your web design, add calls-to-action (CTAs) to high-traffic pages to collect emails from visitors and build a mailing list. Make these CTAs actionable and use copy that promises value.
4. Design email templates
Based on your client’s goals and audience, design emails that match the look and feel of the site.
5. Test for user experience
Before launch, send test emails to your inbox, follow the paths, and consider how they flow for the user. Make adjustments to both the website and campaigns for a more cohesive narrative.
6. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs)
Determine the definition of success by setting a benchmark for marketing emails based on client goals and chosen metrics. Make these KPIs strong but achievable.
7. Launch and iterate
With both the website and campaigns complete, release them together and keep an eye on open rates and subscriber counts as time progresses. Make impactful changes or launch A/B testing projects to improve.
Aligning email design to website branding
When handling marketing design work, take special care that all of your materials align on the web and in subscribers’ inboxes. By ensuring that email and website branding matches, you can create a seamless and consistent visual narrative that can affect clickthrough rates, conversions, and more.
Brand consistency also helps maintain the trust of subscribers by showing professionalism and polish. In an era of spam and phishing, users are more hesitant than ever to open emails. Aligning messages to their brand expectations shows the reputability of your client’s business and increases confidence in your campaigns.
To create visually appealing and effective email campaigns:
Use on-brand fonts, logos, and colors
Align typography, logos, and colors across the website and email. If you make updates on the website, update the email campaigns to match.
Have a consistent brand voice
From subject line to body copy, use the same copywriting style as on your client’s website. The emails and web pages should feel like a conversation with the same person.
Demonstrate value
Lead with the value of the email in the subject line and body copy. Readers are quick to skim and bounce, so keep them focused by highlighting benefits.
Create clear CTAs
Inspire action by creating clear CTA buttons and link text that lead to conversion-oriented web pages. The target location should match the CTA text.
Include trust signals
Increase trust by adding reviews or testimonials from real customers, or awards and badges from third parties. This can boost conversion rates by showing credibility.
Optimize for mobile
Test all email designs on different devices and screen sizes to verify responsive designs work for all recipients. Many subscribers view emails solely on mobile devices, so testing compatibility ensures a seamless user experience.
When designing emails with Squarespace Email Campaigns, you can incorporate your client’s existing design elements for consistent branding. With quick access to fonts, colors, logos, components, and assets from an integrated library, the platform empowers you to bring your site design and products into email marketing templates.
Ensuring client success and satisfaction
When selling Email Campaigns, taking a data-driven approach to measuring success is essential to building strong marketing programs and lasting working relationships. With benchmarks and access to metrics, both expectations and results become manageable for you and your clients.
Establishing and monitoring KPIs for email marketing
To start, work directly with clients to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for your campaigns. From open rates to conversions, these numbers should directly tie to client goals for the program and contribute to their business growth. If needed, take time to educate your client on the KPI metric and overall value to their brand.
Based on existing or expected results, set a baseline or benchmark for the KPI and a percentage increase in growth after the campaign launches for the year or quarter. This percentage defines success for the email marketing project and should guide future actions.
Train your client on how and where to access analytics for Email Campaigns to empower them to stay informed. All performance insights are in one platform, offering real-time insight into traffic by channel, data sets, and more from accessible dashboards.
Using the available data, monitor performance over time and compare growth against projected results. You or your client can make adjustments to the campaigns and watch the impact on the data.
Providing continued support
While emails are often automated, “set and forget” marketing, campaigns need continued maintenance and support to be truly effective. Your client may not have the time or experience to handle the workload, offering opportunities for you to provide more value beyond the initial setup.
Some key areas of support for Email Campaigns are:
Content updates
As new components, designs, or products are added, refresh campaigns to match. This work ensures consistency and keeps the brand's narrative cohesive.
Optimization work
Review existing campaigns and look for areas of improvement. Track key metrics and look for underperforming campaigns.
Subscriber list management
Clean up subscriber contact information by removing junk leads, deleting inactive subscribers, updating audience attributes, or tracking send rates.
A/B testing
Create a second, slightly different campaign and test performance against an existing email flow. Try fresh copy, new CTAs, or different user flows to generate growth.
Reporting
Provide monthly or quarterly performance reviews for the client on marketing campaign effectiveness. Add training or strategy time into these meetings or create custom reports and analysis.
Add value by selling Email Campaigns
By offering Email Campaigns setup as an add-on service to your web design offerings, you can increase your revenue while making a measurable impact on client growth. With strong email marketing in place, clients can expand brand awareness, increase client engagement, improve conversion rates, and build stronger brand narratives—all at a lower cost than other traditional marketing channels.
With the Squarespace platform, you have an opportunity to repurpose existing web design work to create a stronger marketing funnel for clients. By using streamlined templates, existing visual elements, integrated contact lists, and easy-access analytics, you’ll have everything you need to provide additional value, make clients happy, and positively impact your bottom line.
Want more?
Check out Squarespace Circle, Squarespace’s program for professional web designers, developers, digital entrepreneurs, and creatives. Along with exclusive content, discounts, and other perks, Circle brings professionals together from across the globe to exchange advice while connecting with new clients and collaborators.
