Selling Email to Your Design Clients
Vootie (1092 pencils) | Sat, 2010-05-29 16:23
Excerpted from Create Stunning HTML Email That Just Works! (SitePoint)
By Remo Camerota
Selling email services is a logical step forward for freelance web designers and developers. We will look at the practicalities of selling email to existing and new clients. Once we review the reasons you should add email to your service offering, we’ll take a closer look at the variety of email-related services that you can offer, and what is involved in selling email services. We will cover the common approaches to pricing and preparing a folio of email samples, and discuss tips for a winning client pitch.
Why Sell Email Services?
Perhaps this section would be more appropriately titled, “Why wouldn’t you sell email services?”
More than Just a Designer or Developer: If you see yourself purely as a web designer or developer, it’s time to broaden that view. The first important step in selling your email services is to recognize your capabilities in email design and delivery. Then you’ll be able to see—and present—yourself as someone who designs or develops more than websites alone.
There’s one particularly good reason why you should sell email services. If you’re freelancing, email services provide a prime opportunity to maintain ongoing, potentially lucrative relationships with clients. Designers and developers often find that they have few reasons to continue the client relationship once they’ve delivered the site they were contracted to provide. Email is a very handy solution to the challenge of maintaining close client relationships over time.
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i dont really agree with this article. first of all, "development" isnt really a logical progression from designer. PRACTICAL? for sure! PROFITABLE? hell yes!
but realistic? probably not...
first and simplest of all, there are more ways to do html email wrong than to do it right.
second, just because you can design a pretty or even a highly usable page, doesnt mean you have clue one about promotion. and thats what email marketing is all about
add to that, most designers i know make horrible sales people.
maybe im just being negative, but i think this sounds like sugesting a mechanic to also do bodywork. related? ok. complementary? yes. but a whole different set of skills...
The author is an employee at Campaign Monitor, a provider of email services geared specifically to site creators, as a way of deepening their relationship with their clients. If you're unfamiliar with their offering it's worth checking out, since they provide very solid tools to ensure that HTML email works flawlessly.
Other chapters in the book do deal with many aspects of email campaigns, this extract was directed at encouraging site designers to consider adding email management to their billable services. Whether designers just provide the mechanics of email management -- and things like merging and purging lists isn't trivial -- or extend the relationship into marketing, etc. is up to the designer and the client. Email management is actually something that's a fit for the technically inclined.
I agree - the description makes it sound like THE ONLY WAY for a designer. However, from experience of sitepoint books (I'll admit, I'm something of a sitepoint addict) they are great for digging deeper into things that interest you (or that you have no idea about).
I think this is an example of a hard-sell backfiring slightly.
With services like Google Apps and the seamless sync it offers with not only Droid but many devices, there is no reason to sell a client an email service just so you can milk them out of money they should not be spending.
I just migrated a third client away from internally hosted Exchange which cost them thousands per year in "support" to Google Apps. No more headaches and they are extremely happy with it and with me.
The email services being spoken of here are about creating and managing HTML newsletters and their lists, not managing the client's internal email. I quite agree that Google provides robust capabilities for that sort of thing.