How to Get Clients for Your Agency with Cold Email
Cold email is a quick and cost-effective way to get new clients for your agency. You can easily set up and start a cold email campaign in a single day. All you need to do is find prospects and create a contact list, write an outreach email, and start the campaign.
Cold email is also a very affordable solution for generating new business for your agency. You can send unlimited emails and generate hundreds of leads by spending just a couple hundred dollars a month.
Sounds good? We’ll guide you through starting your first cold email campaign and generating new clients for your agency.
Find prospects
The first thing you’ll need to do is find prospects so that you can create a contact list for your email campaign. Depending on the type of businesses you’d like to target, there are plenty of places where you can find prospects. Here are just a few:
Job boards – Websites such as Indeed and We Work Remotely are filled with job postings from companies that are your potential clients. Since these companies are already looking for help with what you’re selling, it will be much easier to convert them into clients.
Directories – Directories such as Clutch and Capterra list plenty of companies that you can contact to offer your agency’s services. If you’re looking to sell your services to startups, check out AngelList. If, on the other hand, you’re interested in selling your services to local businesses, you can use Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Google Maps to find prospects.
LinkedIn – The business-oriented social network is perfect for finding leads. It allows you to search for prospects based on the company they work at, their job title, and more.
Wavo – Apart from running an amazing cold email platform for agencies, we also create custom contact lists at very affordable prices.
While finding prospects’ email addresses can sometimes be a time-consuming process, you can speed it up by using a tool such as Clearbit Connect or Hunter.io. Alternatively, you can hire a virtual assistant to help you gather all the information you need to create your contact list.
Write a great outreach email
The success of your cold email campaign will depend, for the most part, on your outreach email. This is why it’s crucial to take the time to make it just right. The four main things you’ll need to pay attention to when writing your email are personalization, the subject line, email length, and the call-to-action (CTA).
Personalization is key
The key to writing great cold outreach emails is personalization. Personalized emails have a higher open rate than non-personalized ones, and have shown to result in improved click-through rates and conversions.
Try to include 2-3 personalizations per email. Anything more than that would make your prospect feel uneasy.
Vague, impersonal emails will very rarely generate any significant results. That’s why you need to find ways to personalize your outreach for each prospect.
Here are some ways to personalize your emails:
Find shared interests
People are more likely to trust those they consider similar to them, so finding something that you share with your prospect is a great way to personalize your outreach. Perhaps you went to the same school or attended the same conference. Check out your prospect’s LinkedIn or Twitter account and see if you share any interests that you could mention in the email.
Use mutual connections
A great way to get in touch with your prospect is to have a mutual connection introduce you. If you share any connections with your prospect, ask your mutual acquaintance to introduce you by sending the outreach email for you and including you on the CC line.
The prospect is more likely to trust you and be open to your suggestions if they’re introduced to you by an acquaintance.
Use the prospect’s name
Start your email by addressing the prospect by their name. Use their name in the email multiple times. Apart from using the prospect’s name in the email, you can also mention their job title or role, company name, or industry data.
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Your subject line matters
Your email’s subject line will be the first thing that the prospect notices about your email. You should use it to let your prospects know that your email is not spam and that you know who they are and what their business does.
Your subject line also needs to be compelling enough to make prospects open your email. Remember, your email will be competing for attention with potentially hundreds of other emails in the prospects’ inbox.
The best way to find the perfect subject line for your campaign will always be to test many different subject lines until you find the best-performing one. However, there are certain best practices that you can use to help you.
You should keep your subject line fairly short, at around 4 to 5 words and consider adding a form of personalization such as your prospect’s name or company name. Write as you normally would and avoid using cliches or slogans.
Keep it short and focus on the CTA
Most people don’t have time to read long emails. That’s why you need to make sure to get to the point as quickly as possible. Try to keep your emails under five sentences.
Finally, if you don’t tell the prospect what you want them to do, how can you expect them to do it? It’s crucial that you let the prospect know what the next step is at the end of the email.
The call-to-action in your email’s closing line is the most important part of your email. It will have the greatest impact on your click-through and reply rates.
Remember to split test your emails
We’ve mentioned some best practices regarding cold emailing throughout this guide, but in the end, you’ll certainly need to split test your emails to find out which ones will provide you with the best results.
The three metrics you’ll want to focus on include:
Open rate – The percentage of sent emails that were opened by prospects. To improve your open rate, you should focus on tweaking your subject line.
Click-through rate – Indicates the percentage of people who’ve opened your email and clicked on a link. A low click-through rate usually means that you need to work on your email copy.
Reply rate – The percentage of people that replied to your email. While your entire email copy will influence your reply rate, the CTA is what will be making the most impact. If you’re getting a lot of opens and click-throughs but very little replies, try changing up your CTA.
Always split test one thing at a time. If you’re testing different subject lines, make sure to keep the email body and CTA identical across all emails. This will allow you to pinpoint the changes that made a difference in your results.
Once you find the best subject line, start split testing different versions of email copy and CTAs until you find out which combination of subject line, copy, and CTA gives the best results.
Make sure to follow up
Your prospects are probably getting at least 20+ emails every day, and it’s hard for them to reply to everyone on time. If you don’t get a reply in a few days, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not interested.
You should always send a follow-up email to see if the prospect is indeed interested. When writing a follow-up email, make sure to add some new information instead of repeating what you said in your initial message.
Try to provide value to your prospects with each follow-up email you send. Use your follow-up emails to gain credibility, show empathy and understanding, or put a smile on your prospect’s face. Consider your prospect’s pain points and challenges and let them know how you can help them.
Stop at two follow-ups if the prospect never replies. If, on the other hand, you get a reply and the prospect shows some interest, keep following up until you get a Yes or a No. It’s important to be persistent with prospects who show interest because it’s been shown that it can take 9 follow-ups or more to get a reply from a prospect and close a deal.
Cold email templates
We’ve listed our two favorite cold email templates below to help you get started. Please note that you shouldn’t copy these templates word-for-word. Most prospects can spot templated emails from a mile away. These templates should simply serve as inspiration and a starting point for crafting your own cold emails.
Template #1
“Hey [First Name],
I saw you on Yelp and was impressed by your 4-star rating for home care.
We help home care businesses increase revenue by 50%.
Love to send you our top 10 ways to do that.
Are you the best person to pass this information over to?
Sincerely,
[Your Name]”
Why it works: This email checks a lot of boxes: it’s personalized (by using the prospect’s first name), it shows that you’ve researched their company (mentioning their Yelp rating), includes a potential benefit of working with your company (increase revenue by 50%), and promises additional free value (in the form of a guide on how to increase revenue).
Template #2
“Hey [First Name],
[Your Name] from [Your Company Name] here. Hope you don’t mind me reaching out 🙂
We help businesses like [Client 1] and [Client 2] to grow their email lists and traffic.
I’m curious who might be best to speak with about email marketing at your company?
Cheers,
[Your Name]”
Why it works: Apart from personalizing the email and introducing yourself and your company, this template lets the prospects know about other businesses in their industry that have had success with using your services. If you’re able to point the prospect to case studies you’ve done featuring businesses in their industry, that would be even better.
Looking for more templates? We’ve prepared a collection of 10 cold email templates that can help you generate more clients for your agency. You can download them here.
Use Wavo to get more clients for your agency
Are you ready to use cold email to get new clients for your agency? You can start today by using Wavo, our cold email platform for agencies. Get your free 7-day trial and start generating new clients now!
The Complete Guide to Selling Cold Email Lead Generation Services with Wavo
Are you looking into how you can start selling lead generation services? We’ve created a guide to help you get started with generating leads and selling them to your clients with Wavo.
First, let’s look into why you should be offering lead generation services to your clients.
Why you should consider selling leads
A lead generation service can be an excellent addition to your service offering. It can help you:
● Differentiate your agency – In a world full of SEO and PPC agencies, offering lead generation services will help your agency stand out.
● Improve customer retention – Generating leads for your clients will have an almost instant impact on their bottom line, ensuring that they’ll stay with your agency for a long time.
● Expand your pool of prospects – Since all businesses need leads, providing a lead generation service will help you target a wide variety of companies that need your services.
● Create a recurring revenue stream – A lead generation service is an excellent way to build recurring revenue for your agency since satisfied clients will keep purchasing leads from you every month.
How to price your services
How much you’ll be able to charge for lead generation depends on your clients’ industry. Financial services leads are valued differently from web hosting leads, which in turn are valued differently from SaaS leads. In general, the three main pricing models that you’ll need to decide between include:
● Pricing per contact – You can charge clients for each contact reached. Depending on the industry, you can charge anywhere between $1.5 to $5 for every contact you reach.
● Pricing per warm lead – Another way to price your lead generation service is to charge for each warm lead that you generate for your clients. Most companies that use this model charge between $50 and $200 per warm lead.
● Hybrid pricing – You can also opt for charging a fixed per-lead rate along with a 10 to 25 percent commission on every generated sale.
How to generate and sell cold email leads with Wavo
We’ve prepared a step-by-step guide to help you get started with selling leads. First, let’s talk about how to pitch your new lead generation service to your clients.
Pitch lead generation to clients
Clients might not be open to a lead generation service from the start because it might seem unfamiliar or risky to them. You’ll need to educate them on how lead generation works and how it can benefit their business. You should focus on the following features of lead generation:
● Instant results – Lead generation can provide results within a single day. Let your clients know how quickly you can generate leads for them, and they’ll be thrilled to use your service.
● Hands-off – Explain that your service requires very little input from the client and that you’ll be able to generate results without taking too much of their time.
● Transparent process and results – Make transparency one of your main selling points. Being completely transparent about your process, pricing, and the results you can generate will help to develop a trusting relationship with your clients.
● Excellent ROI – Email lead generation is one of the most cost-effective ways of generating leads for businesses. Make sure to demonstrate this to your clients by demonstrating the math behind the process with the help of captivating visuals in the form of infographics, videos, or presentations.
Acquire contact list
After you’ve agreed on generating leads for a client, you’ll need to acquire a contact list. There are many different ways that you can acquire contacts for cold email lead generation. Here’s a list of services that can help you:
Clearbit Connect – An extension for Gmail and Outlook, Clearbit Connect can help you find email contacts at any company. You can search for contacts by name, title, and job role. Clearbit Connect also allows you to find out more information about your leads, including their location and social media profile links.
Hunter.io – You can use Hunter.io to search email addresses by domain. Hunter’s Domain Search allows you to list email addresses of all people working at a specific company. Its advanced filtering features can help you extract just the contacts you need for every campaign. Hunter.io will also verify all the email addresses for you so that you can be certain that your emails won’t bounce.
BuiltWith – BuiltWith allows you to build lists of websites built on a specific technology (e.g., Wordpress or Shopify) as well as categorize the websites by industry. Along with websites, BuiltWith will also provide you with contact details for each website, including phone numbers and email addresses.
Wavo – We offer custom contact lists containing email contact information based on specified location, industry, or role. You can find more details about our data packages here.
Acquire and warm up email account
You’ll need to ask your client to provide you with an email account that you’ll use to reach out to contacts. However, you can’t just start sending hundreds of emails from a single email address on day 1.
You’ll want to warm up your email address before starting your campaign. To warm up your account, start by sending just a few messages every day, and then slowly start increasing your send rate over the next couple of weeks.
Create a new client
Once you get an email account from the client, you’ll need to log into your Wavo account and create a new client. If you don’t have a Wavo account yet, you can create one here.
In the Wavo dashboard, click on the Clients link in the main menu.
On the next screen, click on Add Client.
Enter the client’s name and the number of email accounts you’d like to assign to the client. Click on Submit.
Add an email account for your client
Now that you’ve created a new client inside Wavo, you’ll want to add an email account for them. Click on Email Accounts in the main menu. On the next screen, click on Add Email Account.
Enter the email address, and the first and last name you’d like to use with the account. Finally, choose the client and the server type for your email connection. Depending on the email server you use, you might need to enter some additional information, such as your password or IMAP details.
Create a new campaign
Once you’ve added an email account for your client, it’s time to create the campaign. Click the Campaigns link in the main menu. On the next screen, click on Create Campaign.
Enter a name for your campaign, choose a client, and click on Create.
Add contacts
Next, you’ll be presented with the Campaign Details screen. Now it’s time to add contacts to your campaign. Click on the Contacts link below the main menu.
On the next screen, you have the option to add a single contact or upload a CSV containing a list of contacts.
Create an email sequence
Once you’ve added your contacts, click on Email Sequence on the Campaign Details screen.
Click on Add Sequence Step and then on Add Email Version to create your first email. Click on Edit to edit the email copy.
Craft email copy
Now it’s time to write the email copy for your campaign. The elements you’ll want to focus on include:
Subject line – This will be the first thing prospects will notice about your email so make sure to pay special attention to getting it right. In most cases, you should try to keep your subject line fairly short (5 to 6 words) and personalize it for each recipient.
Body – The main part of the email. Try to say everything you need within 4 to 5 sentences. Anything longer than that and prospects won’t bother reading your entire email.
CTA – The most important part of your email copy, the CTA (call-to-action) serves to let the prospect know what you want them to do once they finish reading the email. Decide on a single action that you want your prospects to complete and clearly ask them to do it.
Wavo also allows you to use merge fields such as FIRST NAME, LAST NAME, or COMPANY to personalize your email copy. These fields can be automatically populated with data imported from your .CSV file.
By default, Wavo sends emails between 9 AM and 5 PM. You can also set a custom delivery window.
Once you’re done editing the email, simply click on the X at the top. Wavo will automatically save your email.
Repeat this process until you add all the emails for your sequence.
Start generating leads
Once you’re ready, go to the Campaign Details page and click on Start to start your campaign.
Wavo will now start sending your emails. You can view all the replies and new leads on the Inbox page.
Report results
Make sure to research the client’s competition and market extensively. This will allow you to show your client that you understand their specific market and needs as well as that you’re willing to go the extra mile for them and do extensive research even before signing a contract.
Rinse & repeat
That’s it! You’ve successfully started generating leads for your client. Now work on signing new clients and repeat the entire process to generate more recurring revenue for your business.
Start selling cold email leads with Wavo
Cold email lead generation is an easy way to create a recurring revenue stream for your agency. You can get started in less than 30 minutes. It’s simple, just create a Wavo account and start building your first lead generation campaign today!
Why Your Agency Needs a Client Retention Strategy
The cost of acquiring a new client can be as much as seven times larger than keeping an existing one, making client retention a priority. Client retention is a company’s ability to retain clients over a period of time. It’s influenced by the number of new clients acquired, and the number of clients lost within a specific period of time.
While client retention is important for all businesses, it’s crucial for niche agencies with a rather small target audience. Since these agencies are fighting over a small pool of potential clients, they need to put in special effort to retain their existing customers.
Client retention starts with the first contact with a client and should be maintained throughout the entire relationship. To improve client retention, you’ll need to consider how you treat your clients at every stage of the relationship, from pre-sale to project offboarding.
Before we delve into how your agency can improve client retention, let’s look at the most common reasons why agencies lose clients.
Most common reasons for client churn
There are plenty of reasons why agencies lose clients, and these vary by agency and industry. However, there are a few reasons that can frequently be noticed at most agencies:
Competition – A client might decide to switch over to a competitor if they believe your competition can provide better results. This usually happens if your agency is bad at setting expectations and communicating results.
Lack of delivery – You can lose a client if you fail to deliver on your promised results or target KPIs.
Poor service – Bad customer service is another frequent reason clients switch agencies.
Price – A client that is trying to cut costs will often decide to stop using your agency’s services and try to build an in-house team.
Why you should focus on improving client retention
Improving client retention can help your agency:
Save time – Keeping existing clients relieves you from creating new proposals, spending time on onboarding, and setting expectations for each new client.
Reduce cost of acquisition – We’ve already established that it’s cheaper to keep existing clients than acquire new ones. Improving client retention will help you reduce your average cost of acquisition and allow you to acquire more clients with a smaller investment.
Increase profits – By working hard on making clients stay with you longer, you’ll generate more revenue from each client and increase your profits.
Generate more referrals – Improving client retention by making your clients satisfied will allow you to generate more referrals because satisfied clients will be happy to recommend your agency to others.
How to improve your client retention strategy
There are a number of things your agency can do to improve client retention. We have outlined seven actionable tips that will help you make your clients satisfied and reduce client churn.
1) Set expectations
It’s crucial that you set expectations at the start of a relationship with a new client. Clients need to understand what kind of results you can deliver, as well as the timeframe in which they can expect the results delivered.
Put in the effort to manage expectations at every stage of the relationship to make sure that clients always understand the current status of their project as well as the progress you’ve made so far. If you don’t manage client expectations, clients will set their own expectations which might differ from reality and cause issues in the long run.
When setting expectations regarding results, never provide guarantees but rather offer a range of expected results that clients can expect. Remember, it’s always better to set low expectations and then overdeliver, rather than setting high expectations and not reaching them.
2) Improve communication
Don’t be one of those agencies that only communicates with their clients when there’s significant progress to report or when something goes wrong. Keep clients informed about what you’re doing for them and how you’re progressing towards their goals on a pre-defined, regular basis.
Regular communication will help you build trust and make your clients feel important and valued. It’s also the easiest way to make them happy.
Consider creating a communication calendar that will help you schedule and keep track of all client communication including meetings, phone calls, and emails.
3) Develop a roadmap for the future
Clients need to know how you’re going to achieve their goals. Develop a roadmap for where you’re looking to take the client’s project in the future so that clients can stay excited about what you’re doing for them.
When creating the roadmap, get input from the client, plot a trajectory, and set a timeline for achieving goals. Remember to revise the roadmap regularly.
4) Ask for feedback
One of the best ways to improve client retention is to ask for feedback from your client’s entire team. Ask how clients are satisfied with your work throughout every stage of the process to find out where and how you can improve.
While it can be hard to hear about what you’re doing wrong, you should always try to learn from your customer’s complaints and improve your process.
Some agencies only ask clients for feedback once clients announce that they’d like to end their relationship with the agency. This allows you to learn from your mistakes but doesn’t help you keep the client.
Getting regular feedback will allow you to fix issues early and increase the chances of clients staying with you for the long term. Studies show that as much as 70% of clients whose reported issues get resolved are willing to continue working with their current agency.
Get the Bonus: 7 Ways to Improve Client Retention (Infographic)
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5) Provide a consistent client experience
Consistency builds trust. By providing a consistent experience to all your clients, you let them know what they can expect from you at all times and in all situations.
Clients don’t like surprises; they like predictability. To be predictable, you need to have defined and documented processes that you follow at all times. Map out processes for everything from onboarding and communication, to reporting and billing. Being organized about how you approach client work will allow you to be reliable at all times.
Being consistent and predictable will signal to your clients that they can always count on you to deliver.
6) Educate
Clients will often question your methods and ask why you do things a certain way. They’ll have their own ideas and suggestions. You’ll need to be prepared to explain why the way you’re running their project is the best for them.
You should strive to regularly educate your clients and provide them with various informative materials including articles, blog posts, reports, and ebooks.
Be available for any questions they might have and provide them with additional resources where they can educate themselves on the subject.
It’s a good idea to build in time for educating your clients into your pricing since client education will inevitably be a part of every client-agency relationship.
If possible, consider running monthly or quarterly workshops to educate both clients and prospects.
7) Overdeliver
A good client retention strategy should be based on overdelivering. Try to always provide your clients with more than they expect, and certainly with more than you promised.
Exceeding your clients’ expectations will make them satisfied and happy to refer business to you.
Improve your client retention strategy
It’s much more cost effective to work on keeping existing clients than acquiring new ones. This makes it crucial for agencies to improve their client retention strategy. Improving client retention can help agencies save time, reduce acquisition costs, increase profits, and generate referrals.
To improve client retention, agencies should make sure to set expectations for each client. This will help clients understand what you can do to help their business, as well as how long it’s going to take you to do it. It will also help you avoid unpleasant situations that might arise when clients set their own expectations, and you fail to rise up to them.
Regularly communicate with your clients and let them know what you’re doing to achieve their goals. Consider creating a communication calendar that will help you stay on top of client communication.
Develop a future roadmap for the client’s project to help them understand how and when you’re going to achieve their goals. Ask clients for feedback at every stage of the process to learn what you might be doing wrong and how you can improve. This will help you retain clients that might be already considering switching over to one of your competitors.
Document all the processes you need to manage client work so that you can provide a consistent experience to all your clients. Be prepared to answer all your clients’ questions and educate them at every stage of the process. Provide them with plenty of resources that they can use to further educate themselves.
To make your clients happy, strive to always overdeliver on your promises.
7 Ways to Grow Your Digital Agency
There are so many things that need to be done to run a successful digital agency, from generating leads and pitching services, to managing client relationships and delivering services. On top of that, the digital agency landscape is very competitive, with new agencies opening up every day.
Agencies often get stuck in meeting their current clients’ needs, and they don’t put in enough effort into growing. Other times, agencies might work hard on growing, but their efforts fail to provide any substantial results.
Today we’re going to look at how you can grow your agency by setting goals, creating a sales process, improving lead response time, creating case studies, forming strategic partnerships, improving existing client relationships, and focusing on building recurring revenue.
1) Set growth goals
The best agencies set quarterly and yearly growth goals. They know exactly how many leads they need to generate every month to hit their sales and revenue goals.
Setting goals are important for a number of reasons:
• It provides direction and guides decision making
• Facilitates planning and strategic thinking
• Improves motivation and inspiration
• Helps to measure performance
To ensure growth, you need to set SMART goals for your agency. SMART goals are:
Specific – Goals need to target a specific area for improvement (e.g., revenue growth).
Measurable – There should be a way to quantify goals and indicate progress (e.g., by how much do you want to increase revenue).
Achievable – Your goals need to be realistic (e.g., if your current monthly revenue is $30,000, setting a goal of scaling monthly revenue to $1M in the next three months would be unrealistic).
Relevant – The outcome of your goals needs to solve a challenge you’re having.
Time-bound – You need to set a clear deadline for achieving your goals.
Here’s an example of a SMART goal: We will grow revenue from client services to $50,000 per month by December 31, 2020.
Growth metrics
There are three metrics that you should be tracking when working on agency growth:
1) Sales conversion rate – The rate at which you convert leads to clients. Your sales conversion rate provides a quick insight into the effectiveness of your sales process.
2) Client lifetime value – Shows how much revenue you’re making over the lifetime of a client account. Knowing your client lifetime value will help you understand how much you can afford to spend to acquire a client.
3) Average time to conversion – How long it takes to convert a lead to a client. Tracking the average time to conversion will help you pinpoint parts of the sales process that might need to be improved.
You need to think of your agency’s goals as an obligation, not an option. Try to establish some accountability by publicly declaring your goals or sharing them with others in your company.
2) Create a sales process
Not having a defined sales process will make your agency lose both time and money. You’ll have a hard time converting leads, and no way of knowing which parts of your sales process are working and which need fine tuning.
You need to map out these four steps in your sales process:
1. Connecting – Finding leads and connecting with them through inbound or outbound tactics (or both).
2. Qualifying – Making sure that the leads are the right fit for your services. With inbound, you’ll be qualifying leads through the use of buyer personas, while outbound lead generation will require you to qualify a lead manually (usually via a phone call).
3. Closing – Selling your service to the leads. Detail every part of closing a deal with a client, from explaining your services and overcoming objections, to asking for the deal.
4. Delivering – After you’ve made the sale, you’ll need to deliver your service. To provide a consistent service and make all your clients happy, create a structured process for the delivery stage, outlining every step you need to take to deliver the service to your clients.
3) Improve lead response time
The average lead response time for agencies is 42 hours, with less than 40% of agencies responding within an hour. How much time does it take your agency to respond to a lead?
A study has shown that agencies that contact leads within an hour are seven times more likely to convert leads into clients. Furthermore, in B2B industries, 78% of customers buy from companies that respond to their inquiries first. This makes it crucial to respond to your leads as soon as possible.
Aim to get your lead response time below 60 minutes.
4) Create case studies
Most leads won’t be persuaded by your sales pitch. They’ll be persuaded by the results you’ve generated for other companies, especially if those companies are similar to theirs. To show off all the great results you’ve generated for your clients, you’ll need to create case studies.
One of the reasons case studies are so effective is because they are highly specific. They outline how a particular problem was solved in a specific situation and shows the results that the solution generated.
Contact a few of your best, happiest clients and ask if they would be willing to participate in a case study. Ask them about their experience with your agency, and how they’re satisfied with the results you’ve provided so far. Use their testimonial and the hard data on the results you’ve generated and create one or more case studies.
Post these case studies on your website or blog and then promote them through social media, guest blogging, and advertising.
Apart from case studies, you can also consider creating success stories and testimonials.
5) Form strategic partnerships
Very few agencies are truly “full-service”. Most create partnerships with other, often specialized agencies so that they can provide their clients with everything they need. Partnering with other agencies can help you expand your service offering so that you can attract more clients as well as upsell your existing clients.
Another way you can benefit from agency partnerships is to partner with an agency whose services complement yours. For example, if you’re running a marketing agency, you could partner with a web design agency that can refer clients who are in need of marketing services. In exchange, you could refer some of your clients to them or simply pay them a referral fee.
6) Improve existing client relationships
The growth of your agency can be further accelerated by improving the relationships you have with your existing clients. This would allow you to upsell and retain clients easier.
Communicate with your clients regularly and ask how satisfied they are with your service and if you could be doing anything better.
Create processes for renewing client accounts as well as for proposing new projects to upsell clients. Strict, defined processes will help you stay organized and successfully retain and upsell clients as well as keep you on track to meet your goals.
7) Focus on building recurring revenue
One-time projects are good for temporarily improving your cashflow, but they’re only a short-term fix. Any agency that wants to grow should focus on building recurring revenue. Some services are better for building recurring revenue than others.
For example, you could start offering web design services, but most clients will only ever purchase a one-time website design from you.
An example of a service that can help your agency build recurring revenue is lead generation. If you can consistently generate leads for your clients, most would be happy to pay you for the service for as long as possible.
A quick and easy way to start selling lead generation services to your clients is to use Wavo.
Wavo is a complete white label solution for generating and selling leads that can help your agency upsell clients and increase revenue. We offer a free 7-day trial so that you can test our platform and see exactly how you can benefit from using Wavo for lead generation.
Get the Bonus: 7 Ways to Grow Your Digital Agency (Infographic)
We’ve prepared a handy infographic that will help you learn everything you need to know about growing your digital agency. You can download it below.
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Grow your digital agency
Growing a digital agency starts with setting goals. Growth goals will provide you with direction, help you develop plans and processes, as well as motivate your entire team.
A crucial part of growing your agency is the ability to predictably and consistently convert leads into clients. To be able to do this, you’ll need to create a strict, defined sales process which will allow you to efficiently connect with leads, qualify and close them, and deliver your service. With all the competition in the agency world, it’s also important that you respond to leads as fast as possible.
When it comes to pitching your services, being able to showcase previous results in the form of case studies can be immensely beneficial. Work on regularly producing case studies with the help of your most satisfied clients.
Remember that you don’t have to grow your agency all by yourself. Form strategic partnerships with other agencies so that you develop mutually beneficial relationships that will provide you with leads, clients, and referrals on a regular basis.
Don’t forget to keep working on improving existing client relationships. Communicate with your clients regularly and make sure that they’re happy with your work. Create processes to retain and upsell these clients.
Finally, consider offering services that can help you build recurring revenue, such as lead generation or content marketing.
How to Differentiate Your Agency from the Competition
Differentiation as a competitive strategy
Too many agencies are looking to be everything for everyone. They try to present themselves as full-service marketing agencies in an effort to get as many contracts as possible.
However, this strategy usually results in the agency developing a reputation of being mediocre – decent at everything, but not an expert in any particular area. This makes it hard for agencies to generate referrals and acquire clients through word of mouth.
Be transparent
Lack of transparency is a frequent issue for today’s agencies. They provide restricted account access, fake testimonials or guarantees and establish bad relationships with their clients.
To differentiate yourself from these types of agencies, you should strive for maximum transparency in everything you do. If you focus on being transparent, you’ll have a much easier time developing high quality and sustainable relationships with all your clients.
Be honest about your experience and abilities
Many agencies will try to get client contracts by trying to appear as if they have experience or knowledge when it comes to providing certain services, while in reality, they don’t.
For example, have you ever had a potential client request social media marketing services for their business while you only offer SEO services? What would you do in this case? Would you
create a proposal for both services even though you currently don’t offer social media marketing, thinking that you’ll learn to do it on the fly?
Or would you be honest with your client and explain that you only offer SEO services and provide them with a recommendation for someone who is more experienced with social media marketing?
To develop a solid reputation as an agency, you should try to be completely honest about what you can and cannot do.
Show clients what you are doing
Do you provide your clients with access and insights into all the accounts you manage for them? Don’t try to hide things from your clients. Show them how you approach managing their accounts and give them access to all the accounts you manage for them.
Try to keep your clients in the loop about everything you are doing for them.
Present all the data in complete detail
Do you provide clients with comprehensive data on everything that you’re doing for them or are you only showing them the positive effects that you’re generating and trying to paint a false picture of their progress?
You should show clients all the data you have on their project and be completely honest and transparent with them about how things are going. This will allow you to gain their respect more easily.
Change your pitch
Most agencies have a habit of sending generic proposals to all their prospects and clients. To stand out, you need to change your pitch by using data, personalizing your pitch for each client, performing extensive market research, and planning for the long-term.
Back up your claims with data
One of the biggest mistakes agencies make when creating a pitch is that they don’t show how exactly they are going to back up their claims. You need to provide concrete data, both from results of working with your previous clients as well as predictions on how your strategy is going to perform for the prospect.
Prepare a unique pitch for each client
Sending generic pitches to all your prospective clients will yield poor results in most cases. You should prepare a unique pitch for each of your clients. Take the time to find or prepare case studies or examples of your work with previous clients that are related to your prospective client’s industry.
Show them how your experience and expertise can specifically help their business.
Do extensive market research
Make sure to research the client’s competition and market extensively. This will allow you to show your client that you understand their specific market and needs as well as that you’re willing to go the extra mile for them and do extensive research even before signing a contract.
Plan with the long-term in mind
You should try to approach each project and client as the beginning of a long-term relationship. By taking this attitude, you will be able to perform in a way that will show your clients that you are interested in their long-term success, instead of just trying to make a quick buck.
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Consider specializing
Brands are starting to look for specialized agencies, with 40% of in-house marketers maintaining a roster of niche digital agencies. It’s clear that you should focus on being an expert on a few areas of marketing or advertising rather than trying to be good at everything.
Which specific area you’re going to focus on will depend on your experience as well as market demand.
Focus on a single industry
Perhaps the easiest way for your agency to stand out is to focus on a specific industry. Clients are looking to work with agencies that understand the unique challenges of their business and their industry. If you don’t understand the client’s industry and can’t speak their language, it’ll be hard for you to convince them to sign a contract.
When you focus on a single industry, you’ll be able to:
Get more referrals – Focusing on a specific industry will allow your agency to get more referrals. If you provide a quality service to a client, they’ll be happy to recommend you to other businesses within their industry.
Acquire clients more easily – If you’re focusing on a specific industry, this will allow you to build a targeted list of prospects more easily, helping you acquire clients quicker and with a smaller financial investment.
Develop industry knowledge – If you only work with clients in a specific industry, this will allow you to gain more knowledge about that specific industry faster than other agencies.
Develop replicable solutions – You will be dealing with the same problems all the time. The solutions that you develop for one client will often be applicable to other clients as well, saving you time when it comes to research and implementation.
Become an authority
Becoming an authority can be an excellent way to differentiate your agency. Has your agency won any awards? Do websites or magazines in your industry recognize you as an expert?
All of these things can help to differentiate your agency. You can show authority by winning industry awards, working in the industry for a significant number of years, working with prestigious clients, and gaining public recognition from industry publications.
Differentiate through thought leadership
Another way to stand out as a digital agency is to produce in-depth, highly valuable thought leadership content. Apart from helping you differentiate from other agencies, creating thought leadership content will also allow you to attract more traffic and leads for your agency.
Different types of thought leadership content that you can produce include:
1) Long-form blog posts – Writing in-depth, long-form blog posts on topics relevant to your clients will help you develop thought leadership and generate leads.
2) Studies and reports – You can produce various research and case studies, as well as industry reports to establish thought leadership.
3) Visual content – Producing stunning visual content such as videos or infographics on topics that interest your clients can also help you develop thought leadership.
4) Tools – You can create tools that are helpful to clients and prospects, including calculators, generators, templates, resource lists, and cheat sheets.
Offer a different pricing model
Brands are looking for transparent pricing. Display your packages on your website and show what the client gets with each specific package. Being transparent when it comes to pricing will help brands decide on hiring your agency. It will also help to differentiate yourself from competitors that try to obscure their pricing.
You might also want to consider offering performance-based pricing.
Provide detailed analytics
It’s crucial that your agency can provide proof of how you’ve helped previous clients and how you’re helping your current clients. This makes analytics an essential component of running a marketing agency.
You need to be able to report everything about what you’re doing for your clients, how you’re spending their money and how much money you’re actually making for them.
Provide a unique service
You can differentiate your agency by providing a unique service that is rarely offered by agencies. An example of such a service is cold email lead generation. You could offer to generate leads for your clients for a fixed fee or on a per-lead basis.
A lead generation service can be very attractive to prospects and current clients because it provides quick, tangible results. You can use Wavo to generate leads for your clients and provide them with a beautiful white label dashboard where they can see all the results that you’re generating for them.
Differentiate your digital agency from the competition
You need to do everything you can to differentiate your agency in today’s crowded market. We’ve prepared a checklist that will help you understand if you’re doing enough to make your agency stand out from the competition.
How to Pitch Cold Email Lead Generation Services to Clients
A cold email lead generation service can be an excellent addition to your agency’s service offering. Offering such a service can help you differentiate yourself from the thousands of other agencies out there. It can also help you create recurring revenue and grow your business.
Have you recently considered offering cold email lead generation services to clients? If you have, you’re in luck because this type of service is one of the easiest to pitch and sell to clients.
We’ve prepared seven tips to help you improve your pitch and sign more contracts for cold email lead generation.
A cold email lead generation campaign can be set up in one day and can provide results within a week. The entire process consists of four steps:
1) Create email sequence – You’ll create the email sequence that will be used to generate leads and have it approved by the client.
2) Find prospects – You’ll gather a list of prospects that you’ll use for your lead generation campaign.
3) Send emails – The next step involves using Wavo or a similar service to run the campaign.
4) Deliver leads – Finally, you’ll deliver warm leads to the client’s inbox so that their sales team can take over and convert the leads.
Make sure to specify that you’ll be providing them with warm leads that are interested in what the client has to offer and that these leads can be converted more easily than leads from other sources such as social media or content marketing.
Explain to the client that they will get a positive return on their investment within the first month of using the service and demonstrate to them how much profit you could generate for them just within the first month.
Most businesses have many things going on at the same time, and they’re rarely looking to purchase a service that needs a lot of input or effort on their part. That’s why it’s important that you explain to the client just how low-maintenance your service is.
The less effort your service requires of the client, the easier it will be to sell it. Make sure to let the client know how your cold email lead generation service requires no input from them. In essence, the client only needs to do two things:
1) Approve email sequence – After you create an email sequence, the client will need to review and approve it to make sure that it fits their brand voice.
2) Provide email address – Cold email lead generation works best if the email sequence is sent from the client’s company email address. Your client will need to provide you with an email address tied to their domain (e.g., outreach@companyname.com).
Explain that you’ll be relieving them from having to generate leads themselves, allowing them to focus on providing their customers with the best product or service they can.
Agencies lack transparency and try to obscure how they do what they do. Try to be different by being completely transparent about your process, results, and pricing.
Let the client know how you’re going to generate leads and exactly how much you’re going to charge them for the service. You should provide an insight into everything you’re doing for the client. This will be very easy to do if you’re using Wavo’s white label dashboard.
When it comes to pricing, you should consider charging a fixed per-lead rate so that clients can know what to expect when it comes to paying for your services. You can also opt for charging a monthly retainer fee. Whichever type of pricing you choose for your service, make sure to be completely transparent about all the associated costs.
Clients are mostly interested in how much money you can make for them. Thus, you should focus on showing clients how much profit they can make by using your service.
Create a video or a presentation to demonstrate just how much return on their investment you can provide. Take into account the average lifetime value of the client’s customers and compare it with how much you’re charging them for a lead to make them understand how much profit they can expect from using your cold email lead generation service.
Compare the ROI of other services such as SEO or social media marketing with the average ROI generated by cold email generation to help your client understand how using your service is a better investment. Show them how much more profit they could generate if they invested more of their marketing dollars into cold email lead generation.
Many agencies fail to back up their claims and results with concrete data. To convince your clients of the profitability of your service, you need to provide data on how many leads you can generate, and at what rate you expect the leads to convert.
If possible, show the client related case studies or industry reports to help them understand how much leads generated through cold email are actually profitable.
To gain their trust, be completely upfront about all the results they can expect and don’t try to present a false picture of how your lead generation efforts will perform.
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Most agencies don’t take the time to personalize their pitch for each specific client, but rather send the same pitch to all their clients. This makes it hard to sell services.
It’s crucial that you don’t use a generic pitch. Instead, personalize your pitch for each new client. Research the client’s industry and find some industry-specific examples that you can use to explain to your client how they can benefit from your service. Use industry lingo to show that you understand their industry and speak their language.
During your pitch, focus on the ROI that you can bring to the client instead of talking about vanity metrics.
Clients might be wary of using your service because they don’t understand how lead generation works. If that’s the case, you’ll need to educate your clients on how you generate leads with cold email and explain why leads generated in such a way are more profitable for them.
Show them every step of the lead generation process to remove any doubts that they might have. If possible, prepare a video that explains the process in full detail. Since most people are visual learners, your client will probably have an easier time understanding the process if they watch a video about it.
Apart from creating a video or presentation, prepare some additional resources for the client so that they can further research lead generation on their own if they wish to do so.
By explaining your entire process to the client, you’ll not only make them feel more comfortable about using your service but also build trust and show your expertise.
Cold email lead generation is one of the most profitable services an agency can offer. It’s also one of the easiest services to pitch to clients.
To improve your chances of getting clients to sign up for your lead generation service, let them know how quickly you can generate results for them. Explain the entire process to them and let them know that you can run the entire campaign entirely without their input, freeing their time so that they can focus on more important things.
Win your clients over by being completely transparent about the lead generation process, the results clients can expect, as well as the associated costs. Demonstrate what kind of ROI the clients can expect when using your service.
Compare your lead generation service to other marketing services the client is currently using and let them know why lead generation will provide them with the best return on their investment.
Prepare lead generation case studies and industry reports to help your clients understand the effectiveness of lead generation. Research the client and their market to understand the intricacies of their industry so that you can create a personalized pitch that will show your client that you’re the perfect agency to help their business.
If the client has a hard time understanding your lead generation process and how it can benefit them, create an educational video or presentation for them that will explain the entire process. If necessary, prepare additional, external resources that the client can refer to for more information.
BONUS: Download our free cold email lead generation pitch cheatsheet!
You understand all the benefits of selling cold email generation, and you’re looking for a tool to help you do it effectively? Wavo is a white label cold email lead generation platform for agencies that can help you generate and sell leads to your clients.
Wavo has everything you need to start selling cold email lead generation services. Since it’s a white label platform, it allows you to create custom white label reports and dashboards for all your clients so that they can track their progress and see how many leads you’re generating for them.
You can use Wavo to automate outreach emails and follow-ups, split test email copy, schedule emails and much more.