How marketing agencies can drive more revenue from email

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Email is not dead. 

That’s right. You heard it here first.

Despite regular claims that email marketing has had its time in the sun and that we’re now in the era of social media and YouTube influencers, the truth is quite the opposite.

Don’t believe me? Then consider this: last year, email campaigns saw a 27.6% increase in click-to-conversion rates. That’s not an ambiguous metric like open rate, where someone might open your email but then delete it. We’re talking about cold, hard, revenue-generating conversions. When people opened the email, said “Wowzers, I need this!” and then clicked on the big green “buy now!” button.

In fact, email marketing continues to be so good that it provides one of the best ROI of any marketing channel — Omnisend brands see an average return of $68 for every $1 they invest in the platform (not to brag or anything, but that’s almost double the average ROI for email marketing).

And this tells us something important: that when it’s done well, email marketing is still the marketing platform you can’t ignore. Because while algorithms can change and platforms come and go, email marketing is a consistent option — you own that list of subscribers, so you can contact them whenever you want. 

With that said, let’s take a look at the steps agencies can take to maximize their revenue-generation-from-email skills, and have brands tripping over each other to work with you.

Why brands choose agencies for their email marketing

In order to give the best value to brands, we first need to understand their reasons for hiring a marketing agency instead of handling their email marketing in-house. After all, platforms like Omnisend are so intuitive and powerful, you could say that email marketers have never had it so good.

Yet, there are good reasons to hand responsibility over to agencies. Not all brands have the internal resources to manage it themselves, or they see the value in letting people with more hands-on experience take control and give themselves the very best chance of seeing fast results.

For example, one of Omnisend’s agency partners, Enflow Digital, was approached by a brand in late 2023. The Enflow team immediately identified a few problems with the existing email strategy:

• No automations were being used
• There weren’t any audience segments, so every subscriber received every email
• The email content was unengaging and not aligned with the brand’s voice

They got to work addressing these issues, creating new automated workflows, rewriting the email content, and introducing audience segments to send the right messages to the right people. They also created website popups, and they almost doubled the size of the email list within a year.

The results were transformative:

• Omnisend-generated monthly revenue increased by $100,000 within a few months
• Automations brought in over $60,000 per month within six months
• The updated campaigns generated $465,000 in December 2023, just two months after Enflow were hired

Now let’s turn our attention to some proven tactics that you can use to increase more revenue from email marketing.

6 email tactics to drive more revenue

If you want to secure impressive results for your clients like Enflow did, check out the following six tactics. These are all tried-and-tested by Omnisend agency partners or customers, providing real revenue for real ecommerce brands.

Automations

If the thought of an employee who works 24/7 with tireless energy is appealing to you, then automations are what you’re looking for. These are behavior-driven emails that work on autopilot, and one in three people who click an automated email then make a purchase — compared to one in 18 for scheduled, non-automated messages. Pretty big difference, don’t you agree?

In fact, they’re so effective that despite making up only 2% of total email sends, they account for a massive 37% of all email-driven revenue. Put another way, if you aren’t using automations, you’ve slashed your potential income by over a third.

Working round-the-clock day and night, they make sure that every single new subscriber or customer gets the same onboarding experience with your brand. And they have multiple ways to generate revenue for you. 

For example, order confirmation emails can offer related products, as well as upsells and cross-sells to entice recent customers to spend more — boosting your average order value (AOR) at the same time. There’s also the essential cart abandonment email, recovering lost sales by reminding people that they’ve left items in their cart without paying. Like a lasso-wielding cowboy at a rodeo, they recapture visitors you may otherwise never see again.

Alongside cart abandonment are browse abandonment emails, sent to people who viewed items but left your store before adding them to the cart.

Browse and cart abandonment are two-thirds of the Big Three automated emails — a trio so effective, you almost want to mention their names in hushed tones out of sheer reverence. How effective, you ask? Together, they drove 87% of all automated orders. 

So what’s the third email that joins abandoned carts and browse abandonment to make up this powerful trio? 

The welcome email. The trusty message that gets sent to all new subscribers and customers. And this one is so effective that it deserves its own mention…

Maximize your welcome emails 

The welcome email is a Special Forces caliber of email. If John Wick was an email, he would quake in his boots at the mention of it.

Its open rate, averaging 41.92% in 2024, is lower than some others. But its conversion rate, at 2.91%, is second only to the back-in-stock email. Where it really shines, though, is its click-to-conversion rate. The back-in-stock email is no slouch with a 27.45% rate, and the abandoned cart email can feel arrogant at 42.02%, while others hover between 14% and 23%.

But the welcome email? That powerhouse of an email has a click-to-conversion rate at a mighty 58.26%! To put this into perspective — one in every two people who click in a welcome email will go on to make a purchase.

As you can see, then, you really, really want to make sure your welcome email is firing on all cylinders. And to help you do that, here’s a story about an Omnisend agency partner that tripled the average click rate for its client’s welcome email. From an audience size of under 1,700 people, the email generated over £7,600. It then repeated this with four other clients, proving the performance was no fluke.

How they did this can be summed up in a single phrase: zero-party data. That’s fancy talk for “asking people for an important piece of information when they sign up for your list.” The agency, May the Growth be with You, asked people to name their two favorite celebrities. The answer then dictated what welcome email is sent to each recipient, ensuring that the emails are hyper-personalized. No more generic messages that leave readers cold — these emails feel like talking to a new friend who knows exactly what you want.

Celebs are just one option, of course. If you sell games you might ask people what type they prefer. If you sell coffee, you might ask about their preferred flavors or roast type. If you sell apparel, you could find out their size or favorite material. Gender, birthday, and location are always good options too.

The point here is this: ask your new subscribers what their interest is, relevant to your brand. Then send a welcome email that relates to that question, with an appropriate sell. Here’s how it looked for May the Growth be with You, who offer a 10% discount on Harry Styles Magazines for any new subscribers who choose Harry Styles as their favorite celebrity:

Engage your most loyal customers

One of the most effective strategies within email marketing is audience segmentation. The quick overview of this is splitting your subscribers into different, smaller groups based on particular characteristics. These can include geographical location, past purchases, browsing history, age, income, gender, and many other things — so many, that Omnisend allows you to create unlimited segments using over 500 data points. But right now we’re going to look at one particular segment: your most loyal customers. 

This strategy was used by Enflow Digital, whose name you may remember from earlier, for a hobby appliances brand. The plan was to target loyal customers who hadn’t shopped with the brand for a while, and they integrated Omnisend with the loyalty program platform Smile.io. Then, they created personalized loyalty point reminders that encouraged customers to buy and collect rewards.

But the emails didn’t just offer rewards and hope they were effective. Instead, they were:

• Sent exactly 45 days after the customer’s last purchase
• Personalized to each recipient, showing their current points balance and, importantly, how close they were to earning a reward

By showing exactly what the recipients needed to do in order to get a reward, the emails created a fear of missing out (FOMO) that prompted the readers to act quickly.

The results speak for themselves: a 69.87% open rate, 12.23% click rate, and over $28,300 in revenue.

While we’re looking at segmentation strategies, you can adapt this to different segments — such as sending larger discounts to people at risk of churning.

Create product abandonment workflows

There’s one fact of life for all ecommerce brands: a lot of people will visit your site, browse your products, and leave without purchasing. That’s never going to change. But did you know that it’s possible to contact these people, and convert some of them into buyers? And did you also know that it’s possible to do this entirely on autopilot, so you’re quietly racking up sales in the background?

To show how effective these workflows can be, let’s look at how they were used by FiGPiN, an ecommerce brand selling collectible pins. These workflows are pre-built in Omnisend, so you can get started immediately or customize them to your preference first.

Simply by reaching out to browsers who didn’t purchase, and sending a subsequent SMS reminder to anyone who didn’t engage with the first email, FiGPiN’s campaign generated $106,034. These emails had an incredible 53.7% open rate and a 7.76% click rate — proving that some people just need a reminder, and didn’t leave because they weren’t interested in what you’re selling.

Warm up your email domain

When starting with email marketing, it’s tempting to put your foot on the gas and start launching campaigns immediately. But if you want to maximize your success — and keep your clients happy — then you can’t overlook the critical first step of warming up your email domain. By sending out a lower volume of emails to begin with, and gradually sending more, you can build a positive sender reputation and your emails are much more likely to land in the inbox instead of the spam folder.

Ag3ncy had a new client that suffered from low deliverability with its previous email marketing platform, before migrating to Omnisend. Ag3ncy knew the importance of warming the email domain first, and this laid the foundation for the subsequent campaigns to make the brand owners giddy with glee (or at least, very happy).

Compared to the performance from the previous email marketing platform, the brand saw a sales increase of 300% in the first week, and a revenue increase of $67,100.

Improve deliverability

Ag3ncy showed that improved results are not always about growing your list and refining your messaging. Sometimes, the list and messaging are fine, but the emails aren’t reaching the inboxes. In these instances, improving deliverability is all that’s needed to turn your email marketing from awful to awesome. Dud to dude. Zero to hero. You get the idea.

Let’s take a closer look at this using the example of CLVMaxers, a boutique email marketing agency that helped a wellness equipment brand.

CLVMaxers went back to basics, and:

• Checked the custom sender domain was configured properly and recipient email addresses were verified
• Removed inactive contacts, leaving only the subscribers most likely to engage
• Simplified the automated workflows, ensuring that there weren’t conflicting or overlapping triggers, and every email only drove one action instead of multiple
• Used A/B testing to identify the best-performing subject lines, leading to higher open rates
• Created audience segments, sending emails to the most engaged recipient (similar to Enflow Digital’s strategy of sending loyalty reward offers to the most loyal customers)

Following this strategy fixed the brand’s email reputation. Open rates more than doubled, and revenue from Omnisend exceeded $207,000 (CAD) in the first 30 days.

Another revenue-generator for agencies

In addition to sending emails for clients, marketing agencies have another way to make money from email marketing: becoming an affiliate.

Omnisend has a Partner Portal for agencies, which is a one-stop shop to manage each one of your client accounts. But it’s also more than that — you’ll have access to new leads, and receive a 20% revenue share of your client’s monthly plan, for the entire time they remain an Omnisend customer.

Wrap up

Brands hire marketing agencies with the expectation that they’re getting access to experts. A team of people who know the nuances of email marketing in order to get the most success from each campaign. And as we’ve shown in this article, there are many different tactics for improving the results, and revenue, from email marketing.

Expertise is only one factor, though. As essential as expertise is, the email platform itself has a huge role in the success of a campaign. Imagine the difference between a platform that has features specifically built for ecommerce brands, is intuitive to use, and has 24/7 support should you ever need any help. Compare that to a platform that has a clunky interface, lacks important features for generating revenue, and has limited support. 

That’s the difference between Omnisend and some other platforms. So if you want to experience a powerful but intuitive platform, built specifically for ecommerce brands, which offers 20% recurring revenue share for each of your clients, and has a network of over 125,000 brands, apply to join our Agency Partner Program.