Maximizing your agency’s ROI with Madison Taylor Marketing
Founded over 15 years ago, Madison Taylor Marketing has become a well-known agency in Denver, Colorado, for its success in bringing unprecedented results to clients. The agency's smart strategies have helped clients ensure alignment, reduce costs, optimize their resources, and, more notably, maximize ROI by almost 300% across all marketing efforts.
In a live session with Chris Copen, Chief Operating Officer, Cassie Renier, Creative Specialist, and Andrea Davis, Creative Manager, they shared their insight into how agencies can maximize their ROI with email marketing.
What is ROI?
“ROI, or Return on Investment, is one of our most important performance indicators as an agency.
ROI is not just a metric, but it measures the profitability of our business and our investments and helps us understand the value that we're generating from our efforts and resources.
By tracking ROI, we are trying to ensure that our strategies are effective, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions.
For agencies, achieving a high ROI is really important because it reflects our ability to deliver value to our clients and continually optimize operations. Ultimately, this empowers us to drive growth for ourselves.
For our clients, our ability to achieve high ROI demonstrates our ability to use budgets wisely to deliver maximum value and achieve their business goals efficiently.”
Excerpt from Chris Copen at our live session with Madison Taylor Marketing.
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With a return of $36 per $1 spent, why do agencies struggle to increase email marketing ROI?
“We have found that that email is a powerful tool for achieving ROI for our clients. It's been around for a long time, and it's a tried and true tactic. While people have changed their media consumption habits, email continues to produce results for us. Email marketing connects our clients directly with their audience segments, allows us to deliver personalized content, and drives conversions.
Despite its potential, though, we have definitely experienced struggles over the years.
For both ourselves and our clients, we’ve found that the main challenge with email marketing is how much time and effort it takes.
Creating visually appealing and effective email campaigns requires significant time and effort.
We have found ourselves really bogged down in the minute of design details and trying to craft the “perfect” layout and visual elements. While important, this detracts from strategic activities that might yield higher returns.”
We've also experienced the challenge of hard coding emails and getting those emails to work across platforms. This process is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. Little mistakes in the code can lead to rendering issues across different email clients, which has obvious consequences for a campaign’s effectiveness and ROI.
In addition to that, there's the issue of too much back-and-forth. When we collaborate on email campaigns, this often involves multiple rounds of feedback and revision.
All of that just adds to the cumbersome and lengthy process and leads to diminishing returns - addressing all of those is critical in unlocking the full potential of email marketing for ROI.
Excerpt from Chris Copen at our live session with Madison Taylor Marketing.
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How can agencies optimize their email marketing ROI
“By optimizing our email creation process, leveraging automated tools, reducing manual coding, and streamlining our feedback mechanisms, we were really able to improve our ROI. Cassie has been one of our leaders in helping us find the right tools and helping us increase our productivity and efficiency.”
- Chris Copen
1. Find the email marketing tools
"Finding the right tool enables and empowers us to execute our vision and our client's vision without hindering their goals.
As a designer, when I'm looking for the right tool for email marketing, there are a few things to look for.
Ease of use is the first thing. Whatever tool you use should be user-friendly, intuitive, and allow me to create and customize designs quickly and effectively.
Another need is a high degree of flexibility. I need to be able to create unique and visually appealing emails that align with the specific branding of all of our clients. We shouldn’t have to sacrifice elements of a client's brand to fit within the constraints of a design platform.
The collaborative nature of a tool is also crucial. The right tool should facilitate seamless communication and collaboration, not only with our clients but also internally, throughout the revision process. That includes features like real-time editing, feedback, integrations, approval workflows, and so on. This helps us ensure we are always on the same page internally and with our clients.
Lastly, the right tool should integrate smoothly with other platforms and tools, such as CRM systems, analytic tools, and marketing automation platforms. This helps ensure that we have a cohesive, streamlined process from design to delivery and analysis and are not bouncing between a bunch of different platforms.
Our previous process before finding Beefree was inefficient and unsustainable. It was clear that our approach was hindering our ability to meet client expectations and deliver high-quality, unique campaigns.
Recognizing this was the first step toward improving our process. We needed a tool that would propel our agency to go above and beyond what our clients had asked for."
- Cassie Renier
Excerpt from our live session with Madison Taylor Marketing.
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2. Optimize your design and collaboration processes
“When it comes to making something like email marketing work, alignment between vision and capability is so important.
When we're working as a team of marketers and designers, we need to effectively collaborate on an idea from start to finish.
Often, agencies run into issues executing on a vision because of limitations in capabilities, whether human, tools, or resources.
What we've found that works really well is to first clarify the client's situation and goals to ensure we're moving in the right direction. Involving design teams early in the process is crucial to understanding the full context and aligning on the vision.
Then, we need to be able to move from strategy to deliverables in the most cost-efficient manner. This means reducing the time spent on ideation, creation, and revisions. This is another reason why finding the right tools is important.
Beefree, specifically, allowed us to streamline our processes and enabled us to produce high-quality designs rapidly, ensuring timely and relevant communication with our client’s audiences. With Beefree’s collaboration features, all team members communicate in one place, reducing the time spent on back-and-forth and ensuring everyone is on the same page. Also, with real-time collaboration clients could see changes as they happened, reducing the need for multiple rounds of revisions.
By simply optimizing our email and collaboration processes we were able to reduce the time spent on designing while still producing high-quality assets. This allowed us to respond more quickly to market demands and time-sensitive opportunities, improving our ROI.
Excerpt from Andrea Davis at our live session with Madison Taylor Marketing.
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How should agencies measure their ROI
“In terms of measuring external ROI, setting clear, measurable goals for each campaign is important.
Whether it's increasing engagement, generating leads, or driving sales, having specific objectives helps define what success looks like and provides a benchmark for measurement.
Track all related costs accurately. This includes not only direct expenses like ad spend but also indirect costs such as team hours and the cost of tools we use to streamline email creation and deployment. Knowing your total investment is crucial for an accurate ROI assessment.
Analyze your key performance metrics. These metrics might include open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and overall engagement. Analyzing this data will provide insights into how well campaigns are performing and how the use of efficient tools contributes to these results.
Consider both short-term and long-term impacts. Immediate results, such as sales from a campaign, are important, but so are long-term benefits like customer retention and brand awareness. Understanding the broader impact helps paint a complete picture of ROI.
Regularly review and adjust strategies and processes based on our findings. ROI measurement should be an ongoing process, helping refine tactics and improve future campaigns, but also providing internal operations insights. This iterative approach ensures continuous improvement and better outcomes over time.
Evaluating distinctly the ROI of internal investments. This includes the tools and technologies we use to enhance our productivity and efficiency. Analyze the effectiveness of these tools in helping you streamline your processes.”
Additional insights shared by Chris Copen, Chief Operating Officer at Madison Taylor Marketing.
How Madison Taylor Marketing cut down email development time by 66% with Beefree
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