Your service menu and packages

Clients don't buy "email marketing." They buy a tier of outcomes at a monthly price, so build your menu from the 2026 retainer ladder. Basic, $750–1,500 a month: one to two campaigns a month, the newsletter handled, basic segmentation. Standard, $1,500–3,000: three to four campaigns, the welcome flow and core flows maintained, A/B testing running, a monthly report. Premium, $3,000–7,000+: six to ten campaigns, the full flow stack, SMS as an add-on, weekly reporting. Above that sits full retention ownership at $7,000–15,000+ a month — a real tier, but one you grow into.

Alongside the tiers, keep a project menu for one-off work: an email audit runs $500–2,000, a welcome series build $800–2,500, an abandoned cart flow $800–2,000, a full automation stack of five to eight flows $3,000–8,000, a platform migration $1,500–5,000, a single produced email $250–1,000, and template design $300–1,500. Hourly consulting sits at $100–300 — fine for advice, wrong as your main offer, because hours cap your income and invite clients to count them.

Every package names what's included, what's not, and what happens when they want more. "Two revision rounds per campaign" and "new flows are quoted as projects" belong in writing from day one. The scope line is what keeps a $1,500 retainer from quietly becoming a $7,000 workload.

One cost conversation to have early: the ESP subscription is the client's cost, not yours. Klaviyo runs roughly $100 a month at 5,000 contacts, and it scales with their list — say so in the proposal so nobody is surprised when the platform bill grows with their success.

The audit pitch: open their emails, find the leak

The fastest way into a brand is through its own inbox. Join their email list. Buy something small, or at least start a checkout and leave it. Then watch what actually arrives over the next week: the welcome flow, the abandonment emails, the campaigns. Almost every brand leaks somewhere — a welcome series that ends after one email, a cart flow that fires once and gives up, a list that only hears from them during sales. Your pitch is one specific leak, shown plainly, with one fix you can describe in two sentences.

Never pitch "I do email marketing, let me know if you need help." Pitch the leak:

Example DM (to a candle brand's founder on Instagram): "Hi — I joined your list last week and went through checkout to see your emails (the fig candle is genuinely great). Your welcome series is one email, and it never mentions the refill subscription, which I'd guess is your best-margin product. Your cart email also fires once, about four hours after abandonment, and that's it. I mapped out what a three-email welcome and a two-step cart flow would look like for your store — happy to send the one-page version, no charge. If it's useful, this is the work I do on retainer."

Example email (to a coffee subscription brand): Subject: "Your second welcome email is the one making the money — you don't have one." Body: "Hi Dana — I subscribed to Roast Club's list and started a checkout to see the full picture. The first welcome email is warm and well written. Then nothing for six days, until a 20%-off blast. Brands in your spot usually send three welcome emails in the first week: the story, the proof, then the offer with the subscription savings math done for the reader. Your cart flow also stops after a single reminder. I put the leaks and the fixes in a one-page audit (attached) — three changes, in priority order. If you want them built, a welcome series runs $800–2,500 as a project, and most brands roll it into a monthly retainer after. Worth a 20-minute call this week? — [Your name]"

Send fewer, better pitches. Five audits a week, each built from emails you actually read, beats fifty copy-paste blasts — and every audit you write gets easier to reuse as proof for the next one.

Discovery calls and proposals: quote the program

The discovery call is 25–30 minutes of diagnosis, not a sales presentation. Ask what email sends today and who owns it. Ask what share of revenue email drives now — for a healthy DTC program it's commonly 20–40%, and if they don't know the number, that's your first finding. Ask about the list: how big, how it was built, when it was last cleaned. Ask what a good quarter looks like in their words. Write their answers down; the proposal quotes their goals back to them.

The proposal itself is short: the situation as you found it (two or three leaks, with the evidence), the program you'd run (tier, flows maintained, campaign count, testing, reporting), the first 30 days in plain steps, the price, and the terms. Send it within 24 hours of the call. And quote the program, never the hour — the moment a proposal breaks your work into hours, the client starts shopping for cheaper hours instead of better outcomes.

When a brand isn't ready for a retainer, sell the audit as the paid first step: $500–2,000 for a full teardown of their flows, campaigns, and deliverability, ending in a prioritized fix list. It pays you to diagnose, it proves how you think, and a large share of audits convert into the build work — a welcome series at $800–2,500, a full stack at $3,000–8,000 — and then into the retainer that maintains it.

Terms to put in writing every time: scope matching the package, payment monthly in advance, revision rounds per campaign, who approves sends and by when, and what happens on pause or exit. Friendly, boring, and signed before the first send.

Onboarding a brand: access, deliverability, data reality

Onboarding starts with access done properly. You get added to their ESP as a team member or agency partner, with your own login. Never work from the owner's password — shared passwords break two-factor security, blur who sent what, and turn every offboarding into a lockout. Same rule for their store and analytics: named access, or the engagement doesn't start.

Before you send a single email, run the deliverability check. Confirm SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are set up and passing. Look at the sender reputation signals you can see: recent bounce and spam-complaint rates, whether they've been mailing from a dedicated subdomain, and whether a recent list import or a long silence has warmed or cooled the domain. A brand that hasn't emailed in four months does not restart at full volume to the whole list — it ramps, engaged segments first.

Then face the data reality, because it decides your first month. Export the list and look at it honestly: total contacts versus people who have opened or clicked in the last 90–120 days, where signups actually come from, whether flows are connected to the store at all, and what the current attribution settings claim. Brands routinely discover their "40,000-person list" is 9,000 live humans and a sediment of dead addresses dragging deliverability down.

Write down what you found in a short onboarding note — access confirmed, authentication status, the engaged-list number, the first three fixes in order — and send it to the client. That note is the baseline every later report gets measured against, and it's the document that proves month one started from facts instead of optimism.