If you’ve decided to sell your services on the basis of skills—template design, delivery, list management, and so on—you’re probably looking at two charging options.

The most obvious option is to charge by the hour, but you could charge a flat fee instead; the latter acts as a sort of “easy sell” that stops your less confident or more budget-conscious clients from worrying just how much they’ll wind up paying for the service. Table 6.1 lists some of the services we discussed above, and identifies their most common pricing options.

As you can see in Table 6.1, the one area where charging by the hour is less appropriate is where the list size plays a role. Many freelancers base their email delivery service charges on the size of the mail-out, since the costs of the mailing increase as the list grows. The same logic applies to hosting and list management service charges.

It’s also important to note that although some of these services—particularly list and image hosting—may be included in a web-based email management service package, many freelancers charge clients separately for them. It’s true that these items might fall outside the freelancer’s direct action. However, they may see these charges as offsetting related costs that may not be covered by their own client service package price. For example, if they need to liaise with the email service’s support team over the hosting of image files, or to obtain backups of client data at some point, there’ll be no need to charge the client separately for those hours, since they’ve already been covered by the hosting price.

In choosing which pricing method to use, you’ll probably gravitate toward your current pricing approach. But you should always consider how the client will react. If they’re unfamiliar with email marketing and have never collected details for a subscriber list before, a flat fee may put their minds at ease regarding the potential of costs escalating. Alternatively, your existing clients may be curious if you, a staunch by-the-hour designer, suddenly offer services for a flat fee. And if you do opt for flat-fee pricing, keep in mind that some clients will take up more of your time than others.

You might want to set your price at a point that allows for some back and forth with the client, or contains a percentage of “fat” for unexpected discussions or delays. This is especially relevant if you’ve created a flat-fee structure to convince clients who are inexperienced with email to give it a try. You may need to do extra legwork to keep them comfortable and answer their questions as the development progresses. Be sure to allow some form of extra time in your flat-fee structure.

Ultimately, the answer to the question of pricing really depends on you, your clients, your relationships, and the way you do business. If you’d feel happier charging by the hour for everything, and you can sell this option to current and potential clients, go for it.

Pricing service packages like the one we discussed in the section called “What Can You Sell?” will obviously require you to work out how much you’ll charge for each component of the package first. You may find that when you group tasks into a complete bundle, working on them becomes more of a fluid process than would completing these tasks individually. You also stand to gain economies in the project management aspect of the job, given that you’ll be working with one client across the spectrum of tasks. These continuity benefits might allow you to shave an hour off here or there, providing better value than you would if providing the services individually.

But what should you do if a client wants only some of the services on offer? The example we saw in the section called “What Can You Sell?” included A/B testing. But what if, perhaps for reasons of time or budget pressure, your client doesn’t want to test their email? Can you remove that service from the package? If so, by how much will that affect the package’s price?

If you’ve reduced your overall package price to account for the benefits that the continuity of the work will bring, you won’t want to cut the package price by the original cost you allotted to A/B testing, since that now represents a larger portion of the “optimized” price. In this case, it might be more accurate to reduce the overall package cost by a percentage of that original sum you calculated for A/B testing.

Perhaps you’ll develop a standard calculation that allows you to to drop in or pull out components of your service package easily. This will make it easier to establish how much the price will change if a client adds or removes a component from the package, and saves you having to go back to the pricing drawing board every time they decide to add or drop a service.

However you structure your pricing, it’s important that you communicate it clearly and transparently to clients. We’ll look at these considerations next.

Whether you prepare a pre-sales whitepaper to introduce prospects to the benefits of email services, or simply spend half an hour discussing the topic with them over a coffee, you need to be able to prove that email marketing delivers.

The Direct Marketing Association’s research on the average return on investment for email is available on its site, and its key findings are regularly reported in various news sources. A quick web search will turn up the most current research results, which you can use in your discussions with clients. The same is true for data on email market penetration, its usage by organizations in particular countries, and the acceptance of email marketing by target recipients. This kind of information can make persuasive reading (or listening!) for your prospects. You might even consider creating a quick comparison of how email performs against other marketing tactics to clearly indicate the effectiveness of email.

As well as answering the question, “Why should I use email?”, you might need to explain to prospects why they need to pay for email when they can send it from their own computers free of charge. You’ll want to show them how easy, flexible, and cost-effective email campaign management can be, and the benefits it delivers. Explain the kinds of headaches prospects can avoid if they use appropriate tools to manage their mailing lists. Step them through the process of setting up a test campaign in your system, using them and yourself as recipients. And highlight the value of the tracking data they can gain through a properly managed campaign, perhaps by showing them examples of tracking reports.

If you’ve already run a campaign or two for clients (or yourself) you might prepare case examples of those campaigns that identify the clients’ objectives, how you met their needs, and what sort of results they obtained in a given time frame. Be sure to obtain permission to mention the names of the clients to which you’ve provided email services—it’s sure to encourage your prospects to start wondering if they’ll be left behind if they bypass email marketing.

Finally, compile electronic and printed examples of different email types so that your prospects can gain a clear idea of which formats might work for them. Consider also preparing a schedule of rates for your email services or packages so they can see at a glance what kind of money they need to spend to reach a given audience size.

A email service folio is an excellent sales tool, as it provides visual proof that you can create what you promise. Even if you’re just starting out in this field, and you have no working email examples, you might create samples of the different email types to show prospects. A collection of carefully honed examples will indicate even to the least creative of your prospects what you can do for them.

If you have real campaign data, marry the creative examples with brief fact sheets that identify the response rates generated, and the return the clients gained on their investments. This information will go a long way to convincing prospects that you know what you’re doing. Not only does it show that you’re focused on the business benefits of email, it also proves that you can help them achieve real results.

Presenting your folio online, along with case information, testimonials, and results data wherever you can is undoubtedly your best option for presenting your email service capabilities. Once you’ve completed email projects for a few clients, you might like to present a case study for each of the services or packages you offer. In the meantime, publish examples of your creative output to show off your capabilities in email marketing.