How Digital Agencies Can Monetize Their Email Communications

It's Monday morning. You open your Inbox and immediately feel overwhelmed, quickly switching tabs. Your workload for the week already seems to be at an all-time high. Sound familiar? This sensation is familiar to many of us with those working at digital agencies being some of the hardest hit. Their bread and butter is client communications, and clients expect to hear from agencies more often than is necessary.

If you dread opening up your Inbox you're not alone. According to Forbes, professionals receive over 200 emails every day on average.

How to Manage Client Communications

Digital agencies are pros at managing client expectations and deadlines. That being said, communication is a top priority, and getting stuck on a difficult email is common. This can feel like a major time loss when you earn revenue through project-based work with impending deadlines.

That’s where a cloud-based automated platform like Accelo is life-changing. One thing digital agencies can do to increase productivity and revenue is alter the way they respond to email. Email is a necessary evil-- a mandatory part of your day. More likely than not, you will need to spend a few different time blocks throughout the day focused on processing and answering messages coming through your inbox. With Accelo's automated email system, the time spent on each email messaged is logged. The timer begins the second you click 'Compose Message' or 'Reply' and your work suddenly becomes both billable and transparent (making it easy to invoice for). Furthermore, when you know how much time you're spending on each client then you are aware of your costs and can improve how you're spending your time. Without being aware of it, you may be giving your lowest paying clients the biggest chunk of your time. 

With this model, you will not only be more structured and organized, you will actually increase revenue. Surprisingly, email optimization is one of the easier changes agencies can use to strategically increase productivity and revenue.

Tips on How Agencies Can Optimize the Time Spent on Email:

1. Process your email instead of opening it. Opening an email and then switching to another task is lost time and will increase your stress while decreasing productivity. Wait until you have enough bandwidth to get to the meat of the message.
2. Set aside blocks of time each day to work on email. We recommend three blocks throughout the day: morning, afternoon, evening. You can then further break down these blocks by client, giving your biggest clients priority.

Set aside time to go through the process of opening, reading, and working/responding. This entire process is billable work, and it’s much harder to track your work when spending five minutes here and there on an email or task. By giving up multitasking, you're saving yourself from lost time, and you're working more efficiently.

Remember, time is money, and your team’s time is your most valuable resource. Digital agencies earn revenue through project-based work, and you want to make sure you’re optimizing billable hours. If you're using Accelo, utilize the timer. Don’t just set it and let it run but create goals ahead of time. How long can you afford to spend on this client today? Using a timer helps stay on top of your budget and make sure you aren’t spending time on small fish. 

In a study by Accelo, 51% of respondents rarely track time they spend on email; 28% said the same about meetings. This costs average professional services business over $110k in annual lost revenue. Download the full report "Time is Money" here. 

If want to test out how to better track client communications and increase revenue then sign up for a free trial of Accelo today.