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Managing email programs for 12 clients: lessons from an agency owner

agency_annaAgency Owner

Our agency manages email marketing for 12 clients across e-commerce, SaaS, and media. Here are the hard-won lessons from scaling email across multiple brands.

Standardize your tooling

We standardized on Brew for all new clients. Managing 5 different ESPs was a nightmare — different dashboards, different reporting, different APIs. One platform reduces cognitive overhead dramatically.

Template system is everything

We built a shared component library in React Email with brand tokens per client. A new client email template takes hours instead of days because the components are proven.

Reporting cadence

  • Daily: Deliverability alerts and anomaly detection
  • Weekly: Campaign performance against benchmarks
  • Monthly: Strategic review with client — growth, engagement trends, revenue attribution

Common mistakes

  • Not separating sending domains per client
  • Using one SPF record for multiple clients
  • Copy-pasting automations without customizing triggers
#agency#management#clients
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5 Comments

retention_rachelRetention Strategist

Standardizing on one ESP is the best advice here. We wasted so much time context-switching between platforms when each client was on something different.

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indie_hacker_ray

The React Email component library idea is smart. Do you open-source it or keep it internal? Would love to see the architecture.

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agency_annaAgency Owner

It is internal but we might open-source the base components. The brand token system is the secret sauce — each client gets a JSON config and the components adapt automatically.

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devops_dave

How do you handle client onboarding for the reporting cadence? Getting buy-in for daily deliverability monitoring can be hard when clients just want to see revenue numbers.

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agency_annaAgency Owner

We include deliverability monitoring in every contract as a non-negotiable. Frame it as protecting their investment — poor deliverability means wasted campaign spend.

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