Marketing proposal template
A structured marketing proposal you fill in and send as a branded page, not a Word file the client has to download.
The .docx is free to use anywhere, no sign-up. Building it in ProposalKit is a free 14-day trial, no credit card.
What's included
- 01 Cover
- 02 Executive Summary
- 03 The Challenge
- 04 Our Approach
- 05 Scope of Work
- 06 Investment
- 07 Timeline
- 08 About Us
- 09 Terms & Conditions
Overview
A 6-month retainer focused on getting Orbital past the $250k/month plateau. Paid acquisition, lifecycle, and organic, run as one playbook instead of three disconnected channels.
Orbital Bikes has done the hard part. You have a product people love, a founder story that carries real weight, and a core customer (late-30s, urban, $90k+, commuter-first) who refers at a rate that most DTC brands would kill for. The problem isn't demand. It's that the marketing engine feeding that demand was assembled one channel at a time by three different people and has never been run as a single system.
We're proposing a 6-month growth retainer to fix that. Not an audit deck, not a strategy document. We run the channels. Paid acquisition, lifecycle email and SMS, landing pages, and the organic work that actually moves the needle at your scale. One team, one weekly meeting, one shared dashboard, and a monthly P&L view that ties spend to revenue so you always know what's working and what we're about to kill.
We've scoped this engagement for the revenue range you're in ($2M–$3M ARR) and the goal you've told us you care about most: getting to a predictable $400k/month by month six without burning the margin structure.
Your channels are fighting each other
Paid social is running creative from 2023. Your email list gets a generic weekly blast instead of triggered lifecycle flows. Your organic is a blog that hasn't been updated in 7 months. Each of these was set up by a different freelancer, at a different time, with no one owning the whole picture. Meta and Google are bidding against your own organic traffic for branded keywords because no one ever told them not to. You're paying twice for customers who were going to find you anyway.
Your CAC is going up and you don't know why
Six months ago, a new customer cost you $74 in paid media. Today it's $112, with no change in ad spend mix. Your attribution window changed when iOS 17 rolled out, your best-performing creative fatigued three months ago, and your Meta CPM is up 21% year-over-year. None of these on their own is catastrophic. Together, without anyone watching the curves, they've eaten 40% of your media efficiency and nobody noticed until the finance spreadsheet caught it at the end of Q1.
Your lifecycle revenue is leaving money on the table
Your abandoned cart flow recovers at 6.2%. Industry benchmarks for your category sit around 14–18%. You have no browse abandonment flow, no post-purchase cross-sell, no win-back for 90-day lapsed buyers. Klaviyo is installed but 70% of what it can do isn't turned on. This is the cheapest revenue in your business and it's the work that's been deferred the longest.
Retainer work gets a bad reputation because it's usually sold as "we'll do some stuff each month and send a report." That's not how we work. The retainer is priced against a playbook with specific deliverables in each phase, and if the numbers aren't moving by month three, we tell you instead of hoping you won't notice.
Month 1: Audit, instrument, stop the bleeding
We audit everything first. Meta, Google, Klaviyo, your Shopify analytics, your Attribution setup, your pixel health, your site speed, your top 20 SKUs' contribution margin after returns. Nothing gets changed in week 1; we just see the system as it is. Then week 2: we pause the obvious losers, fix the tracking gaps, and set up the weekly dashboard you'll be looking at every Monday for the next six months.
Months 2–3: Rebuild the creative and lifecycle engines
Paid acquisition gets a full creative refresh: 12 new static concepts and 6 new video concepts tested against a clean audience structure. In parallel, we rebuild the lifecycle program in Klaviyo: abandoned cart, browse abandonment, welcome series, post-purchase, win-back. Every flow is wired to your Shopify events and tested against a holdout group, so you see the actual lift in your P&L.
Months 4–5: Scale what's working, cut what isn't
By month four we have real performance data from the rebuild. We double down on the channels and creative that are beating target, cut the ones that aren't, and start testing one new channel based on what the data tells us (usually this is either YouTube, podcast sponsorships, or a wholesale affiliate push; we won't guess which until we see the numbers).
Month 6: Transition plan
Whether you renew or not, month six ends with a written playbook, a trained in-house operator (if you're hiring one), and clean handoff documentation. We'd rather lose a renewal to a great hire than keep a client who's stuck with us because we made ourselves hard to replace.
Paid acquisition
- Meta and Google account management (ad creation, testing, audience structure, daily monitoring)
- Weekly creative production: up to 8 new static ads and 3 new video ads per month (editing from your existing footage, not new shoots)
- Budget pacing and spend reallocation against a target CAC
- Monthly channel P&L including margin-adjusted ROAS
Lifecycle (Klaviyo)
- Full rebuild of core flows: welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, win-back
- 2 campaign emails per week (planned, written, designed, sent)
- SMS program setup (Attentive or Klaviyo SMS), if you want it
- Monthly deliverability review
Landing pages & CRO
- Up to 2 new landing pages per month (design + Shopify build)
- A/B test setup and analysis on your top 3 product detail pages
- Cart and checkout review in month 1 (usually worth 5–10% lift on its own)
Organic & SEO
- Keyword audit and content calendar (month 1)
- 2 substantive blog posts per month (1,200–1,800 words, written by a category specialist)
- Technical SEO pass at month 1 and month 4
Not included
- New product photo or video shoots (can be added as a line item)
- Influencer outreach and talent management (different specialty; we can refer)
- PR, earned media, or crisis communications
- Amazon advertising or marketplace management
- Launches into new international markets outside the US and Canada
Month 1: Onboarding & Audit
Channel audit, tracking cleanup, dashboard setup, first 30 days of active management
Monthly Retainer (Months 2–6)
Paid, lifecycle, landing pages, and organic. Five months at $7,500/month
5 x $7,500
Ad Spend Pass-Through
Media budget paid directly to Meta, Google, Klaviyo, etc. Not included in retainer. Recommended starting budget: $35,000/month, scales with performance
Month 6: Transition & Playbook
Written handoff playbook, documented dashboard, optional 2-day shadow period with your in-house hire
$49,500
Month 1: Onboarding
Audit week (week 1), fix week (week 2), first live campaign work (weeks 3–4). You'll see the dashboard go live at the end of week 2 and every Monday after.
Month 2: Creative & Lifecycle Build
First round of refreshed paid creative goes live. Klaviyo flows rebuilt and instrumented. First proper content calendar in market.
Month 3: Readback & Calibration
End-of-month review: what's working, what isn't, what we're changing. If the trajectory doesn't point at the target, we talk about why, honestly, and what we're doing about it.
Month 4: Scale + New Channel Test
We double down on winners, cut losers, and start a single new channel test based on what the data supports.
Month 5: Full-Scale Operation
Steady-state execution at full spend level. Fewer experiments, more discipline. Weekly cadence stays the same.
Month 6: Transition
Playbook delivered week 1 of month 6. If you're hiring in-house, 2-day shadow period available in the last week.
Plain Signal is a 5-person growth team working exclusively with DTC brands between $1M and $15M in annual revenue. We don't do B2B SaaS, we don't do enterprise, and we don't take accounts we can't run honestly. That's why we cap at 8 active retainers at any time.
Who works on your account
- Retainer lead (strategy, weekly call, P&L)
- Paid media operator (daily Meta/Google work)
- Lifecycle operator (Klaviyo, SMS, copy)
- Designer (ads, landing pages, email)
All four are on your shared Slack channel. No account managers.
Recent work
- Good Fortune Kitchen (Asian pantry DTC): took CAC from $91 to $54 over 4 months, scaled from $150k/mo to $340k/mo
- Rover & Holt (travel accessories): rebuilt lifecycle program, grew email-attributable revenue from 12% to 31% of total
- Coastline Candles (home fragrance): launched Google Shopping from zero, now 18% of total revenue
What clients say
"Plain Signal was the first agency that told us to cancel a budget line instead of doubling down on it. Saved us $18k in the first month and I knew we were working with the right people."
Dan Koh, Founder, Good Fortune Kitchen
Payment Schedule
- Month 1 onboarding ($9,500) invoiced on signing, due on start date
- Monthly retainer ($7,500) invoiced on the 1st of each month, due within 10 days
- Transition fee ($2,500) invoiced at the start of month 6
Ad spend is paid directly by Orbital Bikes to Meta, Google, Klaviyo, and any other platform. We don't mark it up and we don't act as the merchant of record. Our retainer is our only fee.
Cancellation
Either party may terminate with 30 days written notice after month 3. Months 1–3 are committed, because the audit and rebuild work doesn't pay off until the later months and early cancellation penalizes the client more than us. We're happy to talk through this in person if it's a concern.
Reporting & Transparency
You get access to every ad account, Klaviyo account, and analytics tool we touch. Nothing runs through intermediate agency accounts. If you hire an in-house team to replace us, you keep everything we built and all the data history.
Performance Expectations
We don't guarantee specific revenue outcomes. Anyone who does is either lying or hasn't been in this business long. What we do commit to: a written forecast at the end of month 1 that we stand behind, a monthly readback on variance against that forecast, and an early conversation if we're off track. If month 3 numbers are materially worse than forecast and we can't explain why, we'll discount month 4.
Proposal Validity
Valid for 21 days from the cover date. Retainer slots are first-come first-served against our capacity cap.
Most marketing proposals fail in the same place: they list activities instead of outcomes, and the client cannot tell what they are paying for. This template starts you from a layout that separates the work from the result, so the proposal argues for the engagement instead of just describing it.
It is built around the way agencies actually win retainer and campaign work: a clear goal, a channel plan that ladders up to that goal, a scope that names what a month includes, and pricing that keeps your fee separate from ad spend. Open it, replace the starter copy with your client's situation, set your pricing, and publish. The client opens a branded link, you see when they read it, and they sign on the page.
What a marketing proposal needs to cover
A marketing proposal has to answer three questions before price: what is the goal, which channels move it, and how will we know it worked. The template lays these out as an executive summary, an approach section per channel, and a scope that names deliverables and cadence.
Keep activities and outcomes on separate lines. "Publish twelve posts a month" is an activity. "Grow qualified pipeline from organic social" is the outcome it serves. Clients approve outcomes and question activities, so lead with the outcome and let the activity sit underneath it.
Be specific about measurement. Naming the two or three metrics you will report on, and the cadence you will report them, does more to build confidence than another paragraph about your process. It also sets the terms of the renewal conversation before the engagement has even started.
Scoping retainer work without scope creep
Retainers drift because the boundary is never written down. The scope section gives you a place to state what a month includes, what counts as out of scope, and how extra requests are handled. Specific beats generous here: a clear limit protects the relationship better than an open-ended promise you quietly resent.
Set a timeline per channel rather than one project end date. Marketing work compounds, so the proposal should show the first ninety days as a ramp, with the early weeks weighted toward setup and the later weeks toward output the client can see. A timeline that admits the ramp is more credible than one that promises results in week one.
Drawing the fee versus ad spend line
The most common pricing confusion in marketing proposals is mixing your fee with the client's ad spend. The pricing table keeps them separate so the client sees what they pay you and what passes through to the platforms. That single distinction prevents most pricing arguments later.
If you manage spend, say how the management fee is calculated and where the line sits. A client who understands that your fee and their media budget are two different numbers is far less likely to treat a rising ad bill as a reason to renegotiate your rate.
How the template is structured
The starting structure runs cover, executive summary, the challenge, your approach, scope of work, investment, timeline, about, and terms. Each section opens with a prompt rather than a blank box, so you are editing toward a finished marketing proposal instead of staring at an empty page.
You are not locked into it. Rename sections, drop the ones a given pitch does not need, and reorder to put the strongest part first. The structure is a starting point the tool builds from, not a form you have to fill in order.
Send it as a page, not a file
Once the proposal reads the way you want, you do not export it and attach it to an email. You publish it as a branded link on your own page. The client opens it in the browser, on a phone or a laptop, with no download and no account to create.
That changes what happens after you hit send. You see when the proposal was opened, how many times, and which sections held attention, so a follow-up is timed to a signal instead of a guess. When the client is ready, they accept and sign on the page, and the proposal locks. You get a clean PDF with the signature and an audit trail attached, which is the copy that gets filed and forwarded internally.
Related reading: How to write a marketing proposal .
Marketing proposal template: FAQ
What should a marketing proposal include?
State the goal, the channels you will run to reach it, a scope that defines what each month covers, a timeline per channel, and pricing that keeps your fee separate from ad spend. This template lays those out as cover, executive summary, the challenge, your approach, scope of work, investment, and timeline sections, so the activities, the outcome, and what you can promise each have a home.
Is the marketing proposal template free?
Yes. Download the .docx at no cost and use it anywhere. Building the same marketing proposal in ProposalKit is free for 14 days, with no card required.
Can I edit the template in Microsoft Word or Google Docs?
Yes. The download is a standard .docx, so it opens in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Pages. You can also build it online in ProposalKit and send it as a branded link instead of a file the client has to download.
How do I price a marketing retainer in the proposal?
Keep your management fee and the client's ad spend on separate lines, so the client sees what they pay you versus what passes through to the ad platforms. The template's pricing table is built for that split, with a per-month breakdown for the retainer.