Leave if your drug of choice is an unexpected expense. If not, saunter over and let’s go through this pricing guide for email marketing from top to bottom.
This tutorial focuses more on how you may become more knowledgeable so you don’t get stuck with unexpected fees than it does on the most affordable services available. The surprise of it is painful.
Quick email marketing statistics
While it is clear that email marketing is an effective acquisition, retention, and promotion strategy — it is not clear enough what opportunities it offers. Here’s what statistics states on this:
- The average return on investment for email marketing is 42:1.
- The most effective marketers send 5-8 emails every month.
- 19% of sales are typically attributed to email marketing.
- Within one hour, 22% of all email marketing campaigns are opened.
- The average conversion rate for e-commerce companies in 2022 was 8.17%.
Because different companies define conversion rates differently, measuring them for email marketing might be a little trickier. For instance, while e-commerce enterprises define conversions as completed purchases, software companies may utilize demo signups as their key conversion indicator.
How much does it therefore cost to obtain these outcomes? It depends on the degree of adherence to the plan, the kinds of tools and technology employed, and other factors.
The statistics at a high level indicate the following:
- Email represents an average 7.8% of marketers’ budgets.
- Between $9 and $1,000 is what mid-sized businesses spend each month on email marketing.
These numbers indicate a wide range of expenditures. In the end, firms must consider a variety of aspects to decide how much money they should allocate to email marketing. Let’s now examine the factors that affect how much email marketing costs.
Factors that influence email marketing cost
Your email marketing costs are influenced by three main categories.
Data
Without an email list, your email strategy cannot be successful. At least because 99% of customers check their emails on a daily basis — meaning there’s a huge opportunity in using it as a communication channel with your audience. But before messaging anyone, you should clearly get their consent.
To expand your email list, there are various options. To entice people to subscribe to your newsletter, for instance, you might include CTAs in your blog entries. Alternatively, you may produce gated content, such as eBooks, that users can access in exchange for providing their email addresses.
Creative resources
Business executives can streamline email marketing campaigns more easily than ever thanks to creative marketing automation tools, yet no computer can produce quality email text. You still need real writers for that who are familiar with your brand and its attractiveness to consumers.
The process of writing compelling email text is complex. Email subject lines influence recipients’ immediate decisions, thus the material must be written by someone who is aware of the topics they wish to read about. Creative copywriters can create material that entices readers to open the email and then visit the website of your company.
Businesses who decide to write their own material may initially save money, but they may end up spending a lot of time creating different email variations. Running the business might be a more effective use of the time spent drafting and split-testing email copy. Because of this, a lot of executives decide to collaborate with marketing firms to assist with copy.
Video is a potent medium that goes beyond copy. A few pertinent data encourage the use of video in your efforts, whether it is created in-house or by a third party, individually or in bulk:
- Any mention of “video” in your subject line will increase open rates by 6%.
- CTR rises by 25% when a video is added.
- If a video is added, unsubscribe rates decrease by 26%.
Your capacity for problem-solving and inventiveness are equal. Finding a successful mixed-media approach for your email marketing campaign will require iteration and refining because creating quality content can be difficult. The correct article and a video combination can boost your social media presence and your CPM rate.
Email Service Provider (ESP)
ESP is the fundamental infrastructure you need to execute your newsletter or campaigns, regardless of whether you have 10 subscribers or 1,000,000.
According to this Email Marketing Pricing Guide, the average price for ESP varies between $0 and $220 per month, with price models typically dependent on many variables:
- Subscription count. The cost of email marketing rises as the amount of subscribers on the list does, but whether you have 10 or 10K subscribers, you get the same capabilities like email marketing automation, extensive segmentation, a user-friendly email editor, email templates, etc. While list size affects price, you can send an infinite number of emails to your mailing lists regardless of pricing plan.
- Sending email volume. You can choose a service known as “pay as you go” that normally operates on the basis of an email credit system if you don’t plan to send emails on a schedule or if your monthly email sending volumes fluctuate.
- Attributes offered. These are advantageous if your business approach is quite straightforward and you don’t currently need sophisticated features. But as you grow and develop, there is always an option to upgrade to a more sophisticated pricing plan.
How to define your email marketing budget
We’ve already defined that email marketing is a pretty cost-efficient way to communicate with your audience. Let’snow go through specific steps that will help you properly calculate your email marketing budget. These are:
- Define your goals: It’s clear enough: without clear email marketing purposes defining email budget is not possible. So clearly define what your goal is — boosting conversions, increasing engagement, or getting some referral traffic to your website.
- Set your budget limits: While you obviously need design and copywriting, you also need a budget for an ESP, as we explained earlier. Estimate your desired spending limits to be able to come up with the most suitable solution that will address all your needs.
- Define your optimal and maximum budget: If you are aware of your desired costs and goals — you can easily define your preferred budget. For this, take into account factors like your audience size, frequency of email sends, and the preferred tool of your choice. Then, decide on your optimal, minimum, and maximum spend.
- Measure cost-efficiency in the process: While this is clear enough, let us emphasize the importance of this statement — budgeting doesn’t end once you sign up for the email service. You should clearly track the performance of your emails — and the potential ROI — as you launch all of your campaigns. Be sure to measure open rates, CTRs, and CTA clicks. Using this information should help you improve future campaigns and optimize expenses.
Remember that email marketing is not a destination, it’s a continuous process which requires experiments and efforts. But if you follow the tips in our guide, you should properly define, use, and optimize your email budget.
