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How Much Do Email Newsletters Cost?

Jacob Brain

Author

If you’re wondering, “How much do email newsletters cost?”, don’t worry – you’re not alone. Starting an email newsletter campaign does come at a cost, but the benefits of this on-going email marketing campaign can be far-reaching for your organization.

Email Newsletter Setup Costs

The initial cost for your email newsletter is going to be the setup cost. This has two main components: first, the cost of the design of your email template, and second, the cost of the ESP, or email service provider.

The ESP is the company or software that is going to send your email newsletter. You will not, under any circumstances, send your email newsletter from your Outlook account on your desktop. Besides coming across as unprofessional, sending from a standard email account does not allow you to track the email success rates. You’ll need that data to grow this valuable communication channel.

We’d recommend starting small, with a free or minimal cost ESP like mailchimp.com or campaignmonitor.com. Both of these are good systems that will allow you to get the job done right.

For your design, you could use the free templates provided by many of the ESPs, but you do want to make sure you’ve customized the design enough that it does not look like 10 other newsletters in your customers’ inboxes. Your design is best built by a professional email marketing designer who knows how to impact open rates and make the most of your content. It could set you back anywhere from $750 to 4K, depending on the depth of the design and number of templates you are creating.

Email Sending Costs

Now, if you are using one of the systems mentioned above, you won’t have a separate sending cost for your email newsletters. But, in a general sense, it should not cost you more than .01, or .02 per email address to send your email newsletter. This is a good way to estimate if you are getting a good deal.

Again, though, many of the systems in the market currently allow you to send a very high volume of emails, so it’s usually not an issue as you get started. When you start sending 10K emails a day to lists of over 100K, then we’ll need to start talking about costs, and about how to maximize those campaigns with email list segmentation.

Email Content Costs

The last part of your email costs comes from the content that is being sent. You might be creating marketing content internally and not have a very high contracted cost, but more of a simple internal cost. Either way, you should calculate the cost of each email sent with the content, sending fees, and design time, so that you can start to calculate ROI (Return on investment) for each and every one of your email campaigns. Starting this calculation now will allow to you truly see if email is a good channel for you, and if your return is great enough to justify its use.

Was Email Marketing Worth the Cost?

So, besides wondering “how much do email newsletters cost?”, you need to also wonder, “was it worth it?”. Your cost in sending email will be high to start, but it will progressively shrink as the return from your email starts to come up. If you are looking for some help getting your campaign started, download the ebook below, or contact us today for a free 30-min consultation to see if we can help.

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