In determining the costs of email marketing campaigns, there is no simple answer. The primary reason is that there are many different options for a person to choose from. For this article, we will discuss the factors that could determine how much it can cost and the things that affect how much it costs you as an email marketer.
What Is an Email Campaign?
Let’s start with the meaning of an email campaign to understand where the cost comes into play. All email marketing systems comprise several different parts that make up the entire system.
An email campaign is a coordinated effort that is part of an email marketing system. It involves individual email messages that are sent out at specific times. The key to a successful email campaign is in the messaging, organizing your subscribers, and analyzing the results after sending out each email.
Are Email Campaigns an Investment?
As part of your email marketing strategy, the money that you end up spending definitely is an investment in your business. That is why you need to do a lot of research into everything before you decide on an email provider you will use for your business.
The email campaigns that you set up will really set the tone for the success of your business. Therefore, you really need to treat every campaign you create as an investment in your business’s success.
» MORE: How Effective Is Email Marketing?
What Is an Email Service Provider?
An Email Service Provider or ISP is a company that provides a software package to its members that includes a powerful dashboard. Along with the dashboard, each member is given a place to upload their whole email list. The other basic service they provide to all their members is an emailer system. With this email service, you can schedule all of your email campaigns and keep track of all the analytics from the dashboard.
While there are free and low-cost ESP’s available, but as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. However, for a bit of an investment in your business, you can use an advanced email service provider like MailChimp. For a nominal monthly charge, you will get many beneficial tools that will be very helpful for your business. The potential for a big ROI (Return on Investment) is well worth the price.
MailChimp and other advanced email service providers are popular because they offer many extra tools that the lower-tier providers don’t.
We included a brief list of some of these tools:
- Add dynamic content to all of your email messages
- Automate many of the email campaigns for you
- Provides you with lead capture forms for gathering subscribers
- Allows the set up of comparative testing for email content and subject lines
- Allows comparative testing of automated campaigns before sending them out
- Powerful tracking information
- Allows organizing of email lists according to interests
» MORE: Best Email Marketing Service for Individuals with a Brand
What Affects the Cost of an Email Marketing Campaign?
Several factors can affect the cost of your email campaigns. When it comes to an email marketing business, most of the costs associated with an email marketing business come in the form of the necessary tools to run a business. The highest single cost will likely be the email service provider you decide to go with.
There are several excellent ESP companies online, and they all offer a wide range of tools designed to simplify your business. Some service providers are free, but you will discover that they are limited in some of the functionalities that they can offer. This is compared to the more popular email service providers that do charge, like Aweber. However, with the large number of tools and functionalities they offer in their packages, it is worth the money.
A big difference between a paid email service provider, like Aweber, and one of the free email service providers is that you can choose a package that caps the number of emails that can you want to out in an email campaign. The free providers will likely impose a low maximum email number, and there is no way to avoid it. So, the benefit of a paid service provider is that you can always upgrade your package if you grow your email subscriber list.
» MORE: Best Free Email Marketing Software For Small Businesses
Things to Consider before You Select an ESP
In email marketing, having a high-quality email service provider is extremely important to your success. With that said, to be sure that you are ready to make such an important decision, you need to be fully prepared and ready.
We came up with a good list of several important things that you should follow to get the decision right. Below is the list of 8 things that we were able to come up with for you.
Top 5 Things to Consider before Making a Decision
- Decide on what kinds of emails will work for you
There are several types of email communications you can use; promotional, newsletters, or even eCommerce. Finding out what works best will be the key.
- Decide on the number of emails you want to send out a month
It’s crucial to figure out how many times you want to send the emails ahead of time. Most email service providers allow you to schedule campaigns in advance.
- How are you going to get the subscribers to build your list?
Your subscriber is the key. So, planning out what ways to get the new subscribers should be planned out as well.
- Decide some goals for your email marketing business
Goal setting is crucial in business so that you can gauge the success of your business. So, make small achievable goals in the beginning.
- Decide on how you want to brand your business and come up with a design
Design and branding are essential in email marketing since you want your subscribers to remember.