You’ve got big ideas for where you could take your email marketing program, and you’ve got plans for how it could positively impact your company. Anything that’s worth doing takes two things: time and money. And as the saying goes – time is money.
In this article, we discuss how to get the most out of email no matter how much you have to spend. We’ll go over some of the basic concepts from the book, including how much email marketing campaigns should cost you, what goes into an email marketing budget, and how you can measure metrics like return on investment (ROI), open rate, or conversion rate.
How much should email marketing cost?
Because every situation is unique, how and when you ask for a bigger slice of the marketing budget will be different for every email team.
Ultimately, it depends on the sophistication of your current program and your team’s established workflow. Are you starting from scratch, do you have a top-tier marketing program, or are you somewhere in the middle? Does your email strategy feed into your social media channels and vice versa? It’s an entirely different conversation based on the pre-existing level of buy-in within your organization.
If you’re just beginning to build a robust email marketing program, you’ll be in a completely different spot than an email marketer who has the data and results to prove what email can do for the company. In general, email has an . Depending on the you use, your costs can be between. (You could get your email marketing underway for free with by Sinch.)
What goes into the email marketing budget?
Every situation is different, so it’s hard to give just one number for your email marketing costs. However, here are some components that go into building your email marketing program. Price these out to determine your marketing budget.
The key determinants of your email marketing plan are:
- How will you create your email content? Let’s start from the basics. To run your email program, you’ll need some emails to send. This includes email design as well as creating HTML email templates. You can do your design in-house or hire an email designer. Similarly, you can build your email templates from scratch or use a.
- How will you send your email? This is an infrastructure question. Now, while you can manage your own SMTP server and send your emails using an email client like Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, this doesn’t really scale. Depending on the number of emails you’re sending, you’ll probably need an email service provider (ESP) to handle your sending infrastructure, email deliverability, IP reputation, and send-time optimization.
- How can you assure the quality of your emails? Before you dispatch your messages, you’ll need a way to make sure your messages display as you intend. To do this, you’ll need an email testing tool, like our
- How can you gauge the success of your email program? Part of budgeting for email marketing is being able to assess your email program. Look for an ESP that enables you to use logs and analytics to determine the health of your email program. We’ll talk more about this in the next section.
- How can you collect and use the data from your email program? Part of email marketing is being able to leverage the customer data you gain from your interactions with your readers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services Kazakhstan Business Email List help you use the data you collect to build a better customer experience for your readers.
How can I measure email ROI or email marketing ROI?
So you’ve asked for money to allocate to your email marketing budget. As a small business or even a larger corporation, you’ll need to be accountable for the money spent.
While marketing isn’t always a numbers UAE Cell Number game, you’ll still need a way to account for the performance of your email marketing program. This means using metrics to determine your email ROI. Not sure where to start? Check out what our friends at Mailjet have to say about .