Brands and marketers alike understand the importance of comprehensive and effective email marketing campaigns. Considering there will be around 319 billion emails sent by businesses by 2021, marketers need to learn how to stand out from the competition through the use of email.
And innovation, though effective, can get costly.
It’s 2019, and regardless of the role email marketing plays in your marketing strategy, costs are likely to go up. It makes more sense for brands to budget accordingly in order to match these expected cost increases.
In order to budget correctly, brands need to know what goes into an email marketing campaign.
What goes into an email marketing campaign?
There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to creating an effective email marketing strategy.
First, brands need to decide what kind of email strategy they want to unveil. Is it going to involve newsletters to a list of subscribers? Are they going to roll out an email nurture campaign? Are they trying to sell directly through email?
Once marketers outline the objectives of an email, they need to decide on content and messaging.
Source: Really Good Emails
Will they use images? Will they embed video? Do they need to hire designers to create imagery?
What will the CTAs be? What is the driving force behind these emails? What next?
There are a lot of questions to consider. And there are a number of team members involved too: marketers, designers, copywriters, videographers, and more.
This can make breaking down the costs of email marketing campaigns so tricky.
How much does an email marketing campaign cost?
Email marketing drives some of the highest ROI of all inbound initiatives: 4400%.
And luckily, email marketing tends to be cost-effective. But like all things, the cost can depend on the many choices you and your team make.
The following is a breakdown of all the different factors that go into email marketing costs
Outsourcing or internal marketing team?
Depending on the size and scope of a team, it might make more sense for a brand to outsource email marketing initiatives. When they do so, they can expect costs well into the thousands, depending on the type of contract they sign—and that’s just for one campaign.
It can be much more cost-effective to run your email marketing in house. And with the right ESP, you won’t need someone who has experience coding and you might not even need one dedicated email marketing person.
Automation tools
When you use email automation tools, you streamline workflow and increase productivity. The right ESP will have tools integrated with the platform, which is one factor you should consider when choosing your ESP. Because these tools—when purchased on their own—can cost hundreds per month, so be sure to factor these costs into the budget from the very start.
Post-campaign analytics & support
In addition to the costs that go into rolling out the initial campaign, the cost to maintain, support, and launch new initiatives with the data found can add another round of costs almost equal to the first if you aren’t careful.
But once again, the right ESP will have everything you need to measure the success of your email marketing and you won’t need to pay anything extra to monitor your email marketing metrics.
Does it really matter?
Absolutely! If you have the right ESP—which can be very affordable—you shouldn’t pay a lot to launch an email marketing campaign. But if you have the wrong tool, you could be paying way more than you should be.
And any extra cost cuts into your total revenue, and we don’t need to tell you why that matters.
What now?
When launching a full-functioning email marketing campaign, it’s important to ask this question: How much will this email marketing campaign cost?
Any marketing initiative requires funds, but it’s better to be prepared and build a strategy that hits all of your targets without breaking the bank.
Learn how to cut costs while saving time when it comes to your next campaign.