How Much Does it Cost to Do Email Marketing?

You want to send emails consistently that have good deliverability and are easy to build and customize, correct? Marketing software for email can cost a business anything from $0 to hundreds and even thousands of dollars each month.

Why is there such a wide range? We'll uncover the average cost email marketing for growing businesses, what to expect when looking at email builder cost, and how to get costs down when creating your email campaign.

Why Do Businesses Need to Know Email Marketing?
- Overall Marketing Cost Will Determine Which Email Marketing Path to Take
What Drives the Cost of Email Marketing?
What Determines the Average Cost of Email Marketing for Common Industries
- Service Industry
- Ecommerce Businesses
How Email Marketing Agencies Can Help
Conclusion

Why Do Businesses Need to Know Email Marketing Costs?

Why should businesses care about how much email marketing costs? Great email content is going to convert more leads, right?

Sure, but you want to make sure your email marketing is bringing in the right ROI (return on investment). If your business spends $1,000 each month on an email marketing platform, using every tool to the best of your ability, and you only have one person out of 1,000 each month who actually purchases that $500 sewing machine online from you - your email marketing agency may not be for you. You're only losing money!

The cost to send a campaign project to hundreds of people will depend on factors like:

Will you let a digital marketing agency design and send the campaigns for you?
Will you create and send your own emails?
How many people do you want to convert into customers? How many contacts do you already send to?
How often do you want to send emails to leads? To loyal customers?
What do you expect to pay each month for email marketing?

Luckily, the content of marketing emails should not affect the cost when creating campaigns. Whether you want a longer or super short newsletter with your brand colors or the background of pink flowers won't contribute too much to the cost of your email marketing overall.

Overall Marketing Cost Will Determine Which Email Marketing Path to Take

If you want to know how much agencies charge for email marketing, here is your answer: an email marketing agency can charge between $250 to $700 per email - but this is more likely for medium to large businesses.

The email marketing agency cost will include:

Email marketing strategy (or email plan)
Copywriting (the text in an email campaign)
Design (the layout, images, brand colors, etc.)
Implementation, such as connecting emails and contacts to landing pages

Here are the most popular email marketing agency pricing structures:

Per hour
Per project, such as a one-time email hosting setup
Revenue share
Retainer service
Per month (minimum and maximum set hours)

The average costs for email marketing agencies can be about $125 to $250 an hour. Some, but not most, email marketing agencies charge this by the hour because it could get extremely expensive for the client.

We will cover more ways to find an email marketing application that doesn't cost an arm and a leg later in the article. For now, determining if you want to go with an agency or simply work with an email marketing software will start you off with a general idea of how much you could spend each month.

What Drives the Cost of Email Marketing?

There are so many factors into what will determine email marketing prices. We named a few above and went over what drove that email marketing cost. But there are many questions a business should ask themselves before averaging how much to put towards email marketing services.

Do you need to build a large list of emails to send to?
Do you already have a full client list with their contact info?
Do you need unlimited data to store emails?
Do you need to send emails to an unlimited number of contacts?
Will I have to pay for unsubscribers for a period of time with a particular email marketing platform?
Do I need to know where my emails are being sent geographically?

Some questions will surprisingly not be about your audience or contact list either, such as:

Is SEO important to your business and email campaign results?
What ROI are you expecting from digital agencies?
Do you want easy integration with other digital marketing and website management, like a blog page or chatbots
Have you tried other pricier email agencies in the past and been displeased with the results? Why do you think that is?
How simple do you want email campaign design to be when you or a team create email layouts?

The Kind of Email Campaign You'll Be Sending

Sending just newsletters can be much cheaper than automated messages. Especially if you choose to go with an email agency to set this up for you.

The cost of setting up automatic emails varies based on what you want to set up. The most common set of automation are:

Welcome series
Abandoned cart email automation
Purchase email automation

These 3 automations will have between 1-3 emails each.

A setup like that will cost around $3,000, but go much higher to 6 or 7 thousand. OR you create these emails yourself for free with an affordable email marketing software instead of a personalized agency.

What's great about TruVISIBILITY is that you can request agency-level personal attention to your emails. There are also plenty of support guides and articles (technical ones and blogs like this one) to help get you started sending campaigns, automated purchase and welcome emails, etc.

How Many Contacts You Send an Email To

Let's use TruVISIBILITY's digital marketing platform as an example. The prices here represent less than the average cost of email marketing for a business - whether it's a B2B, ecommerce, or digital service.

You can send up to 1,000 emails free. They can be any type of campaign, making email marketing simpler than ever for smaller and growing businesses. Any group of 1,000 more emails would be $0.99.

If you want more out of email marketing, you can choose to go with the premium account. This will help you pay less each month in the long run, especially for medium and larger companies sending well over thousands of emails per month.

The bonus here that is rarely found in other services is the additional marketing perks subscribers get along with the email services, such as the ability to also create a site and up to 100 free chatbot conversations each month.

How Your Campaign Is Designed

Not a huge cost factor, but email design can - depending on the email marketing agency or software - drive up prices if you are paying for a one-time project like welcome email series that we mentioned before.

Today, customers are more appealed by the visual aspect of a campaign than its written content (but it doesn’t mean you have to neglect the written part).

As your business grows, you can’t use email marketing templates anymore, and should invest in customized campaigns or creating a more unique campaign yourself for your business. This is an extra cost that will impact an email marketing agency service pricing. If you do it yourself, it will likely not raise your monthly cost by much or anything at all!

There are multiple email marketing agency pricing models when it comes to PPC services, ranging from hourly rates to flat rates to a monthly retainer model.

Obviously, the more emails that must be produced, sent, tracked, and assessed, the more expensive it will be.

Things that can raise any marketing services, though, include:

Email complexity
Dynamic features
Number of content sections
Number of links
Artwork originality
Templates

Other non-design factors that come into play would be:

Segementation of contact list groups
Email testing

Agencies can charge anywhere from $300 a month to even $10,000 a month or more if you have original art in your emails, several links, including social media connects, etc. And agencies can put any price they want based on what you tell them you want.

This is why doing email marketing yourself is a much cheaper option and doable with the right digital marketing platform. TruVISIBILITY is such a platform that does not monitor the contact list of people you have. All that matters is the number of emails you send each month.

AND you can track this data yourself, such as:

Hard bounces
Numbers of subscribers and when they subscribed
Click through rate (CTR)
And much more!

Email testing and contact list management should always be something to take some time to do. It's part of your marketing strategy after all!

And did we mention, A/B testing can be how you can determine if you need a complex campaign design or not? If you don't see that new custom design bringing in more subscribers, then don't pay the money to have more custom artwork done for your emails!

What Determines the Average Cost of Email Marketing for Common Industries

On an average, a mid-size business can expect to spend $9 to $1,000 per month on email marketing if they manage their campaigns themselves (depending on the platform and number of subscribers).

Smaller companies likely have fewer contacts and can expect to pay significantly lower monthly prices. This is true for lay firms and ecommerce businesses alike.

Service Industry

Though email services don't seem to discriminate when it comes to prices for people who own a laundromat versus an online jewelry store, the needs of the service industry are a bit different and may require less or more marketing features, depending.

Luckily, for service industry businesses, email marketing is the most cost-effective digital marketing strategy. Here's what to consider if your business offers clients a service:

What the service industry could pay more for

Choosing a software that doesn't put B2B companies or other service businesses first
Extra unnecessary applications that businesses may already have, such as a website creation tool that comes with the email marketing platform.

What the service industry could pay less for

No need for personalized emails if giving offers to everyone equally
No major segmentation needed if they sell to the same audience demographic and only offer a similar set of services
No need for keeping track of shipping of physical items and automated shipping email confirmation emails.

Now, if you are a cleaning service and find a plan that does offer all of these extras and is STILL quite affordable, go for it! Having an all-in-one digital marketing platform that can help manage your site, social media integration, and even landing pages to connect your emails to will likely save you money - just like TruVISIBILITY's entirely free for life marketing suite that includes everything we just mentioned.

Ecommerce Businesses

Ecommerce businesses should know a good campaign when they see one, so creating a good campaign with on-brand design and messaging is what will keep people engaged and not wanting to unsubscribe, resulting in higher sales!

Every business is different, so the guide below is what businesses found to be true on average when deducing the worth of their ecommerce email marketing.

What the ecommerce industry could pay more for

More contacts. Ecommerce businesses tend to reach way beyond their local audience, even internationally. This means more contacts to manage, which ultimately will drive up price.
Social channel integration.
Personalized SEO work. Digital marketing agencies, like TruVISIBILITY, are more than willing to help design emails that are connected to landing pages, which are better attached to a website. If you want to grab more people, great SEO should be implemented into these platforms, which will cost more to incorporate.

What the ecommerce industry could pay less for

Some platforms have a deal where an ecommerce brand's website, landing pages, chatbots, CRM, and email apps are more affordable if purchased altogether.

Again, an email platform could be directed to B2B companies while others could be designed for ecommerce businesses or even small brick and mortar stores that simply want to sell products locally. What you will end up paying will vary based on what platforms you try out.

How Email Marketing Agencies Can Help

Let's look at TruVISIBILITY's pricing plans and what they can offer businesses in terms of email marketing strategy. Their app specifically designed for email marketing could cost nothing or up to $100 or even $1,500 per month for large companies with close to 900,000 contacts.

So, how much does an email marketing management system cost with TruVISIBILITY? Check out your personalized price with our pricing tool below.

The email marketing cost increases as the number of subscribers in the list increases but you get the same set of features, such as email marketing automation, advanced segmentation, an easy-to-use email editor, email templates, etc., whether you have 10 or 1,000 subscribers. While the list size is a pricing factor, all pricing plans allow you to send unlimited emails to your mailing lists.

Look at Email Marketing Agency Prices

For growing or smaller to medium-sized businesses, we suggest looking at what your business can afford or wants to put forward email marketing services first. There is no reason to day dream about software that could help your business when you can never subscribe to use it long-term.

Look at What an Email Marketing Platform Can Offer

Do you need to do some advanced A/B testing for a big campaign? Email marketing costs can also include how many different email templates you want saved on your data. Luckily, TruVISIBILITY offers unlimited email designs that you can save. Simply create your own templates to use later, adjust, and label according to your needs.

Some other important email features that not every email marketing platform offers include:

Social channel integration
Website and landing page integration
Guides to help you learn how to market and use the email service
Ability to change your plan each month (with no contract or restrictions)
Ability to segment users on your site just like you segment contacts in your email

Aside from email automation, you can see there are so many tools you may find you'll need as you send newsletters, automatic shipping and purchase confirmation emails, a new product information campaign, etc.

See If the Email Marketing Services Can Be Personalized

This is a huge tool that TruVISIBILITY proudly offers every user of the Messaging platform. Why bother to personalize each individual email when you can personalize a group of your contacts. Your email will still have each person's name in their email.

Your contacts don't need to belong to a particular group either. Whoever you are sending the email to can see their name on the email, whether it is in the subject line or in the text of the email. Look at this example to see how easy it is to create a personalized automated email, even with segmented lists of contacts.

Conclusion

Email marketing pricing can vary greatly between businesses. Hopefully you've learned new ways to cut costs of an email marketing software and understand the average cost of what email marketing can be per month for the size of your business.

Please note that social media marketing is not included in the price of email marketing. Though mentioned in this article, you can still connect social pages to your emails. Much like you would integrate automated emails and email list building through landing pages.

Some agencies don't allow this ability. And if they do, they will cost clients extra money per month, such as sendinblue and even Hubspot. TruVISIBILITY's services are not limited in this way. So go ahead and build that contact list, design as many unique email templates as you like. See what you can do with TruVISIBILITY's Messages app!