Email marketing is the direct line to your customer’s heart, mind, and wallet. But whether you are thinking of scaling up or just starting, you need to plan the investments in your marketing strategy before focusing on the return on investment.

Effective budgeting is essential to any successful email marketing campaign, and it's the key to maximizing your campaign ROI. Whether you are small business, managing a non-profit organization, or launching a political campaign, creating and managing a budget is critical to achieving your goals. 

The key to successful budgeting lies in developing a strategy that allows you to allocate your resources effectively and efficiently, while still achieving your desired results. In this blog, we will discuss how to budget effectively for your campaigns, providing you with tips and strategies to help you manage your finances and reach your goals. So, if you're ready to take control of your campaign's budget and maximize your resources, read on to learn more!

How Much Will Email Marketing Cost?

If you’re like me, you have 10-20 different creators’ newsletters in your email inbox. At some point, you might have asked yourself, what would be the cost of building and maintaining your own email list?

The good news is that you can get started for free, but as your email list grows, you will need to pay attention to a few key aspects of your marketing strategy and the investments you want to make in it.

First and foremost, email list management and analytics are crucial as you expand. While searching for an ESP, you need to make sure you are not missing out on features that would only add more value to your content creation process. You need to leverage the platform in a way that makes your workflow more efficient.

When you’re starting out, a big chunk of the content creation process is about figuring out what works and what doesn’t. To get an understanding of this, you need an in-depth look at how your existing campaigns are doing. You need an email service provider that offers functions like automation, segmentation, and A/B testing, which will streamline your workflow and the delivery process. 

A/B testing will help you level up your subject line game, while segmentation will target your audience based on their interests. You are going to need these features first in order to build your audience and sustain it. 

There are more costs, like content creation, for which you might need a team as you scale. Your email service provider should also support your scaling needs over time. Changing your ESP is not a task that you would want to do often. Hence, choose the platform that supports your growth in the short and long term.

With the right tools and a solid strategy, you can reach your audience and build a stronger email list. Here are some of the most commonly used ESPs, and their pricing plans and features, to give you an idea of how it goes:

beehiiv

Brevo

Mailchimp

If you want an in-depth look at how much email marketing platforms can cost, you can read more here. 

You need to think long-term to make sure you can sustain your email list on one platform, which will eliminate the need to switch to another platform if your current emailing platform doesn’t support your needs. Three big factors affect the cost of your email marketing:

How Much Does Email Marketing Cost Per Hour?

Outsourcing can help with email marketing. Especially if you don’t have a great deal of experience in writing or design, outsourcing these tasks could make a huge difference in the overall quality and success of your campaign. Here’s what these roles would cost on an hourly basis:

But here’s the good news. You can save on these costs just like the newsletter Inverse Cramer did by using beehiiv.

The pre-made templates in the beehiiv editor will help you write and design beautiful emails all on your own. beehiiv 3D Analytics will also provide detailed metrics to perform better and level up your email marketing strategy. Hence, you get a higher ROI without the need to sacrifice your time and put in the extra effort.

How Much Does It Cost To Send 10,000 Emails?

No matter how many emails you plan to send, your costs will depend on your email service provider. Just as important is maintaining a healthy email list—one that gets good open rates, high deliverability, and strong audience engagement. If you want to send to more than 2,500 recipients, you can select the beehiiv Scale plan, which can support your growth and help you kickstart the journey.

You should not just select your plan based on the number of emails you can send per day, but also features like subscription forms, segmentation, and polls. These features, while optional, all make for a better experience for your users–and thus, you’ll get more engagement.

The beehiiv Scale plan is just $49/month and has all these features and more.

There are some questions you should also ask yourself to budget, plan, and decide on your priorities:

• How will you handle email unsubscribes and ensure that subscribers have an easy and clear way to opt out of your emails?

• How will you ensure that your emails are mobile-friendly and accessible to all subscribers?

• Do you plan to segment your email list? If so, how will you segment your list, and what criteria will you use?

• How will you personalize your emails? Consider personalization tactics, such as using a subscriber's first name, segmentation, or dynamic content, to increase engagement.

How Many Emails Is Enough In Email Marketing?

There is no hard and fast rule to determine how many emails are enough; but no matter what your content is about, whether you are just sending out promotional content, or you are on your way to sending out regular content on a niche topic, you need to make sure that you are not spamming your audience. 

As we spend so much time online, our email inboxes tend to have unopened emails, which can be easily lost. Bombarding your audience with content every other day won’t deliver the results you’re hoping for. Instead, set a consistent schedule—whether that’s weekly or bi-weekly—and stick to it. You don't want them to get annoyed, but you also don’t want them to forget you exist; so a consistent pattern is much more appreciated.

Better yet – you can use beehiiv to automatically clean your email list, making it easy to remove unengaged subscribers. 

Is Email Marketing Free of Charge?

You can start email marketing for free with free trials on many ESPs. It’s a good idea to try out a variety of providers to see how each works, and discover what features you need and enjoy using. 

Trialing platforms for free can help you get started, but with time, you’ll want to provide more quality content at scale, and for that, you’d have to make some investments in your email marketing strategy.

Get Started With Email Marketing

You can get started for just $49 with beehiiv’s Scale plan. Send emails at scale, track performance with ease, and create professional-looking content—all on your own, without needing a full marketing team.

While planning and budgeting are crucial steps to determine your goals, email marketing doesn’t have to be overly expensive if you choose the right email service provider to help you with editing, delivering, analyzing, etc.

beehiiv is not just great to start; it’s also a great option for those who plan to scale. Select the pricing plan that works for you, or start for free and figure it out from there.

The beehiiv support team is always here to help you out!

Happy emailing!