If you send two promotional emails per week to your subscribers, your email marketing strategy could cost you at least $100,000 per year.
That’s a big number, but it might be even higher if email is a bigger part of your marketing strategy. If your company has two customer segments— say, male and female customers— you probably need to double that number, because you’re tailoring your content for each audience.
If you segment your customers even further, you’re probably creating closer to 20 emails each month. Maybe you’re an apparel company that tailors content by gender as well as region, or a business with different loyalty tiers. That would put your costs over $250,000 per year.
We’re not even counting the automated transactional emails and campaigns that you need to refresh every year or so. Or the special newsletters you create and send to key stakeholders, major donors or other VIPs. Once you factor those in, you might be spending half a million dollars per year in email marketing alone.
Where do those costs come from?
We know what you’re thinking: there’s no way my email marketing costs that much! A quick look at your company credit card statement confirms that your email service provider charges you a thousand dollars per month. Maybe more, if you’ve got a hefty contact list. Not bad at all!
But that’s just one tiny fraction of the total cost. Let’s break it down:
First, your designer makes a new template for your latest promotional campaign. Typically, a single template requires 12 hours of design time, and two hours of HTML coding, for a total cost of $1600 per template. (We’re using industry-standard rates to calculate your costs, based on insights from our customers).
From there, your marketing team can use those templates to create individual emails. Your designers and copywriters create on-brand assets and messaging, to ensure emails are engaging and visually appealing. That adds another $500 per email.
If you’re emailing customers in different languages, every email needs to be translated. That localization will cost $20 per additional language. So if you’re translating an email into 50 different languages, that’s an additional cost of $1000 per template. It adds up fast!
Lastly, you need to add your customer data for personalization. This extra step is valuable: 91 percent of customers prefer to shop with brands that send personalized offers and recommendations. But if your email marketer needs to manually import that loyalty and customer data, it adds another $100 to the total cost.
Now you’re almost ready to send — but first you have to test your emails, making sure they’re compatible across devices and locales. Then you need to circulate the email for feedback and approval, incorporate the changes, and troubleshoot any last issues with the HTML code. We’re estimating this process takes three hours of employee time, but let’s be honest: sometimes it takes way longer to chase down approvals.
Finally, your email is out the door! Whew — when you break it down, it’s a lot of work. No wonder it takes about 27 hours of work to produce a single email! And since your customers want to hear from you at least once a week, your team is likely spending over 100 hours creating and sending emails each month.
Want to see for yourself? Try out our Dyspatch ROI Calculator to find out how much you’re spending on email.
How to save time and money on email marketing
We’re not going to tell you email isn’t worth the effort. In fact, it’s one of the most effective marketing tools you have, generating $42 in revenue for every $1 you spend. And the steps above are essential to crafting effective emails.
After all, you don’t want to skip device testing and find out too late that your email doesn’t look good on Android phones. Or rush through localization and send your US customers a promotional offer in Canadian currency.
Your customers expect personalized, responsive, well-designed emails. And there’s no point saving time on email marketing if your customer doesn’t bother to read what you send because it looks sloppy or unprofessional.
But you can retain the value of email marketing while cutting way down on those hidden costs. Rather than skipping steps or rushing through reviews, you need a tool with built-in design, engineering and testing capabilities to streamline your email creation process.
Dyspatch can cut your email marketing costs by up to 90%
Bring your costs way down with Dyspatch, an email builder that streamlines your email creation process, without cutting corners or compromising on quality. It makes email marketing faster, cheaper, and easier for your whole team.
Our modular design system lets you build each email from pre-built content blocks for maximum ease and efficiency to save design time. Marketing teams can work right in the email to adjust and update copy, without worrying that adding an extra line of text will mess up the design.
Dyspatch is code-free, so you can save valuable time that would be spent adjusting HTML templates or troubleshooting individual lines of code. You can even add interactive content like videos and integrated forms to boost engagement by up to 300%.
Built-in usability testing means you never need to spend time checking localization and device compatibility. And Dyspatch integrates with your existing CMS, so you can send highly personalized emails without having to manually import data every time.
When you’re ready to review, approval workflows and annotated comments let you gather and incorporate feedback all in one place. No more circulating multiple versions of the same email and collating each response, just a clear and coordinated process.
Ready to shave 90% off your email marketing budget? Sign up for a free demo of the Dyspatch email builder today to find out how easy and efficient email marketing can be!
