Let’s set things straight from the very get-go here. This article is not a holy grail of techniques that you can use in digital marketing to become rich overnight. It’s much better actually. We’re going to present a series of steps which, if followed correctly, will take your company to greater and greater profits from email marketing year over year. It presents solutions which will scale with your business and help save up hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run.
During the series, we’re going to take you through some steps which will help your company save up to $50k+ yearly in email marketing expenses. All labor-related costs will be calculated at a very inexpensive hourly rate of $20/h, which most companies don’t even dream of achieving.
Let’s start with the method which will bring you the most amount of time saving and satisfaction. We’re going to break costs down for you so you can fully understand how much money you can save. If you’re part of a larger company then you are probably going through loads of processes before building a new campaign.
1. Design.
Each new template needs a really good design in order to properly engage your clients and get healthy click-through rates. 8 hours/template at least. Of course, we’re counting things like going back to design for 599 times to ruin their lives by asking them to move the same element around in 10 different places. You will eventually spend fewer hours when using the same structure over a long period of time, but probably a lot more at the beginning.
2. Development.
Next up there’s the very tedious loop of coding the email, testing and bug fixing. At least 6 hours here as well…if your developer knows what he’s doing. This is also very likely going to take much longer at first and then less when you start using the same structure over several campaigns.
3. Content.
It probably takes you and your team at least 4 hours to come up with good content and a good strategy of getting as much engagement from the clients possible.
Now your email is finally built, and at this very stage, before even thinking of sending the email out yet, we’ve gathered costs of over $360 for the email campaign creation. Let’s multiply that by say 30 (an average of 2,5 campaigns every month). This will quickly escalate to over $10.800 per year, and remember – you didn’t even start sending the campaigns yet.
Now let’s look at the process again, bring it in the 21st century, and see what we can do to lower costs dramatically. Thankfully, there are loads of options for you to basically skip the first two steps, which not only add to your total costs but are extremely tedious and annoying to go through, for both you and your teams.
Instead of going through all of that, have your design team spend less than 4 hours on a drag and drop email template builder. The result will leave you with an exported HTML file that’s already been tested and optimized for the perfect end user experience. Not only will you be able to get to the end result much faster, but you’re also very likely to have much better open rates for your campaign since these designs have already been optimized to deliver results.
We started from a $10.800 total yearly cost, and just like that we were able to save $160 per campaign and taking into account a $22 expense for one of the builder templates, your savings amount to a sweet $4.778 over the year, making your work much easier in the process too.In part two of our series, we’re going to analyze how you can save even more money by being smart about the way you run your campaigns and build and curate your list. In the meantime check out this post where we analyzed how GDPR consent affected US businesses.