I recommend using an autoresponder to build an email list. A good autoresponder costs between $15 and $100 to host a few emails.
Cost management is a key consideration for new online businesses. If you’re in the early stages and need to be mindful of your budget, this post provides practical guidance on effectively reducing your email marketing expenses.
Avoid free email marketing services
Unless you are completely broke, avoid free email marketing services. You see, those companies have to pay hosting and other bills.
They will offer you free services, but use your emails to promote them to your subscribers, making you lose money. Please avoid the free services if you can afford at least $15 monthly.
You want your subscribers to read and listen to your messages alone. Imagine you have an email list on how to become fit, and the autoresponder you use tries to sell them email marketing services. Your subscribers will be confused.
How to reduce email marketing expenses
Here are five things you can do to reduce email marketing expenses.
Select a premium email marketing service
Email services in the market will offer you a one-time fee or a small monthly fee for unlimited emails. This might sound like a good deal, but it will cost you more in the long run.
For a company to offer such a deal, it needs to cut costs somewhere. This could be because its delivery is bad (emails do not go to your leads’ inboxes), it uses cheap servers, hence slow services, or it has a bad customer experience.
You need to get a premium email service at a good cost. My recommendation would be Convertkit.
This is, for me, the best autoresponder for content creators. They have a limited free plan, but their paid plan starts at $15 for up to 300 subscribers.
Get high-quality subscribers
Another easy way to reduce email marketing expenses is to get high-quality subscribers. You will find people out there promising to provide you 1000 subscribers for $10 or free. Avoid those kinds of subscribers.
The best way to attract subscribers is to provide high-quality content; people who resonate with your content will join your newsletter or email list.
Remember, the autoresponder cost depends on the amount of subscribers you have.
It is better to have 300 subscribers interested in what you want to say than 100,000 random subscribers who do not even know why they are there.
Offer something great in exchange for their email
In my personal experience, people tend to provide their main email if they think that what they are getting from you is high value.
If you create something that solves one of their main problems and offer it for free, you will increase your chance of getting high-quality subscribers, reducing your email marketing expenses.
Send the download link to their email
When I started, I sent people the download link immediately after they opted in. The problem is that most people provided bogus emails to learn about the lead magnet.
The solution is to send them to a thank you page after they opt-in and tell them to check their email. This helped me get real emails and improved my email KPIs.
Another way to do this is to ask them to confirm their email. This is called double opt-in. I do not do this, but it will improve the quality of your emails and, hence, reduce your email marketing expenses.
Pick an email marketing service that does not count double emails
If you are running two newsletters using the same service and one person subscribes to both of them using the same email, some autoresponders, like Aweber, will count that as two separate people, while others, like Convertkit, will count that as one person ( since it is the same email).
Remember, you pay depending on how many people you have on your list. This is one of the reasons I picked Covertkit for email marketing.
Remove unresponsive emails
It does not matter how good are your emails or lead magnets, and some people will not open your emails, do not get discouraged by this. It is part of the game.
In this situation, I log into my Convertkit account every 90 days, figure out who has not opened a single email from me in the last 90 days, and delete them.
Remember we pay for the number of subscribers we have, if they can not even open our emails, they probably are not fit for what we want to do and it is better to part ways, if they want to subscribe again they can do that.
Key Takeaways: How to reduce email marketing expenses
Select a premium email marketing service.
Get high-quality subscribers.
Offer something great in exchange for their email.
Send the download link to their email.
Pick an email marketing service that does not count double emails.
Remove unresponsive emails.