If you are running a business, It is critical for your success to look into all your expenses and find ways to reduce them every once in a while.

In my case, I look into all my expenses every 6 months and do a cleaning of  the non-essential expenses. That also includes finding smarter ways to reduce expenses for existing services that we can’t say no to.

Let me start this post with a small question…

How much do you spend on your email marketing?

Well, if you ask me, I spend $369/month on email marketing services I use. I personally used Mad Mimi for my email marketing and I subscribed with them all throughout 2022 and 2022

Receipt of the payments made in Feb’14. At that time, I was on their 75,000 subscribers plan.

My Payment Receipt – February 2022
However, I took control of my email marketing expenses in 2022. This year I’m going to save nearly $3660 in yearly email marketing expenses.

My Background & How I Reduced my Expenses

First, A little bit of my background :

I run two separate internet businesses :

InkThemes & FormGet.

  1. At InkThemes, we sell WordPress Themes & Plugins and we have about 45,000 email subscribers.
  2. FormGet is an online form building tool and we have about 35,000 email subscribers.

So, in total we have a combined subscribers base of 80,000 subscribers.

While choosing the email service I looked around for several options like Aweber, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor etc. At last I settled for Madmimi email marketing service.

I chose MadMimi primarily because of 3 reasons :

  1. Simple user interface for creating and sending email campaigns
  2. Analytics was nice and I can track all the stats easily
  3. Their service was little affordable compared to other email marketing services like MailChimp & Campaign Monitor.

Madmimi charged $279/month for sending emails to 75,000 subscribers.

Madmimi Pricing
Madmimi Pricing

MailChimp charges about $375/month and above for the exact same volume of 75,000 subscribers.

2015-11-14_14h07_32

Although, I found the little affordable alternative as Madmimi, I still wanted to reduce my costs for sending emails.

My subscribers were growing fast and so do my costs and I really wanted to control my expenses.

I realized due to increasing cost concerns, I was not focusing on growing my leads. I was afraid that if I reach above 100,000 subscribers than I would have to pay even more.

This kind of thinking was indeed restricting my growth.

My Research

In the mid 2022, I decided to take hold of my email marketing costs. I started researching different ways to deliver emails campaigns.

During my research, I found Amazon SES as the most promising way to deliver emails. Reason, their inbox delivery was high and I had to pay just $1 per 10,000 emails.

I used to send nearly 6-8 campaigns every month to all my subscribers.

Based on the cost of $1 per 10,000 emails:

Sending a total of “8 campaigns” a month to my “80,000 subscribers” in both businesses combined:

I just had to pay $64 …

And I was paying a huge $369 to Madmimi at that point in time.

If I had used MailChimp or Aweber, I would even have to pay more than that.

I made a decision that I would be sending all my email campaigns using Amazon SES going further.

But there was a little problem with Amazon SES:

Amazon SES simply offered a server to send emails via their SMTP email service …

  1. It didn’t offered the feature for creating email templates like what I had in MadMimi.
  2. They didn’t have the mechanism to track email opens, clicks etc.
  3. They didn’t have the list management system.
  4. Lastly, Didn’t offered any web forms that I could integrate on my website to capture and store leads.

I was getting this all at MadMimi.

My Ultimate Decision

I was pretty desperate to reduce my email marketing costs.

So, I decided to take the matter in my own hands and decided to build MailGet – Email Service Provider.

MailGet was build keeping in mind all the problems that I mentioned above with Amazon SES.

I summoned my team at FormGet, shared the idea and asked them whether they could build an email marketing software which has everything that could make email creation and delivery easy.

Plus it should connect with Amazon SES to send emails to enable best inbox deliverability and should be able to track opens, clicks, unsubscribes etc.

Sitting together, We outlined things that we needed in the first phase:

  1. Easy Email Template Builder
  2. List Management (Including Email Importing System)
  3. Web forms embedding to capture new leads from website
  4. Analytics module (Track of opens, clicks and unsubscribes.)
  5. Connect with Amazon SES and any other popular SMTP service.

It took nearly 6 months for a team of 4 amazing members to build MailGet, along with all the features, that I wanted to have in an email marketing software which I can use myself.

One of the biggest challenges during building the software didn’t came from the coding front but rather how to manage our servers during peak emailing hours.

We learned a lot on Linux server management about how to manage out CPU resources and database at the time of heavy loads.

MailGet Launched

mailget

We learned a lot from the whole MailGet experience and after lots of extensive testing, we launched MailGet in the end of Dec’ 14.

I sent an introduction email to all my subscribers for MailGet using the very same software that we had built. To my amazement more than 5 people bought the package right away.

This validated the idea right there.

People were looking for a way to reduce their own email marketing costs.

Slowly, MailGet started gaining traction and more people started using it. We realized everyone who started using MailGet starts to love it entirely.

I have already started reducing my average monthly bills to $64. Which comes out to yearly savings of $3660.

Sorry MadMimi, I have unsubscribed from your monthly $369 plan. I still love you guys, but seriously I have better option. 🙂

In Your Case

Not every business want to engage their resources in creating an email marketing solution of its own.

However, since I have felt the huge pain of unnecessary expenses myself, I’ve tried to keep the pricing of MailGet as low as possible.

It has the highest plan of merely $79 for sending emails to 100,000 subscribers and what more you need to pay is only the Amazon SES charges ($1 per 10,000 emails).

What I personally feel is that by switching from your existing email marketing service to MailGet you will have all the necessary features you require plus a flexibility and affordability of prices.

Check MailGet Here

How are you controlling your expenses ?

Let me know, your thoughts in comments. How are you controlling your expenses … Would you be taking some steps to reduce your overall business costs this year? Do share your thoughts and ideas by which you would be reducing your costs this year.