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.
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.
- At InkThemes, we sell WordPress Themes & Plugins and we have about 45,000 email subscribers.
- 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 :
- Simple user interface for creating and sending email campaigns
- Analytics was nice and I can track all the stats easily
- 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.
MailChimp charges about $375/month and above for the exact same volume of 75,000 subscribers.
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 …
- It didn’t offered the feature for creating email templates like what I had in MadMimi.
- They didn’t have the mechanism to track email opens, clicks etc.
- They didn’t have the list management system.
- 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:
- Easy Email Template Builder
- List Management (Including Email Importing System)
- Web forms embedding to capture new leads from website
- Analytics module (Track of opens, clicks and unsubscribes.)
- 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
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.
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.
20 Replies to “How I reduced my monthly Email Marketing expenses from $369 to just $64”
Worth saving you did Neeraj by launching MailGet…
A smart move, I would say..
PS- The article you crafted has a unique USP for MailGet too…
Loved reading it.. 🙂
Deep
Thanks Deep. Glad you found it useful.
Regards
Neeraj
What about autoresponders? I need for my subscribers to sign up to receive my audiobook. Does your system allow me to upload the file to automatically send out? I am very new to email campaigns, can you help me? I want to sign up but need guidance. I use the free mailchimp because I don’t have a lot of emails. Can you suggest how I can increase this? I must be doing something wrong.
UPDATE (17/Jan/15) – Autoresponder and Automated Drip Emailing is launched
Hello Shonna,
We are launching autoresponder on 17th Jan and email drips in MailGet will be our next priority after that. Once its launched you can create an email that will be sent out as soon as someone subscribes to your email list.
The file that you want to send can be simply uploaded somewhere on your website hosting and can be linked in your email itself.
Increasing email leads can be done via Lead capture popups where you offer some free guide or some tips and tricks to your users in return of becoming your subscribers.
In the case of InkThemes, most of the subscribers that we added came through our blog at InkThemes. An active blog definitely adds lots of leads to your system. So, definitely try that out and start growing your leads.
Good case study, Neeraj Agarwal.
Liked it. Good blog post. Looking for more posts from you. I tried mailget and I like it and found better than constant contact
Thanks Mohit.
It is a very very good article. Worth sharing with others- just put a share button/plugin for the others to benefit from this case study.
Honory Jerome
Hohajaa company
East Africa
Hello Honory,
Glad you liked the case study. Will put the share button soon.
Regards,
Neeraj
Neeraj,
Exactly, it was our problem too. Thank you for your great product. We have reduced our monthly expense by 200% using mailget. I can’t Thank you enough for that.
Nemesh Singh | CEO
Appointy.com
Hi Nemesh,
Glad you loved MailGet and were able to reduce your costs.
Let us know, if you need any help.
Warm Regards,
Neeraj
Hi Neeraj,
Thank you for the insight on emailing services and saving money. We found it very enlightening to say the least. We have been using your products for years now and are big fans. We especially like the way most of your themes are focused on growing business…not just being a brochure. In this case, we are interested in trying out your new email program soon and have asked some presale questions that Deep has been fantastic at answering. Thanks again for creating and sharing another such a great product. Have a great day, mark;-)
Hi Mark,
Thanks a lot for the amazing feedback. You are one of our earliest and the most amazing customer.
Warm Regards,
Neeraj Agarwal
The pricing is great! Do you have any plans to add an autoresponder?
Hello Troy,
We recently launched Autoresponders in MailGet. We are also adding automated drip emails in coming weeks.
You can try out MailGet at https://www.formget.com/mailget-app/
Let me know, if you still have any questions. Would be happy to answer them for you.
Thanks
Neeraj Agarwal
That is really awesome!
I was wondering if GetMail and your MailGet is the same thing.
Please forgive me to be so dense, but I am new to internet and often things are confusing.
The only thing I hesitate about is having 2 monthly bills. I hate monthly bills because I am new to business and rather NOT focus on my monthly bills, pay up front for a year and let it rip. If something doesn’t work I get a refund.
I also prefer also to make a trial run. I am doing this internet business since one year and I found that there is more things offered that do NOT work than things that work out well. Your theme I am using is most terrific and as soon as I generate enough income I will do the pro version, probably you have to wait another month. You are one heck of a good expert!
Glad you loved our WordPress Themes.
I am not sure about GetMail. Haven’t heard of that. MailGet is our email marketing service that runs on Amazon SES.
If you want to try MailGet demo.
You can try it via link below.
https://accounts.pabbly.com/login/?s=mailget
Thanks
Neeraj Agarwal
1. Is your conversion rate increased.
2. How external tracking is done
3. Tracking customer behavior
4. Checking performance
5. Customer workflows and life cycle
6. Insights.
Hi Rahul,
1. Yes, substantially. I use SMTP routing too, that is to send emails through multiple SMTP services to achieve best inbox deliverability. I play around by connecting and sending through different services to achieve best inboxing.
2. Inbuilt tracking is built-in within MailGet. So, I can review all the stats like Opens, Clicks, Geo location and every other details like in any other email marketing service.
3. What do you mean by tracking customer behavior? I can easily track the clicks and referred customer to any link easily.
4, 5 and 6. Pretty much all the analytics data that can help in analyzing the customer behavior can be tracked with MailGet. You can also add UTM codes to the links in your emails to make sure the data is moved to Google Analytics or any other analytics tool easily for further tracking.
To control costs is pivotal to any business concern : For me ,the email service provider i use is a bit costly :getresponse : but am looking for a way to opt out because it can only get more expensive . Do you support internet businesses in Nigeria with MailGet? and would i still get all the features of analytics , landing pages , webforms and other features
Hi Dr Maduako,
Yes, you can easily use all the features of MailGet once you make a purchase. We offer PayPal and Stripe for making payments.
Let me know, if you still have any concern related to the service.
Would happy to help.
Regards,
Neeraj