How to get great Email Marketing on a Budget

In this blog post I am going to give you tips on how to get the most out of your email marketing when you are either a startup business or just working on a very tight budget. Even though I mention this below, you have to look at the email marketing platform you are using first, as some bill you per subscriber in your account and some for the amount of emails you send per month.

By taking all of the below tips into account you can re-examine your current email marketing strategy with the tools that you are using. I hope this blog helps you make the most out of your email marketing, working in a start up business or even a large company you need to be aware of the below tips to make sure you are not wasting any money when using email marketing to promote your business.

Pay as you Go

Look at Pay as You Go Credit options, these have no contract to adhere to, and you only use credits when you send emails or use an autoresponder. You can purchase credits at small volumes, like 500 at a time and only top up when you need to.

For example Mailchimp have a pay as you go option for you to purchase credits as and when you need to in your account without even having to make a phonecall to get an invoice made! This is a good idea if you want to send less frequently but still want your account to have the full features of the email marketing platform.

Evaluate your sending frequency

A good idea is to look at how many subscribers you have on your list and reviewing how many emails you send per month. Some email service providers bill you for how many subscribers you have in your account and others charge you on how many email’s that you send. So look ahead and evaluate your email marketing strategy, it might be an idea to change email provider or the plan you are currently on.

It may actually be an idea to plan your email campaigns ahead too – if you can send 2,000 emails a month make the most of this because these more likely won’t carry over into the next month!

Clean your list

Stop paying for inactive subscribers – consider removing the subscribers who have not opened emails in 3-6 months or more. Send an email prior to removal explaining how they can stay active if they’d like to or how they can re-subscribe to your emails. By doing this you will lower your subscriber base but you will then be only emailing subscribers who are active and opening and clicking your emails, this in turn should improve your open rate.

Also, make sure bounces are removed automatically by the email system you are using. These bounces are either temporary (soft bounces) or permanent failures (hard bounces) to deliver the email. Hard bounces are basically saying the email address no longer exsits, and if it doesn’t then you should remove it from your list. Most email providers remove these automatically after 1 hard bounce or 3 soft bounces, but check first as some may not and you don’t want to be paying for dead email addresses!

Look and compare ESP features

Before going any further you should shop around different email providers. Not just for pricing purposes but also to see what features come with different types of accounts too, as you don’t want to be paying for features that you do not even need.

Some email marketing providers have options for basic free accounts too, MailChimp for example offers their free account with basic features to new businesses with less than 2,000 subscribers. This is a great idea for any new start-up business until you get your feet on the ground and build your subscriber base.

Email Vendor Selection is great website that can help you with comparing email marketing companies if you are stuck.

Buy a responsive Template

Having a bespoke template designed can cost up to £400 when switching to a new email marketing vendor. It might be a good idea just to look first at the range of free editable templates you get with your account. You can then edit this template adding your logo and changing the basic colours then save this in your account as your own template ready to use over and over again.

You could instead use pre built template from a trusted website like Themeforest, there are quite a few on here ready for use with Campaign Monitor or MailChimp.

Or you could use a freelancer website like People Per Hour orto get a good price on having a template designed on your requirements for use in your chosen email marketing system. Fiverr is also a good site to buy pre built email templates if you are on a tight budget and have basic HTML knowledge to edit the prebuilt template to change a few elements yourself.

We even blogged at the end of last year about free email marketing templates, which can be found here – 241 Free Email Marketing Templates

Referral Schemes

MailChimp has a referral scheme, you can earn commission credits for sign ups from your footer image link, I have added this to my newsletter, even though as a Pay as You Go customer I have effectively paid to remove this. I can now earn credits back for any new referral sign ups that incur via using my link.

Thanks for reading this blog post, I hope this has helped you – and if you have any tips of your own please leave a comment to share with other readers 🙂