Cost of email marketing compared to traditional mail

We explained earlier several advantages of email marketing, including the cost. This article provides a cost comparison between email marketing and traditional mail.

In my role as marketing manager for the past 7 years, I have run many email marketing and traditional marketing campaigns. Here is a rough comparison of the average costs involved in each channel for sending a single-page flyer/newsletter to 10,000 recipients:

Cost of direct marketing to 10,000 recipients

Item	Traditional Mail	Email Marketing (Own mailing list)	Email Marketing (3rd party mailing list)
Content and Artwork	$ 1,000	$ 100	$ 100
Printing and Addressing	$ 2,500	0	0
Mailing	$ 2,500	0	$ 2,500
Total cost to reach 10,000 recipients	$ 6,000	$ 100	$ 2,600
Cost per recipient	$ 0.6	$ 0.01	$ 0.26

Cost is not the only factor involved. You should also consider the time it takes process a campaign. Here's a rough comparison of the average time for each channel (again for 10,000 recipients). 

Time required for direct marketing to 10,000 recipients

Item	Traditional Mail	Email Marketing (Own mailing list)	Email Marketing (3rd party mailing list)
Content and Artwork	5 days	4 hours	1 day
Printing and Addressing	2 days	0	0
Mailing	2 days	0	1 day
Total time to reach 10,000 recipients	9 days	4 hours	2 days

You can see the difference is extremely large.Now imagine how much longer it takes if you want to test your campaign on a small portion of your mailing list before sending to all!

Advantages of Email Marketing

Earlier we explained where email marketing  can be used. This article discusses why email marketing is superior compared other marketing channels.


Email marketing has six main advantages over other channels:

1. Email marketing is more cost effective
2. Email marketing is easy to setup
3. You get immediate result with email marketing
4. It is easy to test an email campaign
5. Email marketing is transparent and easy to analyse
6. Email marketing is cheaper than other channels

1. Email marketing is more cost effective

Lord Leverhulme, the father of modern-day marketing, has a famous comment:“I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half”.

Fortunately, with email marketing that is not the case anymore. Email marketing is the most targeted way of reaching your potential customers.

Email campaigns use databases which store personal information about the profile of every single recipient. You can also add additional information about each individual’s profile and interests once you start sending them emails. It is this information that makes email campaigns highly targeted.

2. Email marketing is easy to setup

You can simply setup an email campaign on your own. Once you install an email marketing software and upload your mailing list, all you need to do is to draft the email and send it.

3. You get immediate result with email marketing

Email marketing immediately draws customers to your website. This is mainly because of the links you can embed in your email, which makes it easy for people to simply click and land on your website. They don’t need to remember your URL, or even your name.

4. It is easy to test an email campaign

You can try different email texts and send them to small portions of your database to test which one works better. This way you can gradually optimize your email campaign before sending it to your entire audience.

5. Email marketing is transparent and easy to analyse

You can track every step of the way and find conversion bottlenecks. Most email marketing software, now offer many useful stats about how many people opened the email, how many clicked on the links, and what they did after landing on your website.

6. Email marketing is cheaper than other channels

Email marketing is extremely cheap in comparison with other channels. To start an email campaign you need a text, which you can draft yourself, an email marketing software, and a mailing list.

Most business have a database of people who have visited their website, purchase something, downloaded a brochure or registered for updates.

If you don’t have your own database, you would be paying anything between $50 to $500 for every 1,000 recipients on a high quality mailing list. Considering how targeted an email campaign can get, this is incredibly cheap.

You should also consider that if you design a successful email marketing campaign, you would have a good number of these people register on your own database after you pay for the campaign. So you don’t need to pay again to target those people.

Email marketing software, tend to start at few hundred dollars and get more expensive as they become more advanced.

See also: Cost of email marketing compared to traditional mail