Price Hikes 2012 – e-Newsletters
This is the traditional time of year for price hikes and unfortunately, when it comes to e-Newsletters, 2012 must be no different from previous years
Each year we only increase prices in a single area of our services, so one year it might be Hosting, the next it might be Website Maintenance, the next PPC services (Google Adwords) and so on.
This year I have chosen e-Newsletters… The theory is excellent, a regular, effective and simple way for you to keep your customers up to date with your latest news, special offers and promotions. All customers should enjoy hearing from you and take note of what you have to say.
The truth is not rosy, most newsletters are considered Spam, customers don’t want to hear from you, but would rather find you when they need you and for me, the biggest issue of all is the work involved to get that newsletter out on time and in a professional manner.
The result is that prices will now be:
- £120 per email for the first 2000 names.
- £20 per ‘000 names thereafter.
For big senders, this will actually better value as the old flat rate of £80 per ‘000 names are gone.
Moving on, I thought I’d give a brief defence against these prices, first the key to e-Newsletters is:
- Regular – the success rate is dramatic if the newsletter is sent at specific intervals, your customers will respond far better if they know when it is coming
- Brief – a Newsletter needs one core message and perhaps two sideline messages… the aim is not to give them news, but to make them go to the websites and ‘do’ something like buying product
- Personal – You need to know who you’re sending to and address them personally. The chances of them responding will increase dramatically
All these issues have to be taken into account… Now consider the maths a little bit – you need to come up with the theme or message for the mailer it might take 15 minutes, but if you write the content you might spend an hour or two on it, costs money!
I then have to create the email in some ‘programme’ that we will have signed up, www.mailchimp.com, www.madmimi.com are my current favourites… having spent 1 or 2 hours creating the newsletter, we have to go through the database – adding all the new names, maybe another hour… then we have to fully test it and make sure it looks good on iPhones, Macs, PC’s and Gmail before we can schedule the best time to send it.
You’re looking at a realistic time frame of between 5 and 6 hours of work (yours or mine) to get this ready… Now, look at the response rates… The industry average is around a 20% open rate. If your list is 3000 names that are 600 reading it, and if the industry average is 10% clicks then you’re looking at 60 people actually visiting your website… and if you use your website conversion rate of say 5% of the original 3000 people you aimed the newsletter at – you’re looking at 3 conversions.
The numbers just do not add up… often whichever way you look at it.
Our View on e-Newsletters
Newsletter have their place and we’re happy to send them, but proper evaluation of their work involved verses the result achieved is hugely important… we need to raise our prices for the work that goes into Newsletters – clients need to evaluate their worth – otherwise we’re just subsiding your losses.
Thank you and comments welcome.