Annual email marketing budget: What does the investment hold in store?

What does the investment hold in store?

It doesn’t matter if you’re a big enterprise or a small business: Nurturing your customer relations is a definite must! There’s no better way of getting to your customers than newsletter marketing. It’s no surprise that the expenses for email marketing in the US are expected to increase to $2.9 billion (source: Forrester Research). In comparison: In 2014 it was only $2.1 billion.

So, how about you? What will you spend your budget on this year? Do you already have a substantial number of contacts in your database who are waiting to be awakened from their deep sleep? Stop waiting and consider a budget for newsletter marketing in your marketing plan for 2018!

We recommend asking yourself the following questions to set your goals before planning your annual email marketing budget:

• Achieve revenue targets
  • How many new customers do I want to win? – 100? 1,000? 10,000?
  • Do I want to increase my revenue per customer to 50, 500 or 5,000 dollars?
  • How can I keep my existing customers loyal?
• Actively foster customer relations
  • How do I get to know my customers better to send them offers and content they are interested in?
  • How do I sort my list of recipients (e.g. by purchases, age, gender, interests…)?
  • How can I use email automation to send personal newsletters without any great effort?
• Use hidden possibilities
  • How do I turn “sleeping” customers into active ones? The same applies to members, clients, …
  • Can I create a clever newsletter that makes interested customers buy the items they have placed in their shopping carts?

Has this given you food for thought? Great! Only when you realize and know your goals can you align your 2018 budget plan to them. But what if this leaves you with more questions than answers? We have good news for you – in shape of this article series! Just read through and be in the know: we have collected all the important stuff for you to assess the investments that make sense for your business. We also look closely at recent developments in email marketing and explain what linking your newsletters to different social media channels like Facebook can do for you. This input helps you check which measures are useful for your business, so you can tap the full potential of your newsletters.

Why it’s worth investing in email marketing and constantly refining it

Email marketing holds advantages for every business – no matter what the size or industry, online or stationary:

• The result per spent dollar (ROI or Return-On-Invest) is measurable and significantly better than other common marketing measures
• The implementation is easy and flexible
• You can run occasion-related (e.g. “Black Friday”, company anniversary, trade fairs) or behavior-related campaigns (e.g. discount campaign after a certain number of purchases) at strategically important points in time within your customer’s decision-making process (Customer Journey)
• Successfully address your customer through targeted segmentation (e.g. age or interests).

Email achieves the best results!

Let’s assume you run an online shop or a medium-size enterprise (such as a travel agency or car dealer) and regularly send product catalogs. In this case, the following calculation is realistic:

• Catalog delivery
  • Delivery: Once a yearHigh
  • High gloss, 10,000 recipients
  • Costs: 1.50€ /copy plus 0.50€ delivery charges per copy. Total: 20,000.00€

What you don’t know is how your customers have reacted to the content of your catalog – you can’t calculate KPIs or ROI. Hand on heart – you’re completely groping in the dark.

In comparison: 

• Electronic newsletter
  • Also 10,000 recipients, created and sent with a monthly plan at CleverReach
  • Costs: 100 € per month
  • Your benefit: send as many catalogs per month as you like!

This price plan also offers an unlimited number of emails per month, so you can contact your customers as often as you need to. This means: you can always follow up without any extra costs! As you can see: email is 200% cheaper and much more effective than sending catalogues – as well as other marketing measures:

Compared to various email marketing measures, enterprises can achieve significantly better results per invested dollar (ROI), e.g. by using intelligent automation. Here’s an overview of three customer examples that give you an idea which steps suit your enterprise best (and what they will cost you).

Four budget scenarios and goals for small, medium-size and big businesses

The total number of your recipients as well as the number of emails you want to send is crucial for choosing the ideal price plan and calculating your budget. This means it’s good to know if your enterprise will be growing in the future, you will win lots of new customers, you want to send more newsletters etc.

50% of all customers want to be informed about new products – newsletter trends in 2018

Central element of email marketing – no matter if you’re a medium-size or big business – is and will remain nurturing your existing customer relations and winning new customers. Customers value advertising emails to get informed about new products: 50% state this as the main reason for having subscribed to a newsletter in a survey from 2017 (the second reason with 46% was “to get special offers or discounts”, followed by “I regularly buy from this brand” with 38%, source: Statista).

A new trend is the customer’s wish to receive exclusive content. The tendency is going towards automation and the linking of different systems. The detailed evaluation of customer data, with the goal to create individually perfect content for each customer is already a competitive advantage. This means: your newsletters should be faster, more accurate and more useful than those of your competitors. How you’ll achieve this is part of one of our next articles in this series about budget plans for email marketing in 2018. We’ll provide you with a questionnaire to specifically calculate and assess your required time as well as the financial and personnel effort for your newsletters in 2018.

Stay tuned!