September 15, 2016 – Read the updated article I have just published here.
I get lots of questions about email providers, so I thought it might be helpful to review some of the most popular. I’m going to begin with MailChimp. It’s what I use and what I encourage a lot of my clients to use. I will be digging into more providers to provide perspective on what’s out there. Each provider is slightly different than the other which makes them perfect for some businesses and not so perfect for others.
So let’s start with the really big question: How much does MailChimp cost?
MailChimp does have a free option.
By free, they mean permanently free. Of course, there are options that aren’t included in the free account, but for those getting started, the free option is especially useful if you want to get your feet wet and if you want to see how the tool works.
One of the big things that a free account doesn’t get is autoresponders. Autoresponders are a super important tool for those hoping to put their online marketing into an autopilot state, but for the person who is new to marketing online, they typically can survive without this feature for a little while.
Truly, while there are some other nifty tools you won’t get for free, they give a lot for free. They pretty much want you to grow because once you grow so they are giving you lots of features to use to get your list over 2,000.
The big limitation is that you can have up to 2,000 subscribers and/or send 12,000 emails per month.
MailChimp’s paid accounts begin at $10.00 a month.
When you’re ready to take advantage of all of MailChimp’s tools you will need to upgrade to a paid level. The good news is that if you have under 500 subscribers, you can have a fully-featured MailChimp account for $10.00 a month with unlimited emails per month.
You will continue to have unlimited emails until you reach 50,001 subscribers, at which point you’ll get a generous limit, like 612,000 emails. This limit gradually increases as the number of subscribers increases.
MailChimp can handle large business accounts.
For those looking to serve a subscriber list of 80,000 or more, MailChimp can still be your email service. The cost of such accounts begins at $425.00 a month.
MailChimp will let you pay-as-you go by purchasing credits.
This is good if you send very few emails. For instance, if you had 2,400 subscribers, you would pay $30.00 a month with a subscription and you could send unlimited emails. Over 2 years, you’d spend $720.
If you paid almost the same amount, $750, you would have 75,000 email credits that you could use any time. On a monthly basis, over two years, you could send each of your 2,400 subscribers one email a month for 31 months at $750 vs spending $930 on a monthly subscription at $30 a month over the same period of time.
Do you want to know more about a particular email provider? Leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to make them the subject of upcoming posts.
So if you have 100,000 subs it will pretty much cost you a fortune.
Hi there, Scott!
Honestly, if you have 100,000 subscribers, it’s going to cost you “pretty much a fortune” anywhere. But here’s the thing: If you have 100,000 subscribers and they are genuinely an interested audience, you are likely making money from them, so the cost of having that many subscribers will be offset by your business’ success. At MailChimp, their current pricing structure would put you at $475 per month for 100,000 subscribers.