Price for sending e-mail

e-mail marketing, newsletter, cost per million

[DirigoDev]

I manage a number of large clients who send 2,000,000 to 10,000,000 emails per month from dedicated servers. We built the sending, opt-out, feedback loop, bounce... toolset years ago and it works well. These are all high quality senders (low JMR) with high value newsletters... This is not 'SPAM.'

I have a new client who needs me to send 2 million newsletters twice and I have no idea what to charge. I called one of the big senders who quoted me $8,200/month for 2M e-mails. This seems high to me. I am not in the business of sending e-mail. It just happens to be something we do for our large clients.

It will probably take us about 4 hours to setup the templates and anothher 2-3 hours to monitor the SMTP systems... The server cost is nothing since we have capacity.

Does the Webmaster World community have any thoughts on what to charge?

[incrediBILL]

It will probably take us about 4 hours to setup the templates and anothher 2-3 hours to monitor the SMTP systems... The server cost is nothing since we have capacity.

Server cost is never nothing, you're using a portion of the bandwidth and CPU

Sounds like you have costs, 8-10 hours labor, how many people involved?

First, I would bill the labor out on a per hourly basis and then add the email billed on a per thousand emails sent volume.

Based on all that, my rate would probably be about half of what the big sender quoted.

The real risk here is that the email database isn't clean and you get blocked on Yahoo, Comcast, AOL, etc. which is a real pain to get unblocked.