Also, I don’t like the idea of “wastage”. Although the fee is not high, if I take a few months off I wouldn’t want to keep paying the higher fee. Some services I use (like gotowebinar) allows you to “turn off” the fee when not used. That’s fine.

So my personal preference is to avoid services with high recurring costs. I would rather pay a high one-time fee upfront than to have to worry or manage recurring costs. Alternatively, I don’t mind paying a percentage of turnover (e.g. Paypal or Clickbank) but not a fixed recurring fee.

The obvious advantages of email marketing to me are the one-time customer acquisition cost and the ability to continually follow up with your prospects,leads,customers.

Having said that, email marketing has its own rules for building the customer relationship and if you don’t have the fundamentals in place, the best analytics will not help you.

Hi Rob,
At a list size of 100,000, I’d probably be running my own mail server with a dedicated mail admin.

Even if you’re using a lowball figure of $0.50 revenue per user per month, that’s a $50,000 list there.

One of the arguements (or points) made by Tom Kulzer is that their analytics exceeds what other stats/analytics service providers offer, yet the prices are very competitive.

I know the going rates for autoresponder and mailing list services but can’t comment on the prices for analytics such as this. If it really IS comparable and the business is large enough than it certainly makes sense to invest the extra X dollars per month for the stats data in order to see 2X, 3X or more growth from better targeted campaigns.

For now, I’m happy to know that the price increase is only if current clients wish to upgrade.