The True Value of Free Email

We released our next generation free Email on all event dashboards earlier this year, with an additional option for organizations to set up an additional email account that reaches across all their events. Like all our products, email is free to use.

What Does Email Usually Cost?

Great question. While we aren’t experts on other company’s pricing setups (and they change regularly), we did take at pricing as of today for a few well-known email providers (such Mailchimp, Mailjet, Sendinblue, Constant Contact, and more) to get an idea how much our customers are really spending on email services. There are a few categories of email services:

Free (but Limited) Email

Most (not all) of the email services out there offer a “Free” tier. Some even brag that they don’t collect a credit card for their free tier at all. But every “free” service has pretty significant limitations, for example:

  • 500 contact limit with 2,500/Month send limit
  • Unlimited contacts but just 200/Day send limit
  • Unlimited contact limit but just 300/Day send limit

In most cases, free plans only allow for one login from a team, meaning an event director and marketing manager are unable to each login and work collectively through projects.

Scaled Pricing Email

The paid versions of email allow for more flexibility and can appear relatively inexpensive, but in practice, they still come with significant limitations to prevent costs from soaring. For example, some of the plans options include:

Cost per MonthYearly Base CostMonthly Sends IncludedContacts IncludedOverage Charges?
$17/Month$2056,000500Price based on # of contacts
$35/Month$42050,000UnlimitedAutomatically billed for additional sends
$49/Month$58860,000UnlimitedBuy credits for additional email sends
$155/Month$1860600,00025,000Pricing tiered by number of contacts
$225/Month$2,700240,00020,000Price based on # of contacts
$605/Month$7,260100,0001,200,000Price based on # of contacts

Prices vary wildly, and while it’s possible to spend only a few hundred dollars a year, the limitations on sends and/or contacts limit how much you can grow your business. Once you have a sizeable email list – usually your goal as you grow your business – email costs can easily reach $2,000-10,000 a year.

Additionally, most services offer a variety of tiers that may have additional costs for providing access to more features like list segmentation, removing the branding of the email service, and even how many test emails you can send.

The Value of Time and Clean Data

There’s another hidden benefit to TicketSignup’s free email as compared to a separate email service: the time saved by having your email lists tied directly to your event data. Your events automatically create email lists for ticket purchasers, ticket holders, donors, and more, with options to email current attendees, or past attendees. While you can still upload custom marketing lists, these default lists save you time in a few ways:

  • Save time when emailing a default list like current ticket holders – no download & upload needed
  • Ensure your email lists of attendees are always up to date – even if you pre-write and schedule an email weeks in advance, it will send to the current, up-to-the minute list of attendees
  • Easily combine or exclude multiple lists, such as sending a prompt to purchase tickets to all previous attendees except those who have already purchased this year
  • Utilize Organization email to cross-promote your events to attendees of other events you own (no upload required)
  • Automatically include event details specific to the event (like location details) as well as details specific to the attendee (like their link to manage tickets or their QR code for check-in)

Summary: The Value of Free Email

All of this leaves the obvious question: if email costs so much, why (and how) do you offer it for free?

At TicketSignup, our business model is tightly tied to yours – we only succeed if your events succeed. Because of that, we choose to invest in powerful technologies like email and websites that you need to reach new audiences and grow your events. Money saved on email is more money for other marketing channels, hiring more staff, or adding more events to your schedule.

In summary: the value of free email is time (and wasting less of it), automation (the ability to pre-schedule sends), personalization (via integrated event data), and actual money saved.

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