The Cost of an Email Address

These days it seems like everyone has at least one email address. I have three I check on a regular basis. Which email address I provide to someone has a lot to do with their relationship with me. If it’s a business relationship, they get my Right On Interactive address, a personal relationship my Gmail address, and if I feel like I’m just going to receive “junk” from them they’ll receive my Yahoo address. I check the latter mailbox the least often and the work mailbox most frequently. I guess it’s safe to assume a person’s or brand’s relationship with me determines their priority level on my daily to-do list.

In a recent blog post by Jay Baer, he shares 15 email statistics that just might scare you. Here is one in particular to consider: 30% of subscribers change email addresses annually.

So what does this mean for your business? Say you have a database with 10,000 email addresses. Now, let’s assume you have a monthly unsubscribe rate of 1% and you’re not proactively working to obtain more emails. Taking into consideration the statistic above, you would run out of active email addresses in 34 months.

What’s probably most shocking is the cost associated with acquiring email addresses. Consider your organization’s spend on marketing and sales expenses (including salaries) in a year and divide that by the number of acquired email addresses in the same year. You’ll likely come to a startling realization:

1. The cost of email address acquisition is high, and
2. You are wasting your marketing dollars if you’re not growing your email lists.