Why sacrifice that when there are alternative options for cheaper, especially when we're only sending out a handful of emails/mo?
1) We're services/project oriented. So for each $1 we spend, we receive ~$20 back on revenue. That unfortunately doesn't compound and isn't recurring in the normal SaaS sense.
2) That's $20:$1 on revenue but not profit. We average between 15-25% net profit. Not great and we're trying to focus heavily on increasing this but it's quite tricky. Incrasing this usually means very expensive equipment purchases for automation.
3) I wish we could pour more money into advertising but we have to save up for additional equipment to purchase to expand services or pay for future software projects that could help us generate recurring revenue. We don't have deep pockets to leverage since it's bootstrapped. Otherwise, we'd have gone in guns blazing on advertising!
The progression with only investing in ads, each cycle multiply by tree your profit:
$1 -> $3 -> $9 -> $27 -> $81 -> $243 -> $729 -> $2187
The progression with "saving" the money
$1 -> $2 -> $3 -> $4 -> $5 -> $6 -> $7 -> $8
Although I agree it's unusual to see that metric used (revenue per ad-spend) for a product that seemingly can't be scaled very much.
Also, I wouldn't value my time at $60/hr right now. When you're barely paying yourself in order to grow, hard to think of it that way ;)
On MailChimp our cost is $210/month on SendGrid it is $100.
However, looking at their updated pricing, they also now have "Marketing" as a separate pricing tier, so I can't say exactly how that will affect us.
Keen to hear suggestions of who else to use.