Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

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Like anything, this is a matter of perspective. The right team would find value in it. I used to manage a marketing team at a large e-commerce company and we spent tens of thousands a month in email design fees. We rotated through a group of freelancers to design emails. Even an email that was simply following one of our "tried-and-true" templates still would cost us $400 - $500 or so for a single email. That is just updating message content on an existing email.

So when you think about this for $20 a month. It's a no-brainer in that scenario. We already have on-staff copywriters, marketing devs, social media managers, and so on that could have taken over some of the emails using this.

I might still out-source major custom email designs for huge promotions and stuff. But we could easily handle smaller flash sale and other simple emails internally, using a tool like this. So $20 could be justified even if it saved us from outsourcing one email a month.

For the average blogger, $20 a month could still be worth it if it they have a decent email lists and are converting profit from that list.

If you are just running a personal blog and want to send out fun emails to your list of 100 people, it probably isn't worth it. But most ESPs also have WYSIWYG designers that would be "good enough". If you are somewhat-technical then a tool like MJML would probably offer even more than the above tool offers, while being free.

I don't think Microsoft365 is a fair comparison. One is a mass-market product, the other is a niche indie product. $20/mo isn't for everyone. But at $240 a year, that's less than the cost of out-sourcing a single email every year. So if you can make 1 email a month from it, then you are clearly coming out far ahead.

$500 to update the content of an email is downright robbery. Unless it's not actually "updating content" but is changing what side the images are on, tweaks layouts, adding a graph that wasn't there before, etc.

I've executed my own email programs for small projects before, and had the same reaction when I started working at an agency and saw how much we charged for that type of work.

Interestingly enough, it's actually not as padded as it seems. While the update itself may only take an hour or so of time, there's a few hours of communication/procedural overhead baked into these things:

- Receive a project brief - Align with client on the contents of the brief - Provide estimate and get sign off (potentially before the brief, if this is repeat work for an existing client) - Do actual work - Client review of work - Revisions. Usually incredibly minor nitpicking, but virtually always requested. - Final client review and acceptance

Whether the work takes 30 minutes or 30 hours, that procedural overhead is standard in BigCo marketing departments, and creates a price floor of about $500 since even the tiniest requests end up taking several hours of total effort (communication/procedural stuff + actual work). If you're engaging an agency instead of a freelancer, that floor jumps to about $1,000 as the entire process gets facilitated by an account manager + PM, so you have to add in a couple hours of their time as well for the procedural/communication overhead.

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Not to say that's a particularly efficient process, or that it should be that way. But figured I'd share that perspective, since I initially reacted the same way you did when I saw those estimates for stuff that should have taken a trivially small amount of time to accomplish.

$500 would include a few images or something. But it definitely wasn't a crazy amount of work. Swapping out text and messaging probably came in closer to the $300 mark. We mostly were paying for expertise of email developers that we trusted.

We rotated through a team of freelancers that specialize in email development. All the freelancers we worked with did email development full-time. They didn't make websites, they didn't do SEO, they just knew email inside and out. They specialize in email, and we paid a premium to them for that expertise. This is important because you want the emails to work on all platforms. So while it might seem easy to just swap out text, it can sometimes cause layout issues (email is very finicky) and we didn't want any of those glitches negatively effecting the brand. The emails generated tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue per email on average. So no one batted an eye at $500 to make the email. You are paying for the right person to do the job, not micro-analyzing their hours.

We made a lot more money from those emails than the freelancers made by making the emails. So you also want to make them happy, because good email developers are a dying breed. They are hard to find.

I should say that part of process was testing the emails. We ran email device and litmus tests for every email that had to be done as part of the development process. So when I got the finished email from the freelancer, they always submitted a link to a full litmus test result page which showed the email presented in about 30 different device, resolution, and email client combinations. That's what was required for me to approve the email and for the freelancer to get paid.

So the freelancer wasn't just swapping text, but testing the email for us and making any fixes so it worked consistently. They would also add variables for things like %%firstname%% or whatever. We would also run "conditional emails" several times a month that were customized to a customer's location (for example New York customers got a different email than California customers) or some other segment. But conditional emails were more advanced and would run closer to the $2,000 mark. Again, conditional emails out-performed blast emails (uncustomized), so they would consistently bring in 6-figure revenues on those days from the email, so no one thought twice about the $2,000 bill from the email developer.

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