How much do email campaigns cost? A marketing breakdown

How much do email campaigns cost is a question with a real, checkable answer, not a vague “it depends” one, once you look at what an actual platform charges rather than guessing. If you’d rather have someone work out the right number for your own list, book a free discovery call. Otherwise, here’s what one real platform actually charges, tier by tier.

TL;DR: How much do email campaigns cost depends mostly on two things: how many contacts you have and how many campaigns you send. On Mailchimp, one of the platforms most founder-led businesses actually use, that runs from $0 a month (Free, up to 250 contacts) to $350 a month (Premium, up to 150,000 sends), with $13 and $20 tiers in between. What changes the bill isn’t a flat “email marketing price,” it’s your own list size and sending habits against whichever platform’s tier structure you pick.

How much do email campaigns cost on one real platform?

Rather than quote an industry average nobody can check, here is what one widely used platform, Mailchimp, actually publishes on its own pricing page.

The Free plan covers up to 250 contacts with basic campaign sending and no automation. Essentials, at $13 a month, adds testing and scheduling. Standard, at $20 a month, adds automation and personalization and is capped at 6,000 sends a month. Premium, at $350 a month, removes most of those caps, allowing up to 150,000 sends a month, and adds priority support. Above 200,000 contacts, pricing moves to a custom quote. These are one platform’s real numbers, not a rounded industry estimate, and every major competitor prices on a broadly similar shape even though the exact figures differ.

What actually changes the price

Two numbers move the bill, and they don’t move together. Contact count is the one everyone expects: more people on your list, higher tier, higher price. Send volume is the one people miss, and it can bind first. Mailchimp’s Standard plan caps at 6,000 sends a month regardless of how few contacts you have, so a business with a small list that emails several times a week can hit that ceiling before it ever comes close to a contact-based upgrade. Check both numbers against how you actually plan to send, not just your current list size.

How much do email campaigns cost as your list grows?

The pattern holds across virtually every major platform, even where the specific dollar figures differ: free or nearly free at a small size, then a series of paid tiers that step up as your contact count and send volume climb. That’s a deliberate pricing shape, not a coincidence, because the cost of actually delivering an email is tiny and platforms are really charging for the tools layered on top, automation, testing, deliverability support, at the point your list is big enough to need them. A business that stays under a few hundred contacts can often run campaigns for the length of time it takes to outgrow the free tier.

How to work out what you’d actually pay

The two numbers to check before you sign up for anything are your current contact count and how many sends a month you realistically expect, campaigns plus any automated emails counted together. A business with 800 contacts sending one newsletter a month sits comfortably inside Mailchimp’s Free plan on contacts alone, and would only need to upgrade for automation or testing features, not for room. A business with 800 contacts but a daily send habit, three campaigns a week plus an automated sequence, could bump into the Standard plan’s 6,000-send ceiling well before its contact count forces the issue, since a few sends a day across a month adds up faster than most people expect when they’re only picturing list size.

This is why quoting “how much do email campaigns cost” as one flat number misses the point. Two businesses on the identical Free plan, one sending twice a month and one sending twice a week, are nowhere near the same distance from needing to upgrade, even though their contact counts and their monthly bill look identical today. Work out your own sending habit honestly, not just your list size, before assuming a tier will hold.

It’s also worth checking your growth rate, not just where you sit today. A list growing by even a modest amount every month will cross a pricing tier’s contact ceiling faster than it feels like it should, and finding that out mid-send is a worse moment to discover it than finding it out now, while you’re choosing a platform in the first place.

Email campaigns cost vs. the real cost of email marketing

The platform bill is only one part of the honest number, and it’s usually the smaller part. We break down the other two, your own time writing and running it, or paying someone to do that for you, in how much is email marketing. If you’re setting up your first list from nothing, email marketing for small business covers the basics this post assumes, and how to write a welcome email sequence that converts is the one piece of automated content worth building before anything else, since it runs on its own once it exists.

So, how much do email campaigns cost?

How much do email campaigns cost comes down to a real, checkable number once you stop guessing and open a pricing page: on Mailchimp, $0 to start, moving through $13 and $20 tiers, up to $350 a month at real scale, driven by your contact count and how often you send. That’s the software line item. It is rarely the number that decides whether email marketing works for your business, which comes down more to what you send and how consistently, but it is the one you can plan a budget around today.

If you’d rather skip pricing three platforms yourself and have someone set the right one up for your list, book a free discovery call, and our email marketing work is what we’d bring to it, before you pay for anything.