How to budget for email marketing on send-based pricing

Per-contact pricing makes budgeting a forecast of how big your list will be. Send-based pricing makes it a decision about how often you email. The second is much easier to control.

The budgeting method on this page works for any send-priced platform. The figures are Bluey’s, because a budget with real numbers in it is more useful than one with placeholders — and because the one quirk in how Bluey counts contacts at the low end changes the answer for small lists.

The one calculation

Take the number of people you actually email — not the size of your database, the size of the segments you send to — and multiply by how many times a month each of them receives something. Add your automated flows, which are easy to forget because nobody schedules them.

• Campaign sends = contacts you email × campaigns per month.
• Flow sends = new subscribers × emails in your welcome series, plus carts × cart emails, plus orders × post-purchase emails. Estimate from last month.
• Monthly sends = campaign sends + flow sends. Round up to the next tier.

The rule below 20,000 sends

Bluey is priced on sends, but at the smallest volumes the contact list is capped at your send volume: a plan that includes 6,000 sends a month holds up to 6,000 contacts, and 10,000 sends holds 10,000. From 20,000 sends a month upwards, contacts are unlimited.

In practice this only matters for one pattern: a list that is larger than what you send in a month on a small plan — say 9,000 contacts where you only email a 5,000-person segment. On the 6,000-send tier the list would not fit, so the 10,000-send tier is the right plan even though you do not need the sends. Everyone else can ignore the rule, because at small volumes most people email their whole list at least once a month anyway.

Budgeting for peak months

Most businesses have one or two months that send far more than the rest — November for retail, December for fundraising, a launch month for software. Budget the plan on your busiest normal month, then treat the peak as its own decision:

• Move up a tier for the peak month and back down afterwards, if your peak is two or three times your normal volume. You pay for the capacity in the month you use it.
• Segment the peak instead, if the extra volume would mostly go to unengaged contacts. It usually would — and those are exactly the sends that raise complaint rates in the week you can least afford it.
• Do not buy a year of headroom to cover one month. The email calendar guide shows how to plan the peak month by month so the jump is deliberate rather than a surprise.

What else belongs in the budget

• A dedicated IP — ₹2,000 or $30 a month on Grow, Business and the transactional Pro plan. Worth it once you send steadily at high volume and want your reputation to be yours alone; not worth it at low volume, because a new IP needs consistent traffic to build any reputation at all.
• Transactional email — receipts, password resets and failed-payment notices. Every Bluey marketing plan can send transactional email alongside campaigns. The separate transactional API plans exist for high-volume transactional sending, priced on their own and kept apart from campaign traffic so a spike never delays critical mail.
• Seats — 2 on Spark, 4 on Grow, unlimited on Business. The seat count is often what moves a team up a plan before the send volume does.
• Your time — the real cost of most email programmes. A tool that saves one person two hours a week is worth more than a cheaper one that does not.

Budgeting inside a Bluey plan

Once you are on a plan, three habits keep the budget where you set it:

Budget FAQ

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