by flickr.com/23905174@N00

We have repeatedly discussed our experiences with email marketing providers VerticalResponse and Constant Contact, but those two providers aren’t the only players at thier low price point – there are other providers worth checking out as well: some of the top competitors in the do-it-yourself email marketing space include Campaigner, iContact, and MailChimp. While each provider has their own unique offerings, the comparison below focuses just on pricing to see how many emails you can get for your buck.

Most providers determine their pricing by mailing list size rather than by the number of emails you anticipate sending each month. This means you could send multiple emails to the same contact list each month, for the same monthly price. This table assumes a small list of 2,500 contacts (or emails) per month:

Campaigner is the clear winner at this low end of the price market, coming in at almost half of Vertical Response’s cost for the same size list.

Some providers – specifically Vertical Response and MailChimp – do offer pay-as-you-go packages which can offer more flexibility if you don’t send campaigns on a regular basis, but you may end up paying a bit more for that convenience. For example, for a one time campaign of 2,500 recipients, Vertical Response ends up being cheaper than their monthly fee at a price of $32.50, but MailChimp would cost you more than double their monthly rate with their price of $75.00 for a single launch. If you end up sending a follow-up email to the same 2,500 recipients within the same month, then you have potentially quintupled the cost of your campaign by spending $150.00 instead of the $30.00 monthly subscription fee. MailChimp does not require a contract nor do they charge cancellation fees for their monthly subscription product.

If you send email campaigns on a sporadic basis, then a provider that offers the pay-as-you-go option is probably a better fit. But if you have a regular emailing schedule monthly pricing, or even the annual pricing (offered by iContact), could be a good choice for the frugal number cruncher in all of us.

Note: Just as we pointed out when we compared Vertical Response and Constant Contact’s survey pricing, a provider’s cost per email can change based on the size of a campaign.