In-house or Outsourced? Let’s move on to the cost of an email audit. Good news! It might cost you nothing. Yep. Nada.
Many companies can perform an audit in-house. Other than the cost of the compensation you already pay staff, that could be it. You won’t need a calculator – unless you want to or need to determine how many hours of staff time an audit will take and multiply that by the rates per hour staff is paid.
There is a trade-off here, obviously. Staff working on an email audit won’t be working on other projects. So, this lost time does have a cost. Because of this, you may decide you want some outside help.
As we mentioned earlier in the Tutorial, there are several other instances as well when it might be a good idea to outsource your audit:
o Your mailing list is huge or subdivided into targeted lists o Record-keeping provides limited data/statistics, which requires an audit done from scratch o Email process involves lots of moving parts and staff, and you don’t feel comfortable handling a big project o Another specific concern an outside vendor can address more quickly
Vendor Costs The out-of-pocket cost of hiring a vendor to do your audit depends on what you want done. It’s that simple. Do you want them to handle the entire process? Just specific parts of it? The more you can do in-house, the cheaper your direct outlay will be.
One example we already mentioned: EmailLabs charges $1,250 for a creative review (it looks at factors such as call-to-action effectiveness). If that’s all you want or need, that’s your cost.
Check with vendors you already use as well. They might not charge you anything extra for certain audit-related tasks. Data or other information you need may be ready and waiting if you know where to look. Ask them.
Another example mentioned earlier: MailerMailer gives broadcast history records and tracking reports to its customer at no extra cost as part of its email list management service.
Check the list of vendors to see how they might be able to help you.
