How to lower subscriber acquisition costs with email verification

Email marketing remains a cornerstone of successful business strategies, and its importance continues to grow year after year. To effectively promote their products, services, and brand values, businesses need to continually improve and develop new email marketing strategies.

There are many different components to email marketing, such as staying informed about emerging trends, utilizing advanced analytics to understand customer behavior, and personalizing email content to cater to individual preferences. All of these practices are good, and they help businesses maximize the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns and achieve a higher return on investment.

Another approach to achieve these greater results is to optimize the costs associated with email marketing, acquiring a new customer is five times more expensive than retaining an existing customer, so it is important to have a subscriber acquisition flow that is effective and cost-efficient, below we will discuss how to leverage email verification to lower the cost of acquiring new subscribers.

E-SAC: What is it and How is it Calculated?

Firstly, it is important to define exactly what E-SAC is, this acronym means Email Subscriber Acquisition Cost and refers to the total cost of gaining a new email subscriber. This includes everything from marketing expenses, lead generation, list building, and all else associated with your email marketing efforts. It is an important figure for any business with email marketing operations to know well, and ultimately, to know how to lower. It goes without saying that lowering your email subscriber acquisition cost will increase your campaign’s ROI (Return on Investment), improve your deliverability, and help you achieve your email marketing KPIs.

Now that the importance of E-SAC has been established, below you can learn how E-SAC is calculated:

E-SAC = Total Campaign Cost / Number of New Subscribers

For instance, consider that you are currently running a $1,000 digital marketing campaign that brings in 100 new subscribers. In this case, the E-SAC would be $10 per subscriber, if we apply the formula shared above. However, it’s vital to keep in mind that not all of these subscribers will be genuine or active. invalid or disposable email addresses can easily skew your acquisition costs, and worse, they can hurt your campaign in several other ways, from lowering engagement rates to damaging your sender reputation. Preemptively keeping your list clean, either via post-registration verification or top of the funnel verification, is key to ensuring the effectiveness of your efforts and maximizing your ROI.

How Invalid & Disposable Contacts Hurt Your Sending Costs

As any marketer knows, sending emails isn’t free - it comes with costs, from email service provider fees to campaign management expenses, not to mention the hidden cost of missed opportunities due to poor deliverability, engagement, and other unforeseen or unexpected spam filters. Unverified email addresses can take a serious toll on your email marketing ROI and overall campaign success, as they contribute heavily to some of the most critical things to consider when coming up with your campaigns, for example:

• Higher Hard Bounce Rates: When emails land in invalid inboxes, they trigger hard bounces, this means that the email failed to deliver, normally because the mailbox doesn’t exist. This damages your sender reputation and reduces your chances of reaching the inbox in the future, even for valid and existing addresses. In fact, a rise in hard bounces can even lead to being blocked by your ESP, and effectively wasting your sender domains and IPs.
• Inefficient Spending: Every dollar spent on invalid, disposable, or unengaged email addresses is a dollar wasted. A bloated email list filled with bad data doesn’t just drain your budget - it weakens your entire acquisition strategy by inflating costs without delivering actual results.
• Poor Engagement: Even a small dip in engagement can have a ripple effect on your revenue. Emails that never reach real users mean lost conversions, weaker sender reputation, and ultimately, underperforming campaigns that fall short of key marketing KPIs. Preserving your engagement metrics is a preemptive effort on many fronts, from early-on decision making to campaign content creation, skipping email verification wastes those efforts too.

How Email Verification Helps Reduce Costs

Let’s now take the time to review all the reasons as to why email verification can reduce costs and maximize ROI. In essence, email verification will ensure that every email address in your database is someone you actually want to contact. This means that after you verify your email list you can now confidently start your campaign without fear of many of the negatives we mentioned in the section above. It goes without saying that this is part of the best practices to improve marketing efficiency and reduce unnecessary costs, reputation problems, and eventual blocks.

Here are the reasons why email verification helps:

• It prevents wasting your campaign’s budget - By removing invalid email addresses that will never convert.
• It lowers your email service provider (ESP) fees - Most ESPs are based on volume, the fewer emails you have to send, the more you save.
• It protects your sender reputation - By preventing hard bounces that can land emails in spam folders.
• Blacklisted? Not when your deliverability is great! - Stop getting flagged and randomly blocked, by ensuring a high reputation you can avoid major blocks.
• It boosts engagement and conversion rates immediately - If you’re only targeting valid leads, your KPIs will increase as a natural consequence.
• Saving resources on list management - Eliminating the need to store, segment, and analyze invalid email addresses can lead to huge savings.

It is clear that by integrating email verification into your email subscriber acquisition and campaign methodologies you cut unnecessary costs, protect your sender reputation, and maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.

Best practices for maintaining optimal subscriber list health over time

Subscriber lists decay over time - email addresses change, users abandon accounts, and engagement drops. On average, 20% of emails become invalid over a year, leading to higher bounce rates and declining performance. It’s important to find an email verification service that can easily and quickly verify your email lists.

Here are some tips to maintain a healthy subscriber database:

1. Perform email verification before every send - Verifying email lists 24 hours prior to sending is considered the optimal best practice by industry experts.
2. Quarterly health verification - Maintain a clean and healthy subscriber list by performing quarterly verifications, minimizing storage and CRM costs.
3. Perform Top of the Funnel verification - Verify emails before they even reach your CRM with real-time verification solutions.

Following these will help you ensure that you stop facing issues with hard bounces, IP, and domain blocks, and more importantly will help you build a long-lasting and robust sender reputation, meaning that you reach the inbox easily and quickly.

Conclusion

I hope that you now see why email verification is a straightforward yet effective way to maximize your return on investment. It is part of the necessary best practices any email marketer should adhere to in order to run successful email marketing campaigns.

Maintaining a clean and active email list lowers acquisition costs and improves deliverability, leading to improved inbox placement and enhanced campaign performance.