I recently got an email from a firm that goes out and finds email addresses for people that you want to sell to.  Nothing in that for me, since my company does much the same, but one line in their advert interested me.

They claimed that each email address you add to a database is worth around £75.

Now there was no analysis of this figure, and no explanation as to how they got it, but it got me thinking.  How do you put a value on email addresses?

Let’s assume that you know that Company X is a company that could be a customer of yours.  You know the company name, and getting the address is easy.  Getting the name of the right person to talk to, and the email address of that person is harder, but not impossible.

So it can be done.  But let’s say it costs £5 to get the email address and all the other data.  Is it worth it?

Once you have that email address you can email the individual regularly – as long as you can find something to say, and can write it well.

Let’s say that you want to write once a week, 50 times a year.  That would cost you maybe £22.50.  By email, once you have the system set up, the mailing is free.

So if we take the lifetime of an email address as two years, then the value of each email address is £45.00

The other way of looking at this is not just with email but with any form of direct promotion.  Let has say that you need to find 20 potential customers and email them for a year to get one decent sale.  Given that the cost of finding an email address might be £5 then the investment is £100 (there being no cost in the email transmission).  So assuming you make over £100 on a sale, then you are making money.  And you should be able to do it again.

These are of course estimates, but it does show that email addresses have a value, and are worth investing in.

If you would like to know more, please do call.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.