How To Send 1 Million Emails For $100/Month

Do you want to know how to send 1 million emails for $100 a month?

Yes. Wait, send 1 million emails or have a million contacts? Just to be clear on this.

Send 1 million emails per month. So obviously when you're paying a lot of these different services, it gets pretty expensive when you're sending a million, but I'm going to show you how you can send a million emails per month for $100 or less. Ready?

Yes, I'm ready. I'm actually paying attention to this one.

All right. Well, wow. Misty doesn't pay attention. No, no, no, no.

But like, when I say me paying attention, I always pay attention to Eric. It's more So I'm getting close to my scheme because I want to actually see how I can save.

When there's a discount, Neil's in, right? Yeah.

So 6 figures a year.

Here's how you can save. Here's how you can send 1 million emails a month for $100. Okay. So if you're sending a million emails per month using Postmark, that's $1,206 per month. Okay. $1,206. If you use Resend, it's $650 a month. You SendGrid, $600 a month. Use Cloudflare, $354. a month. If you use Amazon SES, and I don't know what SES means, but it's $100 a month. So SES and Cloudflare are now the cheapest email providers, right? So he's basically saying, hey, look, so Amazon has this, Cloudflare just launched this for $354 a month or so, but it's getting cheaper to send emails, which makes a lot of sense because AI does make things deflationary.

So my viewpoint is I'd rather spend I don't know how much I spend on email, but call it over $100,000 a year, substantially more than that. I'd rather spend 5, 6x this than to take the $100 option. You want to know why?

Stability, reliability?

No, I bet you Amazon is very stable. The problem with email is all about deliverability. It's actually very hard to get your email into someone's inbox. So what I do is I look for email providers that have shared IP addresses and they let me pick which neighborhood I'm going to be on. So think about who the other parties are that are sending emails. Would you agree as marketers, we're probably more aggressive than most businesses even though we just had a discussion how we don't pitch hard?

Yeah.

Okay, I agree with you on that too. So what I do is I look for shared IP With people who don't send hard emails at all, and they try to just send educational and they barely pitch anything. Because then when I pitch and I'm harder, my deliverability is still great because the other people on my block or my IP address are much cleaner than I am. I pay extra for that, by the way.

Sure.

Like, I look for that in any email provider that I use.

I think that's a great tactic to use. I would also say this, Neil. I mean, look, levels here is when you think about Cloudflare, they should be, and Amazon, there should be pretty good deliverability. He's like, look, it's all the same, but obviously you have to do your own research here. And then you have other people like Nick Gray, Cloudflare deliverability should be, right, very good and S tier. So I, oh, look, Syed, our friend Syed here came in. I think Syed launched something over here. Oh, we should talk about this. So for transactional email, if you guys are interested in trying out SendLayer, I can probably give you a better hookup rate for bulk email, and we are not a reseller of either of those. Oh, that's interesting, right? So I don't even know what SendLayer is. I know, yeah, let's look at this. Reliable email deliverability made easy.

I believe he's an investor. Is he an investor in it through his ventures?

It's probably in his portfolio. It's probably in his portfolio, but I think it's, look, That is a big thing. And I do think it's worth, like, if you're listening to this right now and you're starting out, it's probably worth checking out Cloudflare and Amazon. And then Neil, maybe you can test it on one of your smaller things, but it's interesting to me. Look, we're paying $6,000 a month for 8 million emails on Mailgun, and this guy's like, bro. So anyway, I think before you make the change, yes, look into deliverability. It's not always about price. You want to make sure, in my mind, sure, stable, secure, reliable, But in this case, Neil's right, deliverability too.

Yeah, okay, so check this out. On Eric's screen, you can see how this X post got 2.2 million views. I believe it was 2.2, it's kind of small for me to read. Is that correct?

Yeah, it's 2.2.

So we all talk about posting on social media, whether it's X or whether it's LinkedIn. You don't need the follower count to do well. You can just do what Syed did. What Syed did is, and I don't know what his follower count is, but it's probably decent. But what he did is he went on a thread that was really popular and blowing up and left a comment about another product. When he left that comment, how many views does it have or does it show, Eric?

Yeah, it does show. So just so everyone knows, Syed has 106,000 followers on X. And then so he posted and 1,800 people saw that.

That's a lot. And that's 1,800 potential customers.

Good point.

So you should go and see what threads are really popular in your space. And just go and respond. And I don't know why too many people don't do that. It's an easy way to generate more revenue through social. And everyone's like, oh, I don't have the followers, it's not going to work. You don't need any followers. You just need to ride the coattails of other popular threads and leave a response that's helpful. If you notice here, Syed's response, he talked about a product. He talked about how it's a better deal, if I'm not mistaken, than the others. and it's reliable and it wasn't too aggressive, but it was very relevant. If someone was talking about using AI and how AI is changing the world and then he's just like, oh, you should check out this email solution, that's too aggressive, right? And that's not related. Syed's not doing that. But the example that Eric shared is a prime example of what people should be doing with social media to just drive more sales if you don't have followers.

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Responding to participating in the community?

No, it's called reply guy. So a reply guy is someone that just sits on like X or LinkedIn, for example, just replies to relevant posts. So being a reply guy in the beginning when you have no followers, to Neil's point, will get you a lot of views. And like sometimes I would reply to someone and like someone's like, oh, this is how I'm using AI. And I think this is a couple months ago when my X account wasn't really doing much. I responded and whenever I replied to someone, I would get like 40,000, 50,000, 70,000 views or so. But whenever I posted something from scratch, and like this is months ago, I would barely crack like 500 views or so. Now it's a different story because I think the algorithm's moving in my favor. And now when I post, it's— but like, I had to be that reply guy initially, and then I had to be a lot more consistent, and then you start to get the reach. And the other thing I'll say too is you don't necessarily need a lot of followers for a lot of views today because the way X works or the way like a TikTok or Instagram Reels or Facebook Reels, they just— they call it— it's not just social media anymore, right? We call it— it's more based on the interest graph, right? And so if you post something really good, it's going to get a lot of views. And it just— followers don't matter nearly as much as they did before. I think even when you look at like a YouTube, like a short, for example, YouTube long form, I think followers still matter a little bit, but not as much as before, right, Neil?

Followers matter very little. So social media has become democratized. It doesn't matter if you have a million followers or 100. You guys have all seen the girl that says, I'm looking for a guy in finance, right? 6'5, blue eyes or something like that that went viral. And then she did a song, I believe, with David Guetta. You guys have all seen the guy who's drinking cranberry juice and longboarding on a skateboard or whatever it's called, a longboard, because his car broke down and then everyone started buying cranberry juice and then I believe they bought him a new car or truck, right? What I'm getting at here is these people didn't have a lot of followers, yet they went viral and they got millions of views, if not hundreds of millions of views, and created internet memes and sensations. What happens is if you have content and you put it out there, it doesn't matter if you have 10 followers or 100 followers. What the platforms all do is they show it to a small group of people that they think would be interested. If every single one, I'm giving you an extreme example, watched it, liked it, commented, and shared it, they did all 3, then after they showed it to 10 people who do that, they'll start showing it to 500 or 1,000. Now you may not get all 1,000 to do that, but if you had 20% like it, share it, comment on it, and watch it 3 times, it starts going viral because engagement is high and the platform knows that people love that piece of content, so they share it to anyone that they think would be interested. That's how their algorithms typically work.

Yep. I would also say too, I mean, you've been doing this for a very long time, but when you post something and you want like a YouTube, a new YouTube video, like you'll hit your email list and it does give it a nice initial boost. That goes a long way as well.

I stopped doing that.

So how does it— so it's just pure organic now?

Yeah. So what Eric's talking about is I would publish YouTube videos 3 times a week, and this was before they introduced Shorts. Now I publish YouTube videos daily. Majority are Shorts, and my longer form are longer than they used to be. And when I used to publish them, I would send an email blast in the first 24 hours because the way a lot of what YouTube's algorithm works for both the searches, because a lot of YouTube traffic is actually driven not just from people discovering the product in the sidebar or the video on the sidebar, at least for the desktop version, they also discover it by searching on YouTube and then you want to rank. If you do well in the first 24 hours, your rankings go up, they recommend you more, and your video tends to blow up. So what I would do is I would take my email list the hour that the video got published and I would push it out. What ended up happening is, is over time as my email list grew, YouTube believed that me sending an email blast was spamming and they felt like it was bots or I was trying to game the system, right? In theory, I was, you know, using the algorithm to my advantage, but they thought the traffic was quote unquote fake. And what we saw is they would stop counting the views because they thought it was bot traffic when it was real humans. And it would actually hurt it. So I stopped. When my email list was smaller, it worked well. But when I started blasting out videos to like 2 million people right when I published the video—

Oh yeah. Yeah. You need to do like segments, dude.

Yeah. I never tried it with a— I should go back and try it with a much smaller segment of my list, but I'm too lazy.

Yeah. Well, I think someone on your team should, but Probably you're the only one that has control of your email list still, right?

No, I don't send out my emails. I do review all of the emails. So like, check this out and I'll let you share this on screen. I think this will be interesting for you guys to actually see my workflow, but like, check this out. Hope you're doing good. This is from Colin. This is literally yesterday. Here's next week's emails and charts for webinars. All right. I go through every single email and I go and edit them every single week. I get one group of emails coming from the consulting side of the business. The other arm of my business is software. I get another group of emails once a week for the next week for all my product-related emails. And I literally go through every single one for the subject line to the copy to the CTA, and I modify every single one, but I don't send them out.

So yeah, in theory, Someone should help you segment just for the hell of it, just to test it.

Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I should do it.

Yeah. So there you have it. Uh, guys, hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll catch you next week. We'll see you later.