I am considering adding newsletters to my list of services. Anyone have any suggestions on how to charge for this. I will be creating the newsletter and maintaining the database.

@tracourt

I know I’m not answering your question, but you might want to check out Campaign Monitor as an option for your email marketing software. They give you the ability to white label their product. You can create templates for your clients either in a gooey interface or with code.  Your clients or you can then use these templates to send out email campaigns. Their interface for creating an email campaign is about as user friendly and non-techy proof as I’ve seen.

Campaign Monitor also gives you the option marking up their service, billing your client directly then sending you the difference. 

@tracourt

For some reason you posted the same thread three times.

Here is one of the answers I consolidated from another post:

Dianne Beaton, CGA, CAPS said
1 hour, 49 minutes ago:

Hi Jay

It depends on how involved or not the client will be. Will it be a mailed piece or an electronic piece? Will it be monthly, every other month or once a quarter? Will the client be providing content or do you have to create it all?

Time is money, yours and theirs. My average is $125 to $250 per month. My clients provide me the updated information for the data base and I check for duplicates.

If it is a printed piece, they pay printing and postage cost.

Hope this helps!

@ptwylie campaign monitor can do what you are describing, it’s exactly what I was talking about. You can either manage and account or if a particular client is a DIY then you can set it up, charge accordingly and let them send and monitor their campaigns.
@tracourt

I only posted it once. Don’t know how it showed up 3 times but only once.

@mike-stelzner

I don’t know how this happens Michael. I only post once.

I’m doing this for some of my clients.

I set up the account using either Mail Chimp or Constant Contact. I fill out the account details, import lists and do the other setup. That’s something I charge a flat rate to do based on the amount of time I know it takes for each service. I do charge more if they have multiple email spreadsheets, for example, or a very large list (which sometimes need to be broken apart for import).

For the first newsletter, I have a set fee to set it up, and that includes up to 3 rounds of changes to the layout.

After the first newsletter, I charge hourly for future newsletters, and that includes checking the delivery reports and dealing with bounces, etc. 

I tried them today and it was very frustrating. The formatting would not stay. I gave up.

The way I price newsletters is as follows:

flat fee setup – I use MailChimp – if they want to go with another service they can but they will be paying me to learn which I am very up front about

strategy – usually we are creating a newsletter in conjunction with a web build

newsletter design – this one is really dependent on the client on how rigorous their newsletter needs are

Then shift over to a monthly fee based on the newsletter sending frequency and if they are writing the newsletter or if we are writing it for them.  

all that said, the short answer is go for it – your clients will thank you later!